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Gates to focus on Afghan war at NATO talks
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Gates to focus on Afghan war at NATO talks
AFP - Tuesday, June 9
WASHINGTON (AFP) - - US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is set to depart for Europe for talks with NATO allies amid a concerted push by Washington to reverse the course of the seven-year-old war in Afghanistan.
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The visit comes as thousands of American reinforcements pour into the fragile Asian nation in a bid by US President Barack Obama to gain the upper hand in a conflict that commanders say has turned into a stalemate.
Most of the 21,000 additional US troops are heading to the south, a Taliban stronghold and the center of a thriving opium trade that helps finance the insurgency.
Gates is due to discuss the outlook in volatile southern Afghanistan on Wednesday in Maastricht with North Atlantic Treaty Organization counterparts who have troops in the region. He then heads to Brussels on Thursday for a meeting of alliance defense ministers, the Pentagon said.
"They will discuss a range of organizational and security issues confronting the alliance, but, as you might expect, the NATO operations in Afghanistan will likely dominate their discussions," Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters on Monday.
With the US force in Afghanistan due to double to about 68,000 by the end of the year, the American military presence -- combined with plans to send in US civilian experts -- will eclipse the 33,000 other foreign troops now stationed there.
And in the south, the Dutch are due to hand over command there next year to a US officer.
The troop buildup and transfer of command in the south will mean the US military will have a dominant role in shaping the coalition effort, analysts say.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has warned European allies not to complain about an "Americanisation" of the mission in Afghanistan if they failed to match US contributions there.
US officials and lawmakers, critical of what they call an unwieldy command arrangement, have spoken of reorganizing the NATO-led command structure in Afghanistan to grant top US officers more control over coalition units engaged in combat -- but it remained unclear if Gates would push for major changes.
Allied defense ministers are also expected to endorse plans to cut the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo by a third in January, possibly freeing up some troops for the Afghan mission.
Recommendations by top NATO officers would see the Kosovo contingent KFOR slashed to 10,000 troops from about 15,000 but officials and diplomats insisted that troop numbers would only drop as security conditions allow.
NATO has been tasked by UN Security Council resolution 1244 to provide security in Kosovo since it launched an air war in 1999 to stop a Serbian crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians.
But as security concerns there ease and pressure mounts on members of the 28-member military alliance to deploy troops to Afghanistan and elsewhere, nations have been calling for KFOR to be scaled back.
NATO discussions on Afghanistan also come as a new US commander is due to take charge there after Gates sacked General David McKiernan, saying he wanted "new thinking" in the seven-year-old war.
Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, with years of experience running special operations, is expected to take over soon as commander of US and NATO forces, pending confirmation by the US Senate and the NATO alliance.
US officials say McChrystal will likely focus on the broader, strategic picture while the American officer nominated to be his deputy, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, would run daily operations.
Such an arrangement is designed to replicate the US approach in Iraq, officials said.
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