Safety in numbers? NATO and its partners

Safety in numbers?

NATO and its partners

Why are

NATO partnerships important?

To deal with the new challenges.

No regional organisation

can solve this problem.

At least no Western organisation.

What are the advantages

of partnerships?

Partnerships is the one instrument

that NATO right now can afford

in order to provide collective security.

It doesn’t cost very much,

everybody gets engaged,

it’s well accepted,

it’s different then enlargement,

which is not accepted,

at least not by the Russians.

With security and the concept

in civilian forces to build security,

those things can often create far

more security than a bomber wing

or a panzer division.

The other positive aspect

of our partnership,

is that it’s preventive engagement,

not pre-emptive engagement.

It’s preventive engagement,

so employing long-term instruments

in order to prevent crises,

in order to avoid having to manage

crises or even resolve crises.

Do recent events

make partnerships more relevant?

The events that have transpired

in the Middle East, in the year 2011…

Certainly Afghanistan

is one major theme,

but the other are those countries

engaged in the Mediterranean

dialogue in the Istanbul initiative,

that these countries

are going to need help as well.

And that the model or the example

of cooperation and partnership

that began in the early 1990s in

Central and Eastern Europe, ideally,

seems to me,

needs to be further extended.

The Egyptian military

as a political force,

as a force for the promotion

of a stable order in Egypt,

is going to need help from the US

and from many, many

NATO countries and EU countries,

and that will also apply

in other countries.

How do NATO partnerships

work with other organisations?

When you look

at the partnerships for NATO,

you cannot only look

to other countries,

you have to look to institutions too.

There is the UN, of course,

and the EU as multilateral

institutions, NATO looks towards.

On the ground,

at the non-political level,

the partnership between the EU

and NATO works well,

that has been shown on the Balkans,

it’s seen in Kosovo and everywhere.

The EU provides

civilian instruments.

Look at the EU mission EULEX,

which is a mission for jurisdiction

building and all these things.

It works in parallel to KFOR.

How do these partnerships

work in Afghanistan?

In addition to NATO,

there’s also the German

police training programme,

there’s the European police,

and there’s the role the UN is playing,

but on the ground you can see that

they’re willing to co-ordinate more.

We have been very much part,

with NATO,

of the building integrity initiative,

which has a number of aspects to it,

but one of them

is the training of officers

who are on the ground,

who are in the theatre,

to be able to deal with corruption.

Do partnerships

provide value for money?

If NATO wants to become

a collective security provider,

it has to acquire

some civilian instruments

and that will cost a lot of money.

Where will it get this money from

beyond partnership?

You’re constantly assigning

a dollar or a euro value to defence.

And peace and security have

an incalculable value when it’s gone.

The rationale with the treaty,

based upon the failures of collective

security and collective defence

in the 1930s and 1940s was

that by putting your efforts together,

you would save money

and that’s an article too

to promote

democracy and free markets.

So that is a compelling argument.

Can partnerships

spread NATO values?

NATO is

a values-based organisation.

It’s easier to take those values,

which are common values,

and translate those

into the Afghan security forces.

NATO doesn’t exist

because it has an enemy,

but because we share values. That's

why we want to join together, right?

That’s what we teach our students

and it’s still true.

We need NATO because together we

are more secure as opposed to apart.