NATO Chief ahead of Summit: No Rushing Out of Afghanistan

World | May 20, 2012, Sunday // 19:41|  views

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has insisted that "there will be no rush for the exits" in Afghanistan regardless of the intention of new French President Francois Hollande to withdraw France's troops from the ISAF.

"Our goal, our strategy, our timetable remain unchanged," Rasmussen said Sunday, as cited by international media.

Rasmussen said that new position does not indicate fresh cracks in the alliance. He suggested a deal will emerge for France to move into a noncombat role but continue to support the international mission.

At the NATO Summit in Chicago Sunday, the United States and NATO leaders have as a whole insisted the Afghanistan fighting coalition will remain whole despite France's plans to pull combat troops out early.

With a global economic crisis and waning public support for the war in the backdrop, world leaders were opening the NATO summit to tackle Afghanistan's post-conflict future — from funding for security forces to upcoming elections.

President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai were meeting Sunday on the sidelines of the summit. Their hour-long discussion is expected to focus on planning for Afghanistan's 2014 elections, as well as the prospect of a political settlement with the Taliban, a senior Obama administration official said.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is solidly against the war, with a majority of Americans now saying it is unwinnable or not worth continuing,

Newly elected French President Francois Hollande has said he will withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by year's end — a full two years before the timeline agreed to by nations in the U.S.-led NATO coalition.

Karzai has said repeatedly he will step down from power when his term ends in 2014, paving the way for new elections. NATO's scheduled end of the war was built around those plans, with foreign forces staying until the 2014 election but exiting the country by 2015.

Obama and Karzai will discuss ways to ensure that political rivals can compete fairly in the run-up to the election, as well as ways to reduce fraud and support the winner who emerges, the official said, as cited by Fox News.

Past Afghan elections were riddled with irregularities, and the U.S. applied heavy pressure to Karzai to schedule a second round of voting during the last presidential contest in 2009. The runoff was never held because Karzai's challenger pulled out in protest of what he claimed was an impossible level of corruption.

The election chapter opened a rift between the U.S. and Karzai, who suspected that the Obama administration wanted to replace him.

Meanwhile, the Taliban is urging nations fighting in Afghanistan to follow France's lead and pull their international forces from the war this year.

"We call upon all the other NATO member countries to avoid working for the political interests of American officials and answer the call of your own people by immediately removing all your troops from Afghanistan," the group said in a statement emailed to reporters ahead of the summit opening.

The insurgent group noted declining public support for the war in the West and said political leaders should listen to their constituents and get out of Afghanistan.

The national security-focused NATO summit caps an extraordinary weekend of international summitry. Obama and the leaders of the world's leading industrial nations convened at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, for two days of talks focused in large part on Europe's economic crisis.

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Tags: NATO, NATO summit, Chicago, NATO Secretary-General, Barack Obama, Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan, Taliban, G-8, G-8 summit

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