Nato

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was right to call out our European allies for their lack of commitment to NATO and their over dependence on the defense forces of the USA ("Gates hits NATO allies hard," June 11). Anyone who has traveled to Western Europe can only marvel at the standard of living enjoyed by the majority their citizens. Germany is an interesting case in that this is a country that suffered greatly economically as a result of two world wars but with the help of outsiders has become an economic powerhouse.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili visited Baltimore on Wednesday as part of a U.S. tour intended to build support for his country's bid to join NATO. Saakashvili visited the city to meet with Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. He has also met with officials in Washington including Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry. Cardin serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and co-chairs of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission.

As the world gropes for a security system responsive to the needs of the post-Cold War era, NATO inexorably comes to the fore. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, arguably the most successful military alliance of all time, was born and bred in the Cold War. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire east of the Elbe, there has been intense debate whether NATO has a mission and a future or whether it should be buried honorably next to its vanquished foe,...

Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the former commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan whose nomination to lead NATO was delayed last year while investigators probed his e-mails to a Florida socialite, has retired from the military. The Naval Academy graduate returned to Annapolis a decade ago to serve as commandant of midshipmen. He was the first Marine to hold the second-in-command position. Allen's surprise retirement, announced by the White House on Tuesday, came less than a month after the Pentagon cleared him of wrongdoing in his e-mail correspondence with Tampa socialite Jill Kelley.

LONDON -- Expansion of NATO probably will occur, in part because it would be too awkward to turn back at this point. However, arguments for expansion strike skeptics as proof that NATO is a superannuated institution that has fulfilled its mission and now is implausibly improvising a new one.At NATO's founding in 1949, it was said to have three purposes: keeping the Americans in Europe, the Russians out and the Germans down. America has now had soldiers on the Rhine for 50 years, an almost Roman engagement, Russia's military is disintegrating and Germany has been in NATO since 1955.

How should NATO be transformed so it is relevant to the new security situation in Europe?The Soviet Union is unraveling not only politically but militarily. The U.S. is under great domestic pressure to draw down its forces assigned to NATO by half or two-thirds, thus raising questions about the U.S. military presence in Europe.Meanwhile, Washington and Moscow have offered to rid the continent of most tactical nuclear weaponry. The European Community is trying without success to force an end to the Yugoslav civil war. France and Germany are proposing a 50,000-man force to turn the Western European Union into an organization with military capability.

WORLD POLITICS has changed. There is a new alliance altering the balance of power and will.It is called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. It is led by a powerful nation that had been discounted as isolationist and broke, the United States.This new NATO is like nothing before, especially the former NATO, which had outlived its reason-for-being without new purpose or will.This new NATO emerged in September, when its air forces picked apart the high-tech air defense in Serbian-held Bosnia that NATO members had helped the former Yugoslavia erect against the Soviet threat.

Washington. -- The Clinton administration has given its answer to the problem of Central and East European security. It is as equivocal as this administration's other foreign-policy initiatives: a proposal that all the countries of the region become members of NATO, but not real members.Secretary of Defense Les Aspin said October 20 that the U.S. proposes NATO ''partnerships'' that would not include security guarantees. President Clinton is to put this idea forward at the scheduled NATO summit meeting in January.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - I've been a long and cranky opponent of NATO expansion, out of fear that it was going to dilute the organization. But now that NATO is expanding to 26 countries, I say: Why stop there? Virtually all of NATO's future threats are going to come not from the east and Russia, but from the south - the Middle East and Afghanistan. So if NATO really wants to secure Europe, it can no longer just be in Europe. It needs to help stabilize these other regions. To do that, NATO needs to add three more members: Iraq, Egypt and Israel.

CHALLENGE ANY historian to name an alliance more successful than NATO.There is none.Yet in every decade since the 1950s, throngs of foreign-policy experts have asserted that NATO faced some new crisis.Now comes the crisis of the '90s -- the fragility of democracy in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the loss of a common enemy -- and therefore, it is said, NATO must admit Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other nations of the former Warsaw Pact.This remedy may seem all the more urgent as Russian forces keep inflicting wanton destruction on Chechnya.

In reference to The Sun's editorial, "Unfriendly fire" (Aug. 22), I am in complete disagreement with the claim that maybe it's time to consider speeding up the timetable for bringing all of our troops home from Afghanistan and the surrounding areas. We must never forget that the planning for, and carrying out of Sept. 11 originated in Afghanistan and, in my opinion, the U.S. and NATO forces must never withdraw our military forces from this area. If we did, it would provide the Middle East radicals, including al-Qaida and the Taliban, with the perfect opportunity to plan and fulfill a stronger strike against the U.S. than Sept.

