U.S. Official Speeches and Interviews
Kurt Volker, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, Interview with Abdul Wahed Faqiri, VOA Afghan Service
State Department, Washington, DC
January 29, 2007
VOA: Thank you, sir, for giving us this opportunity.
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Volker: Thank you for having me.
VOA: Recently there was a meeting in Brussels. It was a NATO meeting and it was focusing on Afghanistan. What is the outcome of this meeting? How do you see it?
Volker: This was a very important meeting for NATO. It was Secretary Rice who took the initiative to call the NATO Foreign Ministers together. She viewed this very much as a follow-up to the Riga meeting, the summit meeting of NATO leaders that took place in November. There at Riga the allies expressed strong political commitment to Afghanistan and to the NATO mission there. Secretary Rice wanted to follow up and take the next steps. How do we turn that into concrete additional support to the Afghan people and the Afghan government.
As you know, she came bearing a very substantial US commitment, what we would do further in Afghanistan, an additional $10 billion over two years in assistance and also repeating Secretary Gates’ comments that the U.S. would have an increase in its troop levels in Afghanistan. That was what she brought to the meeting. Our objective was to see all allies increase their contributions, both financially and militarily. And there were additional pledges or comments made at the meeting. I don’t want to go into specifics, country by country, but there were commitments made in the numbers of troops that were there, funding for the international trust fund for Afghanistan, for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan, for police and army training, all of which is very important.
VOA: My next question is, most of NATO members or some of the NATO members don’t want to go to the south of the country where the insurgency is the high end, where the fighting is going on. Did they discuss in this meeting allowing some of the NATO members to go in the south and pacify some of the region where the fighting is going on?
Volker: Yes, they did. This is an important issue for NATO and for the United States and one that we’ve been raising a great deal, for two reasons.
First off, there is an insurgency in Afghanistan. It’s important that we win militarily, and the forces that are needed to come to the fight in the south of Afghanistan need to be there. We’ve got to provide the resources to the commander on the ground to do that. That’s one part of this.
The second part is if some allies are contributing and willing to put their forces in harm’s way and others are not, it’s really not fair and that doesn’t express the spirit of solidarity within NATO that should be there. So we’ve raised this issue.
As a result we’ve seen some countries begin discussing lifting the restrictions on their forces that prevent them from going to the south. We had a few countries do this before the meeting in January with Secretary Rice. A few of them at that meeting. It’s not enough. There are still others who still have restrictions on their forces and we will continue to discuss that within NATO.
VOA: Increasingly we are hearing that the NATO mission in Afghanistan is a make-or-break for NATO itself. NATO was specifically designed to defend Europe against a Soviet invasion or Soviet attacks. Now it is in Afghanistan. How important is the Afghanistan mission to NATO as a whole, as an alliance?
Volker: It’s extremely important and for a number of reasons. It is NATO’s largest operation. It is the most difficult operation that NATO has at the moment. It is part of understanding what the role of NATO is and what the challenges are in the world that we face today.
If you look back at the Cold War and the period immediately after the Cold War, the principle strategic challenges that the NATO countries had to face were anchored in Europe or Eurasia in some way. The Soviet Union, the fall of Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, bringing democracy and market economy to Central and Eastern Europe, and integrating them into mainstream Europe: that was all a European-centered challenge.
In today’s world we have terrorism, which is global; we have the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which occurs on a global basis. We have the effects of conflicts like in Afghanistan from a rule like Taliban that spill over into a much wider area.
So for NATO to carry out its mission today – which is to provide the security and defense of its own members – it needs to be playing a role in this much wider area.
What we see with the Taliban is part of a wider phenomenon. It’s an effort to impose a very dark, very radical view of the world on the population of the people of Afghanistan. We see that also in Hezbollah, we see that in Hamas, we see that elsewhere. So we are dealing with a global challenge, an ideological challenge, of an extremist set of radicals, an extremist group that wants to impose a view that is anti-democratic, anti-market economy. It’s against all the values that NATO stands for. So it’s critically important for NATO to support the people of Afghanistan, to support the government of President Karzai to help him establish the kind of society in Afghanistan that upholds all of these human values that we believe in.
VOA: You talk about global challenges. Is NATO ready to go beyond Afghanistan, go to other trouble spots in the world and pacify there and help the international community in taking their troops there? And adding more assistance, do you predict that?
Volker: I do, and, in fact, NATO has already been doing that. I’ll give you two snapshots in time.
If you look at 1995 NATO had 16 members, had no partners, and had never conducted a military operation.
If you look at 2005, 2006, 10 or 11 years later, you have a NATO of 26 members, 20 partners in Eurasia, seven in North Africa, four in the Persian Gulf, and then conducting operations, eight of them simultaneously. Afghanistan; but also training of Iraqi security forces; also providing humanitarian relief in Pakistan after the earthquake; also transporting African Union forces in Darfur; conducting a counter-terrorism operation in the Mediterranean Sea, a naval operation; providing humanitarian relief in the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina; and then continuing with the missions in Kosovo and Bosnia that it had been involved with for some time. So that’s a tremendous expansion in NATO’s operational activity because of the changes in the security environment and what it requires for NATO to be effectively advancing the security and defense of its members.
VOA: Is the NATO mission in Afghanistan only military or it is also on the civil side, the civil society side? Is it also involved in building civil society and promoting Afghan civil society to be able to stand on its own feet?
Volker: This is an important point.
NATO’s role is principally military. That’s what NATO brings to the table. But it needs to be part of a broader, comprehensive strategy because security and development go hand in hand. You can’t have security without providing the development and the assistance that’s going to build up a strong society in that secure area. Similarly, you can’t bring development assistance and humanitarian assistance and build a strong society if it’s not secure. So we have to have them both together.
NATO is the lead; NATO has the point on the military side, and then is trying to work together with nations bilaterally, with the European Union, with the World Bank, with the UN, to support the development assistance also. This is what the PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams) are all about, is trying to integrate the civil and the military that’s there.
At the NATO meeting that we had last week, we started off with a meeting of the NATO allies, the 26 members, to talk about the military operations. But that was followed immediately by a meeting with all the other troop contributors, 11 countries, plus Australia, Japan, the UN, the EU, the World Bank, to talk about this wider piece and the comprehensive strategy that integrates the financial and reconstruction and development aspects, the counter-narcotics aspects, military aspects, training for police and security forces.
VOA: My final question: there is a resentment among Afghans, particularly with the civilian casualties during NATO’s operations. Was this concern addressed in this meeting or not?
Volker: It’s always addressed at NATO. This is one of the things we care very much about, that we are there to support the Afghan people and to support the central government establishing peace and stability in the country. In any military conflict there are civilian casualties and collateral damage. We greatly regret that and do everything we can to minimize the prospect of civilian casualties or collateral damage.
Unfortunately we have an opponent in the Taliban and al-Qaeda that is extremely violent, that is willing to use force to try to impose its rule on the population, and it takes force to oppose that. In any kind of military conflict, some casualties are regrettably unavoidable. But again, we deeply regret any civilian casualties and do everything we can to minimize that.
VOA: Thank you, sir.
Volker: Thank you very much.
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