By SPA
Munich : U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Saturday said a skeptical European public needed to be convinced the fight in Afghanistan was part of combatting the worldwide terrorist threat, and cautioned that if other countries did not contribute to the combat mission it could
spell the end of NATO, reported ap.
We must not _ we cannot _ become a two-tiered alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not, he told a gathering of the world’s top defense officials at a Munich conference. Such a development, with all its implications for collective security, would effectively
destroy the alliance.
He said it was incumbent upon NATO leaders to recapitulate to the people of Europe the importance of the Afghanistan mission and its relationship to the wider terrorist threat.
On a conceptual level, I believe it falls squarely within the traditional bounds of the alliance’s core purpose: to defend the security interests and values of the trans-Atlantic community.