It is very sad and disturbing to continue reading and hearing about the skirmishes still transpiring in and around Afghanistan in order for the U.S. and NATO to maintain control of the terrorist forces, including al-Qaida and the Taliban, which is an absolute necessity. In my opinion, the most frightening aspect of this continual conflict is President Barack Obama's recent declaration that our troops would be withdrawn from this area in 2014 - a date which appears to be nothing more than a political ploy in order to please the American public, when the announcement of a more comprehensive statement by Mr. Obama to the effect that the troops would remain there until the problems were resolved, and our troops were no longer needed, would have been more practical.

It is quite obvious that the U.S. and NATO are being outsmarted by the Taliban, who are wearing fake Afghan soldiers' uniforms to kill our soldiers and sow discord among the alliance. Moreover, the restrictions placed on our peace keeping forces prevent them from fighting a more aggressive conflict, which is absolutely a hindrance to our assisting the weak Afghan government and military. Quinton D. Thompson, Towson

Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a very weak excuse recently when, in response to recent insurgent strikes in Kabul, he stated that the "attack showed a 'failure' by Afghanistan intelligence and NATO" ("Attacks in Kabul show vulnerability," April 17). In my opinion, this statement should be considered an extreme embarrassment to Mr. Karzai. As anyone else who is as keenly interested as I am should be well aware, this raging conflict between the Taliban rebels and the Afghanistan government and their military forces is, and has been for some time, in desperate need of much stronger support from the U.S and NATO troops in order to quell a challenging problem.

There's a scene in the movie "Pretty Woman" where the kindhearted hooker played by Julia Roberts asks her client, portrayed by Richard Gere: "Who do you want me to be?" Regardless of who she might really be, she realizes that it's far less attractive than a tabula rasa onto which her client can project his own desires, and around which she can then build a tailor-made, palatable persona. It's essentially the same principle that dating-and-mating books recommend adopting when suggesting that women retain an air of mystery at the outset of a relationship and be the first to hang up in phone conversations with a man. The idea underpinning these contortions is that whoever you truly are is less attractive than whatever someone can project onto you, so you should let them continue to dream about who and what you might be for as long as possible so you can rope them in. It's a strategy sometimes seen in politics, as well -- and in the case of the upcoming French elections set for a first round of voting this weekend, it may well be the winning strategy that determines the country's next president.

Since the conception and birth of our nation, the basic challenge for our existence has been our participation in our wars of survival which have required our citizens to gallantly rise up and take arms and go into battle. Such action by our nation began with the Revolutionary War (1775-83) when our American colonies gained their independence from Great Britain. This tremendous victory has been followed down through the years by early skirmishes with the native Indians, Spain, France, and Mexico, and then later by the two World Wars, Vietnam, the Korean Conflict and the powerful9/11attack.

Any assessment of NATO's future has to take account of one of the suppressed realities of the old Cold War, namely that two superpowers -- one totally outside Europe and one on its edge -- kept European tribal conflicts at bay through their unspoken military alliance. This is not how the U.S. and the former Soviet Union officially described their ideological rivalry and nuclear duopoly. But their shared interest was genuine and it persists, if for no other reason than their continuing capability to obliterate one another.

WASHINGTON -- The United States' most important military alliance, a mighty machine that kept Europe peaceful for four decades, faces a post-Cold War identity crisis.Three years after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the alliance is struggling over demands from Poland, Hungary and the other former Communist states for protection from a resurgent Russia.The problem pits the West's relationship with Central Europe's young democracies against the need to support Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and his reform government, under fire from nationalists resentful over the loss of empire.

Where is Afghanistan policy headed at this crucial moment? As the nation's excellent if unsung war commander, Gen. John Allen, testifies on Capitol Hill this week, and as Republican presidential aspirants continue to attack President Barack Obama from both the left and the right on the subject, these questions are especially timely. Will the president soon be tempted to say that with Osama bin Laden dead (on the positive side), but with the Afghan and Pakistani governments still very hard to work with and the insurgency still resilient (on the negative side)

There has been widespread fury in Afghanistan and parts of neighboring Pakistan over the burning of the Quran at the Bagram Air Base. Several U.S. and NATO servicemen have been killed by angry Afghans, and violent demonstrations continue days after the incident despite the swift and sincere apologies issued by President Barack Obama and the chief of army operations in Afghanistan. The "inadvertent" burning of old Qurans was an inexcusable blunder on our part and shows how culturally insensitive our troops and advisers are, despite our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade.