Admiral James G. Stavridis, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe

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.