Less than a week earlier, May 6 and 7, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was in the Romanian capital of Bucharest to meet with the country's president and foreign minister, and while there praised the government's commitment to the Afghan war - Romania recently announced its troop strength would be boosted to 1,800 - as "substantial, without caveats and with a growing focus on training." [2]
A week before the NATO chief was in Albania and Croatia, the military bloc's newest members, and also pushed for more forces in Afghanistan, including military trainers.
During his four-day trip to Europe early this month, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden promoted NATO allies' contributions to the Afghan war among other demands - which included the consolidation of a European interceptor missile system under U.S. control - and addressing 1,100 members of the Spanish Light Infantry Parachute Brigade, slated for deployment to Afghanistan in July, said, "I very much wanted to be here today to pay respect to such a group of warriors who stood side by side with American warriors in Afghanistan. As NATO allies we are working together...." [3]
In February of this year the government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that it was sending 511 more troops to Afghanistan, raising the nation's contingent there to 1,600.
Shortly before meeting with Biden, Zapatero and his defense minister visited NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the Spanish prime minister stated that Afghanistan is "NATO's primary mission right now abroad," adding that it is "very important that we renew our confidence in the current strategy in Afghanistan...." [4]
On May 3 The Times of London wrote of intensified fighting in the north of Afghanistan, which until recently had been comparatively peaceful but where of late Germany has lost the bulk of the 47 soldiers that have died as a result of the war and where Finland and Sweden have suffered combat fatalities.
The British daily wrote that "German troops are fighting the first pitched battles witnessed by the Bundeswehr since 1945 in the face of a growing Taleban insurgency in the north of Afghanistan." [5]
General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of all U.S. and other foreign forces in Afghanistan as commander of both the International Security Assistance Force and the U.S.'s Operation Enduring Freedom, recently announced that he was deploying 56 helicopters and 5,000 U.S. troops to serve under German command in the north of Afghanistan.
When NATO took over the southern quadrant of the South Asian nation in 2006 it "subordinate[d] U.S. troops under foreign command in a combat situation for the first time since World War II." [6]
Central Command's Brigadier General Douglas Raaberg said at the time, "That's a first since World War II."
The chief of Central Command then, General John Abizaid, told the Associated Press that "NATO needs to grab hold of this mission for NATO's sake. Jumping outside European boundaries is where the alliance needs to go to stay relevant for the future."
The Associated Press wrote at the time that "Abizaid and others have said the Afghanistan mission marks a historic expansion for NATO that could see the alliance taking further missions in Africa or elsewhere." [7]
Four months after taking control of southern Afghanistan in 2006 the NATO commander in the region, British Lieutenant General David Richards, said that NATO was conducting "land combat operations for the first time in its history."
And in what has proven to be an understatement of the first order, Richards added: "Two years ago, when the North Atlantic Council agreed to this plan, they probably didn't know what they were getting into." [8] As another news agency expressed it at the same time, "The mission is considered the most dangerous and challenging in the Western alliance's 57-year history." [9]
A month later the British general reflected on the first few weeks of his new assignment and the "persistent low-level dirty fighting" it entailed, characterizing the situation as one in which the "sort of thing hasn't really happened so consistently, I don't think, since the Korean War or the Second World War." [10]
Afghanistan is the battleground on which NATO effected the transition, the escalation, from air wars to ground wars.
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