NATO 'must not withdraw early'

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Western troops must stay in Afghanistan for "as long as necessary" to avoid allowing the Taliban to regain control of key areas of the country, NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph during his first official visit to meet Prime Minister David Cameron and other members of the coalition government, Rasmussen said that the Taliban were aware of moves to set a timetable for withdrawal.

"The Taliban follow the political debate in troop-contributing countries closely," he said. "They do believe that if we set artificial timetables for our withdrawal, they can just sit down and wait us out and they will return when we have left.

"If they discover that through their attacks they can weaken the support for our presence in Afghanistan, they will just be encouraged to step up their attacks on foreign troops."

Prime Minister David Cameron recently said that he hoped British troops would no longer be involved in combat operations in Afghanistan by 2015. Rasmussen said he 'shared the impatience' expressed by world leaders setting similar targets, but that any withdrawal had to be based on stability.

"We can have our hopes, we can have our expectations, but I cannot give any guarantee as far as an exact date or year is concerned," he said. "All statements from all politicians have been based on the condition that the Afghans can actually take responsibility themselves."

The secretary-general also warned that failure to stabilise Afghanistan could lead to the destabilisation of neighbouring nuclear power Pakistan.

He admitted that NATO had "underestimated" the challenge of the war in Afghanistan and that he expected Taliban resistance to remain strong in Helmand and Kandahar province.

"If they [the Taliban] lose Helmand and Kandahar, they lose everything, so they will fight hard to prevent that happening," he said. "We would not have expected in 2001 that fighting would still be going in eight, nine years later. Retrospectively, we underestimated the challenge."

Rasmussen said he was concerned that the spending gap between EU countries and the US could harm relations between the two.

"Militarily, in the case that we would like to co-operate with the Americans, we might end up in the absurd situation where we can't because of an extreme technology gap," he said. "Politically, we might end up with a situation where the Americans find the Transatlantic relationship less relevant."