Video Briefing

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jamie Shea, the NATO Spokesman, speaking to you from NATO Headquarters. And I'd like today to give you an update on current activities in the Alliance.

The first thing I'd like to comment on are the trips that Lord Robertson, the Secretary General of NATO, is making both to NATO and partner countries as he comes to the end of his four-year term as Secretary General of NATO.

Lord Robertson will be leaving in mid-December, soon after the next round of NATO ministerial meetings which I'll talk about in just a moment.

In the last few weeks, since I last reported to you, the Secretary General has visited Russia, where he met with President Putin, and the Russian leadership, including several parliamentarians from the Russian Duma.

This was a very cordial visit, which shows that NATO-Russia relations have really now become normal business. And indeed, trips to Russia by the Secretary General are even being seen as a normal part of life and routine.

But the Secretary General was determined, not just to say goodbye to the Russian leadership, but also to transact a good deal of business, particularly by pursuing closer co-operation between NATO and Russia in the field of defence modernization and in the field of practical military to military co-operation, particularly exploring the possibility for NATO and Russia to be interoperable in terms of peacekeeping forces and doctrines.

At the same time, while he was in Moscow, he invited President Putin to come to NATO's next Summit, which will take place next year in Istanbul, Turkey on the 28th and the 29th of June. And we very much hope, of course, that President Putin will be able to come. His presence at a NATO summit would really put the seal on the very close co-operation that we are developing.

Other topics in Moscow included the establishment of a military liaison mission of Russia at... in Brussels to be assigned to NATO Headquarters and to SHAPE, as a counterpart to the military liaison mission that NATO's already had for the last two years in Moscow.

At the same time, we greatly appreciate the offer by Russia to assist NATO in its deployment in Afghanistan by facilitating transit across Russian territory and we're currently looking at the feasibility of those Russian proposals.

Last week the Secretary General visited another important country. This time the United States of America. First of all, he was in Orlando, Florida, where he addressed the NATO Parliamentarians Assembly, and then he was in Washington, D.C.

The Secretary General was very pleased, as perhaps the highlight of this trip, last Wednesday morning to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a special ceremony in the White House led by President Bush. The Secretary General is the first Scot and one of the very few foreigners, non-Americans, to have received this prestigious award, which for him was not only a recognition of his own personal efforts to transform NATO over the last four years, but also in recognition of the progress that NATO has made.

And as the Secretary General pointed out in his acceptance speech, the team effort of all of the international staff and international military staff, the delegations at NATO, to assist him in this process.

And earlier that morning, when the Secretary General visited the Pentagon he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the Secretary of Defence, Don Rumsfeld.

But again, like in Russia, the Secretary General was at pains to point out that he hadn't just come to Washington to say goodbye, or to receive plaudits, but to transact essential NATO business.

The first thing was to give a fairly buoyant account to the U.S. administration about the progress that NATO has made recently to address terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Obviously the two chief challenges on the minds of his American audiences.

He also pointed out that NATO's role in Afghanistan was a crucial part of achieving success against terrorism, although it's true, nobody can deny this, that while we were in Washington last week, the focus of the United States was very much on Iraq, and looking for new political arrangements there to speed up the transfer of authority to the Iraqis. Afghanistan is not something that anybody can afford to forget. After all, it was in that country that the terrorist training camps of Osama bin Laden originated, and the Secretary General's message was that although yes, many Americans were calling for NATO to play a greater role in Iraq, the fact is that NATO had to give priority to Afghanistan. That NATO could not afford to be involved in two half-baked missions simultaneously. The key priority was to extend the ISAF mission beyond Kabul in Afghanistan and to the extent that NATO was successful in stabilizing that country, this would take a great deal of the burden off American shoulders, which would then, of course, could then be devoted to Iraq.

And I think this message was well-heeded by the Secretary General's U.S. interlocutors, not just in the administration, but also the congressional leaders that he spoke to.

At the same time, the Secretary General briefed the United States on other aspects: the smooth process of enlargement, the new command structure, the activation of the NATO Response Force as well.

His overall message in all of his speeches was "it ain't your daddy's NATO". This slogan came from a T-shirt that Lord Robertson was presented at the recent NATO Defence Ministers' Meeting in Colorado Springs. Which sums up the fact that the NATO of today bears little resemblance to the NATO of just 10 or 15 years ago.

Back from Washington, the Secretary General this week has continued his visits. Yesterday he was in Kosovo, where he urged the Kosovo Albanians and the Kosovo Serbs to work towards a true multi-ethnic society. In this respect he visited some villages where Serb refugees were earmarked to return and obviously appealed for the safe return of those Serb refugees and appealed to the Kosovo Albanians to established the standards of democracy which is an essential prerequisite for the determination of Kosovo's final political status.

The Secretary General tomorrow will be paying his farewell visit to Paris and the French government, and then on Friday he will visit in a single day, Portugal and Spain. And this will almost bring to an end the cycle of visits.

