natoaktual.cz

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11. 12. 2007
We need to stay in Afghanistan – and we need to win
(By Lord Robertson)
If Canada and Britain and the others took the easy way home, make no mistake: They will be followed by the very guys who saw us off. The tumbleweeds of organized crime and jihadists won't stay in their caves. They will congratulate themselves on defeating the world's most successful defence alliance, then reach out to kill again.
Zdroj: Globe and Mail (Canada)

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Autumn/Winter 2007
Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan – how they arrived and where they are going
(By William Maley)
In the battle to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are often on the front line. William Maley looks at how they have evolved and what’s next for them.
Zdroj: NATO Review 

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3. 12. 2007
Nato’s credibility put under scanner
(By Hasan Rafat)
No matter how clear the tasks of Nato are delineated and clarified, the credibility of the organisation will still be questioned until it lives up to the role expected to be played by this international defence alliance.
Zdroj: Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates)

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1. 12. 2007
Trouble ahead: It's back to brink in the Balkans
(By Richard Holbrooke)
At a most inopportune time, the Balkans are back. On Dec. 10, the U.S.-E.U.-Russian negotiating team tasked with getting the Serbs and Albanians to agree on Kosovo's future status will report to the United Nations that it has failed. A few weeks later Kosovo's government will proclaim that Kosovo is an independent nation — a long overdue event.
Zdroj: Houston Chronicle (USA)

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18.11. 2007
On the road to NATO: a guide for travellers
(By Tanja Aitamurto and Kari Huhta ) 
If Finland intends to apply for membership in NATO, we should first know what NATO is. So welcome to this guided tour of NATO. We shall be making a tour of the alliance, taking in the most important sights. There will also be an opportunity to familiarise visitors with eleven fundamental questions relating to NATO membership, addressed to a group of civil servants, experts, and politicians who know their way around the topic.
Zdroj: Helsingin Sanomat (Finland)

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18.11. 2007
Fields of little glory: Nato begins to scale back its Afghan ambitions
(By Stephen Fidler and Jon Boone) 
Afghans are not the only ones frustrated at the progress, or lack of it, in the six years and one week since Kabul was liberated from the Taliban. Western governments, which have 50,000 troops in the country, are struggling to maintain their military commitments. Instability in neighbouring Pakistan, on which they depend heavily to get people and equipment into the country, has heightened their anxiety. Some governments are now wondering whether peace can be made with the Taliban, or at least parts of it.
Zdroj: Financial Times (United Kingdom)

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17.11. 2007
The Implications of Russia's Moratorium of the C.F.E. Treaty
(By Federico Bordonaro) 
Moscow's decision to impose a moratorium on the C.F.E. Treaty must be understood in a broader framework. From an international and geostrategic point of view, Moscow's move suggests that Russia is determined to bring the United States and N.A.T.O. to the negotiation table as it thinks that the Western strategic position has weakened in the last five to six years. Therefore, Moscow hopes to stop N.A.T.O.'s expansion and to maintain a strong strategic influence in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. In this sense, it seems clear that the B.M.D. and C.F.E. issues are diplomatically intertwined.
Zdroj: International Analyst Network (USA)

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7.11. 2007
Bush Should Offer France's Sarkozy a NATO Deal
(By Frederick Kempe) 
But Bush could tell Sarkozy in private that the U.S. will drop objections to a French officer taking over Southern Command leadership, long the province of U.S. admirals. In exchange, France could rejoin the alliance's military command structure for the first time in 40 years. It is an offer Sarkozy has signaled he would consider.  
Zdroj: Bloomberg (USA)

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6.11. 2007
NATO treads warily in Kazakhstan, as russia watches
(By Roger McDermott) 
Kazakhstan’s military cooperation with the NATO Alliance appears to be progressing steadily, despite the problems emerging between NATO and Russia. On October 31 Robert Simmons, NATO representative for Central Asia and South Caucasus, met Kazakhstan’s Defense Minister Daniyal Akhmetov in Astana. An official press release from the Kazakh Ministry of Defense noted “considerable success in a number areas of cooperation,” presenting a highly optimistic evaluation of the current implementation of the Kazakh-NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP).
Zdroj: EurAsia Daily Monitor(USA)

