Video Briefing

Well, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. This is Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman, speaking to you from NATO Headquarters this afternoon.

And I'm here in the room, which you can see behind me, Room 16 at NATO Headquarters, where our ministers meet when they come to town. As you can see it's a very large room and that's what you need at NATO these days for the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council in which the 26 countries of the NATO Alliance meet with almost the same number from Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

And indeed, I mention the word ministerials because that really is the main news item for my monthly briefing on what's going on in NATO.

During the first week of December we had an extremely hectic week, when on the Monday and Tuesday we welcomed the Defence Ministers and then on the Thursday and Friday Foreign Ministers. And these meetings are very complicated because not only do the NATO ministers meet together, but they also meet with those partner countries that I referred to from Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and also with the ministers of Russia and Ukraine in the NATO-Russia Council and the NATO-Ukraine Commission.

But let me give you the main headlines that emerged from those two sets of meetings. I think the key issue was Afghanistan, and shortfalls in the NATO status of requirements for our ISAF mission, our peacekeeping mission, currently taking place in Kabul. It's never nice if you're the NATO spokesman to have to mention the word shortfalls, but realistically since we've been in Kabul, running that operation in the middle of August, we have discovered that we are lacking certain key capabilities, notably helicopters, intelligence officers and operators to run Kabul International Airport.

And it was very important for Lord Robertson, the Secretary General, in his final weeks in the office to make sure that those shortfalls were plugged. At that the Defence Ministers meeting he made great efforts, and I'm pleased to be able to tell you that certain Allied countries, notably Germany, the Netherlands and Turkey, did agree to supply us with the helicopters we need, and other countries, Italy, Romania, and others, agreed to come forward with intelligence officers. Iceland, as you know, has agreed to operate Kabul International Airport, and several countries, including Belgium and others agreed to provide us with the personnel that we need so that we can have that airport up and running to maximum capacity by the spring of next year.

Now, this is good news, not only of course because it means that our presence in Kabul is now fully manned, or will be very soon, but it leads the way for the expansion of ISAF. We agreed some time ago in principle to expand the ISAF mission beyond Kabul. And the first stage of this was completed, at least in planning terms, a few days ago, when the NATO Council approved military planning for NATO to support the provincial reconstruction team which Germany is going to be running in Khonduz in northern Afghanistan.

This is significant because it's the first time NATO moves out of Kabul and it's the first time NATO is supporting one of these provincial reconstruction teams. There are currently about eight of these up and running in Afghanistan. The United States is planning to inaugurate another four early in 2004. And many other NATO countries have promised, or at least proposed, to set up these provincial reconstruction teams, so that we have a web of security, aiding the civilian reconstruction effort, police training, military demobilisation, infrastructure repair, right across Afghanistan.

And at the moment the NATO ambassadors are considering the second phase in NATO's expansion, beyond Kabul, which is a concept of operations, which in the new year will enable NATO to increasingly take over responsibility for supporting up to five initially provincial reconstruction teams, and most probably more later on.

So things now are on track, particularly as the Loya Jirga meets in Kabul to decide a future constitution for Afghanistan. We're on track to make sure that NATO can provide not only security for the inhabitants of Kabul, but for everybody in Afghanistan. So that's good news.

Another thing on Afghanistan is that the American Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when he was here, suggested that NATO should consider a unified operation in Afghanistan. That is to say, a unity of command under NATO. Not just for ISAF, but potentially also for Operation Enduring Freedom, which is a coalition operation in the south of the country under U.S. leadership. And that is also, therefore, something that will be on our agenda early in the new year.

Another topic was Iraq. We didn't make any new decisions on Iraq. As you know, we're already and have been for some time, supporting the Polish-led multinational division. But the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, suggested that next year NATO should consider doing more in Iraq, and nobody dissented from that proposal. And therefore it's something that we will come back to next year.

But the view in the Alliance, shared by all ministers, was that first it's important that we get Afghanistan under control. As the Secretary General of NATO, Lord Robertson has put it, on many occasions we have to succeed at one mission first and foremost, rather than disperse our resources unsatisfactorily across two missions. But that of course would represent an interesting new departure for the Alliance, but no decisions on that score have been taken yet, and as is the case with Afghanistan, we'd have to be crystal clear that our nations are willing to put the capabilities behind any new mission for NATO.

On the Balkans there was some good news. The ministers agreed the NATO and the EU should start planning for a possible takeover by the EU of NATO's SFOR mission in Bosnia, sometime in the course of 2004. The EU agrees that any such takeover would be under the so-called Berlin Plus arrangements, which organize practical co-operation between NATO and the EU. Those arrangements worked extremely well in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (1) where NATO supported the EU's Operation Concordia, which finished over the weekend, and it only makes sense for the EU to have access to NATO's planning and capabilities to ensure a smooth transition without any reduction in security from NATO to the EU in Bosnia next year, if that is the decision of NATO nearer the time.

At the same time, we decided to reduce our forces in the Balkans. But that is not because of overstretch elsewhere. I want to stress this. It is because we're making progress towards a self-sustaining peace. Particularly in Bosnia, a country which now has a high degree of stability, returning refugees, functioning institutions, and even a new defence law, which for the first time sets up a ministry of defence, and a single minister of defence and chief of the general staff for what, in the past, was two totally separate armies and two different entities.