What else is happening in NATO, apart from the Secretary General's activities, in his final four weeks in office?

Well, our focus at the moment is on two... three... three issues. Firstly, Afghanistan, which I've mentioned already. The Military Committee is currently looking at a SHAPE document for the expansion of the ISAF mission, which we've already agreed to in principle, and this will come before the ambassadors in the next few weeks for a decision.

But already NATO is moving ahead by offering ISAF's -- that's the NATO force in Afghanistan -- ISAF's assistance to the Germans who have recently agreed to establish a provincial reconstruction team in Kondoz in the North and part of the NATO planning to go beyond Kabul will involve the support of ISAF to the other provincial reconstruction teams, which either already exist, or will be established in the future.

And the Secretary General has been working hard with nations to make sure that the shortfalls in the current status of requirements for the ISAF mission are being filled as rapidly as possible.

The second dossier is Istanbul; the Summit next spring, which I mentioned a moment ago. This will be a very important milestone in NATO's development. Already it's clear that we are going to take important decisions there on various aspects of how NATO can step up to the mark in meeting the new challenges.

One area that we're looking at is how to enhance our dialogue with the seven Mediterranean countries that we co-operate with.

Another aspect will be welcoming seven new members into NATO, and of course, at the same time, making it clear that the door to NATO membership will remain open to other countries.

I mentioned a moment ago that we hope to have Russia there. We hope also have an important meeting with the European Union to put the seal on the closer co-operation between our two organizations. Particularly as the EU takes on a more important role in foreign policy and defence.

We hope also that there will be new initiatives to make sure that the capabilities that NATO requires will be provided. The Secretary General, as you know, in his final weeks in office, has been hitting hard on the theme of usability, the fact that we are seeing that we have many, many troops on paper, 1.4 million alone in Europe, plus a million reserves, but that it's sometimes difficult to find anything more than one or two percent of that overall number that are trained, equipped and ready to be deployed.

And as NATO takes on new missions we have to increase the percentage of overall usability in our force structure.

And one question of course, is can we develop targets that nations would agree to so that we can measure progress in making our forces more useable.

So already, and particularly following a visit here just a few days ago by the Under Secretary of State of the United States, Marc Grossman, who presented U.S. thinking on the Istanbul Summit, already NATO Ambassadors are brainstorming to make sure that we have a very substantive full agenda for Istanbul.

The third and final topic for today are the NATO ministerial meetings, which I'll be able to brief you on in my next update, but these are only now a few weeks ago. We have defence ministers here on the 1st and 2nd of December, and the foreign ministers will be here at the end of the same week; that is to say on the 4th and 5th.

We're still working on the exact agenda and the substance for these meetings, but I don't think that I'm going to be giving any hallowed secrets away if I tell you that defence ministers will be looking obviously at progress with our Prague Capabilities Commitment, particularly in key areas, like airlift, sea transport, precision guided munitions, better communications for our forces. They'll be looking at usability; this topic I mentioned already, and they'll be reviewing the progress in setting up the new NATO command structure, particularly the Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, which is now getting up to speed.

The good news is the NATO Response Force, and I think ministers will be very happy about this, because it's been activated already, just a few weeks ago. Brunssum in the Netherlands. We have therefore an initial operating capacity for this very high speed response force, which will be able to deploy in under a week, which will really be a record for a multinational unit. And in just a few days time in Izmir in Turkey this NATO Response Force will hold its first training exercise. So that's good news.

And then on the 1st of December, just as the ministers meet in Brussels, one new NATO initiative, which is a defence battalion, able to cope with chemical, biological, radiological, or even nuclear attacks, in helping with consequence management, that NATO battalion will be unveiled at a ceremony at SHAPE.

So on the military side, as well as the political side, NATO is making good progress, and defence ministers will look at that. Plus they'll also examine troop levels in Bosnia and Kosovo on the basis of our latest so-called periodic mission review.

Foreign ministers a few days later. Obviously the topics will be somewhat similar, as you would expect, but I think foreign ministers clearly will look at Afghanistan and how we deal with the challenges there. They will look at NATO's relationships with the European Union, obviously brainstorm on the summit, look at our relationships with partners in Mediterranean dialogue countries.

So it's very important that these ministerials, which at the moment look like being the last ones before the summit in Istanbul, give us all here at NATO Headquarters the necessary political guidance so that we can get on with our work.

Let me just add finally that as the Secretary General's time comes to an end, we currently are involved in a very smooth transition, so the next Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, of the Netherlands, he and Lord Robertson have been holding a series of meetings over the last few weeks. They'll have more in the future. So that the incoming Secretary General will be thoroughly briefed on everything that's going on. And therefore we will have over the Christmas-New Year period the best possible transition to our new Secretary General.

But again, like on all of these topics I look forward to giving you more at the next update. But that's all the news from NATO for today. Thank you very much for following this briefing.

Goodbye.