President Bush plans to ask NATO member nations Wednesday to loosencontrols on troops deployed to Afghanistan so the alliance can respond more quickly to increased attacks by the Taliban.
“If the commander decides to redeploy troops to meet an emergency, he cannot do so quickly,” explained Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns. “He must go through capitals and that slows us down and that doesn’t allow us to accomplish the mission we need to accomplish.”
“We hope very much that the European allies — those that have restrictions on their forces — will lift them so that we have a very quick, forceful and energetic force in Afghanistan,” he added.
Bush is expected to push for that change when he attends a NATO summit in Latvia today and Wednesday.
Judy Ansley, senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council, confirmed that the U.S. delegation will call for “a decrease in some of the restrictions on troops that are currently there” in Afghanistan.
“If NATO is to be successful and to continue to complete this mission,” she said, “It will need troops in the right places. So I think that you can expect that there will be discussion about the need for some flexibility in where troops are.”
A similar problem cropped up in 2004, when some NATO soldiers stayed in their barracks as rioters in Pristina, Kosovo, killed Serbs and burned homes and churches.
“It was a wake-up call for NATO,” Burns recalled. “And we pledged at NATO, after March 2004, we would never let that happen again.”
Although the restrictions have been lifted on NATO troops in Kosovo, they remain in place for some troops in Afghanistan.
“They cannot be deployed at the suggestion of the commander in the country, but are controlled in essence by the defense ministries back in the capitals of Europe,” Burns said.