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1.11. 2007
Afghanistan at the Brink
(By Roger Cohen) 
Afghanistan is not Iraq. That’s the good news. Decades of war are devastating, but not as crippling as decades of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian hell. The glint of initiative outweighs fear’s residue in Afghan eyes. 
Zdroj: Winnipeg Free Press (Canada)

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30.10. 2007
Israel seeking a formal partnership with NATO
(By Samuel Segev) 
Despite the escalating war of words between the U.S. and Iran and the new American economic sanctions against the clerical regime in Tehran, one voice is markedly absent: that of NATO.  
Zdroj: Winnipeg Free Press (Canada)

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18.10. 2007
Shadows over NATO
(By The Economist) 
Just as NATO is vital to Afghanistan, so Afghanistan is vital to NATO. General Dan McNeill, the American commander of ISAF, has given warning that the alliance's future is at stake in the country. He said the allies had the “upper hand”, but did not have enough forces, whether foreign or Afghan, to hold on to all the ground they wrest from insurgents. 
Zdroj: The Economist (United Kingdom)

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06.10. 2007
India holds key in NATO's world view
(By M K Bhadrakumar) 
The so-called global challenges are in one way or the other evident in many of the countries of the Indian Ocean region, which, therefore, becomes a theater of priority for the alliance. But that's not the whole picture.
Zdroj: Asia Times (Hong Kong)

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02.09. 2007
Finland: Advancing step by step toward NATO
(By Max Jakobson) 
A group of experts is being given the task to start pondering during the autumn whether or not Finland will join NATO, or if Finland will continue to remain outside of it. What would the advantages be of NATO membership, and what are the drawbacks?
Zdroj: Helsingin Sanomat (Finland)

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29.08. 2007
The West Lost Russia
(By Gordon M. Hahn)
(...) Worst of all, it alienated the entire Russian elite by expanding NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Baltic states. Further rounds of expansion may very well bring Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. The NATO and European Union expansion, which did not include a substantive role for Russia, effectively locked Moscow out of a Western orbit that the Kremlin thought it was joining.
Zdroj: Moscow Times (Russia)

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10.08. 2007
Unseen by western hysteria, Darfur edges closer to peace
(By Jonathan Steele)
Peace and some respite for Darfur's displaced millions seem closer this week than they have for a long time. If forecasting politics were like the weather, one would call the prospects middling to fair. The breakthrough is due not so much to the latest UN resolution to create a larger foreign peacekeeping force as to the success of talks between the rival rebel groups. They seem to have agreed on a common platform to put to the Khartoum government in full-scale negotiations within the next few weeks.
Zdroj: Guardian (United Kingdom)

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09.08. 2007
Progress at last in Darfur 
(By Michael Gerson)
After four years of brutal raids, ethnic cleansing and systematic rape in Darfur, Sudan - and nearly three years after the Bush administration declared this a genocide - the U.N. Security Council has finally approved a credible peacekeeping force. For 2 million displaced people in the camps, this is a wisp of hope on the horizon. For 200,000 of the dead, it comes too late.
Zdroj: Cincinnati Post (USA)

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08.08. 2007
A weak U.S. means a weakened Europe
(By Christoph Bertram)
In today's interdependent world, however, it is no longer the number of nuclear warheads that bestows influence, but a country's ability to get others to go along with policies that it regards as serving its major interests. Bush's America has forfeited that influence — in the Middle East, in Asia and Africa and in much of Europe.
Zdroj: Japan Times (Japan)

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23.07. 2007
More Islam, democracy in Turkey
(By Stefan Nicola) On the other hand, NATO member Turkey under Erdogan has become a close ally to the United States and has pushed for EU membership. The current government has rewritten several civil rights laws to meet EU standards and in the past has also embarked on a successful economic reform course that has handed Turkey strong economic growth. The main hurdle to Turkey's EU membership doesn't lie in Ankara, Kramer added, "but in Brussels and in several European capitals," an obvious reference to the increased unwillingness by the German and French governments to grant Turkey entry into the 27-member bloc.
Zdroj: United Press International (USA)

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20.07. 2007
No Cold War sequel
(By Ingo Mannteufel)
The West's relationship with Russia is worsening. Some talk about a repeat of the East-West conflict. That's wrong. There's the threat of an adversarial climate, but not of a Cold War.
Zdroj: Deutsche Welle (Germany)

