By KUNA
Bucharest : President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly Jose Lello called on Thursday upon alliance leaders to live up to their common commitments to provide forces for the ISAF mission in Afghanistan.
The parliament president was addressing heads of state and government at the three-day NATO Summit that kicked off here on Wednesday.
He warned that if the members did not live up to the commitments, the alliance would become in effect a “coalition of the willing.” He added that failure in Afghanistan “would be failure not just for NATO, but for the entire international community, including the United Nations and the European Union.” The NATO peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan comprises 42,000 soldiers working as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
President Lello told the gathered heads of state, “Together we made the commitment to provide the forces needed to make state-building and development possible. Together we decided to expand the NATO mission to cover the whole country. And together we must all now share the burden of those decisions.” On NATO expansion, President Lello said that the assembly had long supported expansion based on performance, and that this move threatened no one. On the contrary, “NATO members are good neighbors.” He also underlined the need for NATO to prepare a new strategic concept to take account of the dramatic changes in the security environment which had taken place since the current concept was adopted almost ten years ago at NATO 50th Anniversary Summit.
The NATO Parliamentary Assembly is the inter-parliamentary organization of legislators from the member countries of the North Atlantic alliance as well as 13 associate members.
The Assembly provides a critical forum for international parliamentary dialogue on an array of security, political, and economic matters. Its principal objective is to foster mutual understanding among alliance parliamentarians of the key security challenges facing the transatlantic partnership.
Assembly discussions and debates make an important contribution to the development of the consensus that must underpin alliance policies.