As you know, were in the midst
of a great dialogue in NATO
about the Strategic Concept
and our new Secretary General,
Anders Fogh Rasmussen,
has done a great job
selecting Madeleine Albright
to lead a group of very wise people
to take a look at
where the concept is going.
And the specific things
they’re focussing on
are what I would call
comprehensive security.
It’s getting the balance right
between reassurance to our partners
who are concerned
about conventional threats
and looking to the emerging threats,
cyber and terrorism, narcotics...
Those things.
The unconventional threats.
It’s getting that balance right.
And we need to get the balance right
between a focus
on European defence activities
and participating
in important global activities,
like our work in Afghanistan,
like our work in counter piracy.
The word I would use, the specific
example I would give is balance.
It’s going to be fundamental.
And on the point of counter piracy,
there are five significant operations,
40 different countries
doing very effective work,
from NATO to the European Union,
to stand-alone efforts by Russia
and China to a US led operation,
all fitted together
around the Horn of Africa,
participating in real-world activities
and helping save us,
save the maritime industry
from this ancient scourge, piracy.
I am working
very actively at this moment
to encourage our Columbian friends
to send a contingent of their soldiers
and experts to Afghanistan to help
share some of the lessons learned.
I’m encouraging the commander of
NATO Training Mission Afghanistan,
Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell,
to go to Columbia
and see the actual lessons
that the Columbians have derived
from fighting an insurgency that had
its base built around narcotics.
What I would say
is the idea of reintegration.
It’s getting people
out of dealing drugs
but then finding alternative
life pursuits for them afterwards.
The Columbians have done
a marvellous job
at taking
the 35,000 members of the FARC,
which is the criminal and insurgency
that they fight in Columbia,
and bringing them back
into the mainstream of society.
35,000 they’ve done
over a nine-year period.
There are lessons there that could be
applicable in Afghanistan.
Secondly, in Columbia,
we’ve learned that the key
to counter narcotics
frankly is alternative crops.
That requires market infrastructure,
it requires the ability
to get from farm to market.
It leads us to development lessons
that are crucial for Afghanistan.
I make the additional point
that what we saw in Columbia
was the application
of the comprehensive approach.
You can’t kill your way to victory,
either in a narcotic sense
or in a counter-insurgency sense.
Security will not come
solely from the barrel of a gun.
In the end most importantly is
training the local security forces.
We have a saying in the US
that all politics are local.
In the end all security must be local.
In the case of Afghanistan, we have
to train the Afghan security forces
to take charge of their own country.
We have to place this burden
on the people of Afghanistan.
That is the centre of our focus
from allied command operations.
Training the Afghan security forces.
There’s no simple answer.
Every case will be a little bit different
and will require
a different application of resources
and there’s no, there’s no cut out
the paper doll kind of answer to it.
We’ve got to look at each situation,
each time that we’re in
and focus on what are the right
solutions for a given problem.
And you have to remember
what Henry Kissinger said:
Every solution is merely a key to
the next problem. That’s really true.
There is no end to all this. We have
to continue to face the challenges
as our journey
towards security moves forward.