Gül calls on NATO to win hearts of Afghan people

Gül was delivering welcoming remarks on the second day of an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers hosted in İstanbul. The collective responsibility assumed by the international community to offer a better future to Afghan people is indispensable, Gül highlighted. “However, as I have always stated, here is another fact that we should sincerely accept: We cannot solve Afghanistan's problems solely through military means. In the final analysis, foreign forces will one day leave Afghanistan. They should leave behind a country which can stand on its own feet with all its institutions and functions, not as a country which has been routed,” Gül said at a session of NATO defense ministers with non-NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) contributing nations.

“We should never forget that Afghanistan belongs to the Afghan people, and we should always show this to the Afghan people as well. Inasmuch as ISAF and NATO haven’t gone there to change the identity, cultural values and traditions of the Afghan people, if this fact is well perceived and comprehended, then winning the struggle by isolating terrorism will be much easier,” Gül said.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (front row, third from left), US Defense Secretary Robert Gates (front row, third from right), Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül (front row, second from left) and other defense ministers are seen during a group photo taken following an informal NATO defense ministers meeting in İstanbul on Friday.

“If more than 40 countries are able to send troops to Afghanistan, then they can also build more new schools, more new hospitals and more new roads. In this way, we can win the minds and hearts of each and every one of our Afghan siblings by not solely maintaining the security of Afghan people. We will then also be building a strong barrier between terrorists and the people. As Turkey, we will continue lending support to Afghanistan,” Gül said, pledging that Turkey will not leave Afghanistan to its own devices.

Delivering opening remarks at the same session, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the situation in Afghanistan is improving after a difficult year. In his speech, Rasmussen echoed the assessment of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US military commander there, who said Thursday the security conditions in Afghanistan are no longer “deteriorating.”

Both men were addressing bleak assessments from other nations that the Taliban is expanding in the region and the situation in Afghanistan has turned explosive.

NATO unofficially estimates that the number of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan has grown from fewer than 400 in 2004 to about 25,000 last year and nearly 30,000 now. That has led other officials and analysts to say the Taliban are now waging a war of attrition against the international forces and Afghan government troops.

McChrystal said the Taliban has made strides in recent months and he is “not prepared to say we’ve turned a corner.” Even so, he said the Afghan government and US forces are making enough progress to leave him more optimistic about the war than he was last summer, when he declared it was backsliding.

Private television faces censorship at NATO meeting A cameraman working for the private Samanyolu Haber news channel was removed from İstanbul’s Lüfti Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Center, which hosted NATO’s informal meeting of defense ministers, the television channel announced yesterday. Metin Yıkar, editor-in-chief of the station, said cameraman Erkan Uysal was told to leave the compound by an official, probably a military official in civilian clothes. “He was picked from dozens of foreign and Turkish journalists covering the event and was told that he had not been accredited for the meeting,” he told Today’s Zaman yesterday. But Uysal had received his accreditation card from the organizers two days ago, he went on. When he insisted that he had the proper registration and authorization to cover the NATO meeting, he was told that he had received the permission by mistake. According to Yıkar, the incident is an extension of the ban on Samanyolu and some other media outlets to cover military-related events and enter military facilities. “This is a reflection of the accreditation practice in an international meeting,” he said. Samanyolu is one of the media outlets, including Today’s Zaman, that are categorized by the military as non-accredited. The ban is criticized as an infringement of media freedom. “This act of censorship that targeted Samanyolu in front of the international community is indeed an act of censorship against the media as a whole. It should not happen in a democratic and transparent country,” Yıkar said. There was no statement from the organizers of the meeting when Today’s Zaman went into print. Worst organization ever NATO’s İstanbul meeting will be remembered for its poor organization, which caused many difficulties for journalists trying to cover the event. Some journalists called it the worst example of organization they’d ever seen, referring to a number of things that went wrong ranging from power cuts to excessive security searches. It took journalists 90 minutes to enter the compound where the meeting took place because they were sent from one gate to another by security officials before eventually granted entry. The police blamed the military for numerous security searches of journalists, while the military officials said they had acted on the basis of orders given to them. At one point, no journalists were allowed to enter a room where Jean-Francois Bureau, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for public diplomacy, was holding a press conference. İstanbul Today’s Zaman

Rasmussen said allied forces are on their way to seizing the initiative in the nine-year war. “After a difficult year in 2009, we now see a new momentum in 2010, and it has already started,” he told the alliance’s 28 defense ministers meeting in İstanbul, including US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “There is no doubt that 2010 will be a challenging year.” Both Rasmussen and McChrystal have urged NATO ministers to send several thousand new army and police instructors to Afghanistan to enable government forces to assume more responsibility for the country’s security.

France agreed at the meeting to send up to 100 new instructors for that purpose, French embassy spokeswoman Stephanie Prunier said.

Major world powers decided last week to boost Afghanistan’s military to 171,600 by October 2011, up from the current 98,000 troops. They also decided to increase police numbers to 134,000 by that date, from about 90,000 today. A senior US official said up to 1,700 instructors were needed for the police and army, while up to 2,500 additional mentors were required to work alongside the national security forces.

In the past, Afghan forces -- characterized by high desertion rates and low morale -- have performed poorly in the war, prompting critics to question the feasibility of allied plans to significantly expand them. On Thursday, Rasmussen made clear that NATO does not intend to bribe Taliban guerrillas to defect to the Afghan government side as a way to end the war, dismissing concerns over the latest plan to end the country’s growing insurgency.

Rasmussen’s comments came amid a renewed push to make peace with moderate Taliban insurgents and draw them into the political process. The North Atlantic alliance has strongly backed an Afghan plan to bring the insurgents over to the government’s side.

The transatlantic alliance’s consideration of further reducing its peacekeeping force in Kosovo was also on the agenda of the İstanbul meeting as such a development may free up additional forces in Afghanistan.

NATO diplomats in Brussels have said the plan is to reduce the contingent to less than 4,000 in 2011, with the ultimate goal of reducing the alliance’s troop commitments in foreign missions not directly related to the Afghan war. Rasmussen said defense ministers are discussing “next steps” for the Kosovo force, which was reduced from 14,000 to 10,000 soldiers in 2009.

“We have seen considerable progress [in Kosovo] over the last 12 months,” he said.

In 1999, NATO waged a brief war against Serbia, which was fighting ethnic Albanian separatists in the region. Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008, but Serbia and its allies consider the move illegal.