MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates appealed to Europeans on Friday not to let their opposition to the Iraq war affect their view of the conflict in Afghanistan.
By Andrew Gray
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates appealed to Europeans on Friday not to let their opposition to the Iraq war affect their view of the conflict in Afghanistan.
Gates' remarks form part of a broader effort he is making to spark debate in Europe over NATO's 42,000-troop mission in Afghanistan and its fight against Taliban insurgents.
"I worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused and what I want to try and focus on is why Afghanistan is important to Europe," Gates said.
!ADVERTISEMENT!"Many of them, I think, have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan," he told reporters traveling with him from a NATO defense ministers meeting in Lithuania to a security conference in Munich, Germany.
The Bush administration presents the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts as part of the same global war on terror it declared after al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
But Gates said Europeans should make a judgment about the war in Afghanistan on its own terms.
The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 on the basis that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but no such stockpiles were found and the war was deeply unpopular across much of Europe.
The war in Afghanistan, which harbored al Qaeda militants under Taliban rule, had broader international public support. Although this has declined, Gates clearly feels he has a better chance of persuading Europeans on Afghanistan than Iraq.
"Our view, from the U.S. standpoint, is al Qaeda in Iraq is not just a problem for Iraq but let's leave that aside," he said. "I want to focus on why al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and failure in Afghanistan, would be a security problem for Europe."
Gates said he planned to make that case directly and in detail on Sunday at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, a major annual gathering of defense and security experts.
ALLIES ANGERED
The Pentagon chief's willingness publicly to challenge other NATO nations to devote more troops and other resources to the war in Afghanistan has angered some governments.
On Wednesday, Gates warned NATO was in danger of becoming a two-tier alliance, split between countries willing to send troops to "fight and die to protect people's security and others who are not."
That comment seemed aimed at countries such as Germany, which has confined its troops to the safer north of Afghanistan while others fight hard in the south. The German government swiftly ruled out sending soldiers to the south.
A NATO source said NATO ministers had asked Gates to end the public criticism. "He's been told by a number of people, and not just the most obvious ones like the Germans, to stop it," the source said.
Pentagon officials acknowledge there is a fine line between provoking debate and alienating allies. Gates used a softer tone in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Thursday, declaring the Afghan mission was not in trouble and NATO was not in crisis.
But he defended his decision to shift discussions on troop levels beyond closed-door meetings.
"I think having a more open conversation about this is a healthy thing and my hope is, obviously, that it will lead others to be able to dig a little deeper and see if they can do some more," he said en route to Munich.
One challenge for both Gates and NATO is to reach agreement among alliance members about the very nature of the war.
While European states prefer to bill the mission as a reconstruction or peacekeeping effort, other nations such as the United States and Britain stress they are in a tough counter-insurgency war against Taliban and other militants.
(Editing by Stephen Weeks)