So that country is coming together. As a result, without waiting for decisions regarding a NATO hand-over to the EU in Bosnia we have decided to reduce our forces there from 12,000 to 7,000. Totally compatible with the improved security situation and a smaller reduction of about 1,500 in Kosovo, down to about 17,000. But there the security situation remains rather precarious and we'll be keeping that under constant review.

Now to a different topic: NATO-EU relations. We had, on the margins of the EU... excuse me, we had on the margins of the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting a meeting with the European Union and its Political Security Committee. Highly successful. And there I detected a good deal of consensus that we need to expand the scope of NATO-EU co-operation beyond the Balkans, beyond capabilities, albeit important topics. But to cover other important topics like terrorism where we're both hard at work and exchanging information on our efforts to curb weapons of mass destruction.

Just a few days ago we had some good news. That is to say, the European Union came to an agreement on a new planning cell to be established within its existing military structures, which goes a long way towards satisfying the need to avoid duplication with the Alliance. Something that many NATO ministers and the NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson have been stressing over the last few weeks.

This is a cell which will provide for the EU to have liaison officers at SHAPE, which exists already on an ad hoc basis for the missions in the Balkans. And for NATO to put liaison officers with the newly-formed EU cell, with the EU structures. So that there will be transparency in planning, we'll minimize duplication.

At the same time, the EU statement mentioned that NATO is the natural choice, I quote, for European and American security operations. And so the need to keep Berlin Plus is well respected. But at the same time, the EU will have the elements that it needs to plan its own autonomous operations in those circumstances where NATO is not engaged, and the Secretary General, Lord Robertson, welcomed that agreement in a statement that we published last Thursday, which of course, as you would expect, is available on this website.

Now that we have reached agreement on the structures, the key thing now is to move beyond those debates towards getting to grips with the joint developments of the capabilities, with making a success of our missions, which ultimately is what really is going to be out decisive contribution to security all around us.

We had also during the ministerials good meetings with Russia. We're now working on things like ballistic missile defence, joint intelligence assessments, submarine search and rescue at sea, military reform, assisting Russia with its military reform efforts, and interoperability in peacekeeping units. And all of that work will not be carried on.

We had a good meeting also with Ukraine, where Ukraine has now approved a very ambitious work plan for defence reform for 2004. And as far as our partnerships were concerned, we agreed that between now and the Istanbul Summit we're going to look very actively at how we can upgrade our partnerships in the Caucasus and Central Asia, particularly as in Central Asia we're already having a higher degree of co-operation with these countries in conjunction with our mission in Afghanistan.

The other area is the Mediterranean dialogue where there's a great deal of interest in the Alliance at the moment, in seeing what we can do between now and the Istanbul Summit, to have also a more substantive security dialogue with those all-important countries, not just to our east, but to the south as well.

Finally, looking towards Istanbul, usability is going to be the key theme. As I said in conjunction with what I said on Afghanistan a moment ago, one of the key needs for the Alliance is to have a higher percentage of useable forces. Forces that don't only exist on paper, but which are actually fully trained, fully equipped, ready to be used whenever NATO operations are being mounted.

And the Secretary General hopes that by the time of Istanbul the Allies will agree to specific usability targets to ensure that, for example, around 40 percent of those forces, that's the target indicator, would be useable, and about one-eighth of that figure would be ready at any one time to be deployed.

This is a challenge which all of the Allies are going to be facing in months ahead.

As I speak to you in this room, we're just a few days away from the Christmas break. The Secretary General is in his final few days as Secretary General. He'll be leaving here on Wednesday, though he will still be Secretary General until the 31st of December when Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who recently resigned as Dutch foreign minister to take up his post as NATO Secretary General Designate, will take over. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer will be arriving for his first official day in office on Monday the 5th of January.

As you would expect, there have been many ceremonies marking Lord Robertson's departure. Don Rumsfeld told him recently that there had been more change in the four years of his tenure than in the previous four decades of NATO's existence. I think that's probably true, frankly. Lord Robertson's term has been marked by some phenomenal changes in the Alliance; beginning, of course, with our intervention in Kosovo and ending with NATO in Kabul. Beginning with a NATO with 19 members and ending on the verge of a NATO with 26 members and with a completely different relationship with Russia, the European Union and so on.

So I think Lord Robertson certainly deserves a very honourable retirement from his job as NATO Secretary General, even though he will undoubtedly be extremely active in his new pursuits in the private sector. And all of us at NATO wish him well.

I will be reporting to you from NATO next year as we have the new Secretary General, as we prepare for Istanbul. And one thing already for you to put in your diaries is that there has been a proposal for an informal Defence Ministers meeting to be held in Munich on the margins of the Munich Security Conference on the 6th of February next, which will allow Defence Ministers to meet again to make sure that all of these various dossiers are progressing as we move towards Istanbul.

But for the time being now, that's all from NATO Headquarters. All of us here on the NATO international staff wish all of you watching this a very peaceful Christmas and a very prosperous and healthy New Year 2004.