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19.07. 2007
We are failing in Afghanistan
(By Paddy Ashdown)
The costs of losing this war far outweigh those of Iraq. We must urgently change the approach. Failure is not yet inevitable. But it is now likely, and will remain likely until we increase resources and redress the disastrous failure of the international community to get its act together. The tragedy is that this is happening despite a high level of professionalism and a lot of raw courage among our soldiers. And it is happening despite some outstanding reconstruction successes outside the hot conflict areas of Helmand province. 
Zdroj: Guardian (United Kingdom)

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10.07. 2007
NATO didn’t lose Afghanistan
(By Sarah Chayes)
In 2003, NATO moved peacekeeping forces into Kabul and parts of northern Afghanistan. But not until 2005, when it was clear that the United States was bogged down in Iraq and lacked sufficient resources to fight on two fronts, did Washington belatedly turn to NATO to take the Afghan south off its hands. And then it misrepresented the situation our allies would find there. NATO was basically sold a beefed-up peacekeeping mission. It was told, in effect, that it would simply need to maintain the order the United States had established and to help with reconstruction and security.
Zdroj: New York Times (USA)

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05.07. 2007
Western forces hooked on air power in Afghan war
(By Mark John)
Western forces are unlikely to curtail the use of lethal air power against Taliban forces in Afghanistan, despite a wave of civilian casualties threatening support for the mission, analysts and military sources say.
Zdroj: Reuters (Great Britain)

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02.07. 2007
NATO in Afghanistan: neither peace nor war
(By Pyotr Goncharov)
Today's developments [in Afghanistan] are inevitable - not so much due to international factors as to domestic. Kabul admits this simple truth. President Hamid Karzai agreed that internal influences on national stability were far stronger than outside forces.
Zdroj: RIA Novosti (Russia)

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25.06. 2007
NATO must set example in Kandahar
(By Lorrie Goldstein)
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer needs to do more than beg Canada to keep its soldiers in Afghanistan beyond February 2009. (...) If NATO wants Canada to recommit to the Afghanistan mission beyond 2009, it must first do so itself.
Zdroj: Edmonton Sun (Canada)

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08.06. 2007
U.S./Russia: Analyst says 'Surprise' missile-shield proposal was planned
(Heather Maher interviewing Glen Howard)
in one stroke on the chess board, [the Russians are] trying to get us to eliminate [plans for] Poland and the Czech Republic, where they would have permanent bases and permanent security guarantees -- in addition to what they have from NATO -- locking them in the West. And in one stroke they eliminate that, with some type of unplanned move to Azerbaijan that would put the United States at odds with the major energy producer and conduit for Caspian energy to the Western Mediterranean. 
Zdroj: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (Czech Republic)

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05.06. 2007
Quelle place pour la France dans l'OTAN?
(Par Leo Michel)
Dans son discours du 7 mars sur les questions de défense, Nicolas Sarkozy a accordé une très large place à la politique européenne de sécurité et de défense (PESD). En revanche, l'OTAN n'était mentionnée que dans six phrases, dont la moitié pour exhorter les Etats-Unis à ne pas pousser l'Alliance au-delà de son "ancrage géopolitique clair en Europe et (sa) vocation strictement militaire". Des propos d'ailleurs dans le droit fil de ceux de Jacques Chirac lors du sommet de Riga, en novembre 2006.
Zdroj: Le Monde (France)

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22.05. 2007
For Estonia and NATO, A New Kind of War
(By Anne Applebaum)
Which creates a dilemma, or rather several: Is this an "armed attack"? Is the NATO alliance obliged to respond? And if yes, how? None of these questions have clear answers. And if you thought that terrorists headquartered in ungovernable bits of the undeveloped world were our worst problem, think again.
Zdroj: Washington Post (USA)

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22.05. 2007
GCC states don't need NATO centre
(By  Joseph A. Kechichian)
Although GCC governments are properly concerned by a variety of security issues, they may be better off with the creation of a few more universities, to equip their citizens with a different agenda: the knowledge to overcome the greatest security threat facing mankind, namely poverty. With a few more centres of higher learning such as the American University of Sharjah or Sultan Qaboos University, to name just two of the better ones, GCC governments would provide their people with the critical institutions that will best empower young people over the long haul. Another defence college or centre for strategic studies will have extremely limited utility and add little value.
Zdroj: Gulf News (United Arab Emirates)

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17.05. 2007
A Defense We Just Don’t Need (Yet)
(By Michael O´Hanlon)
Common sense dictates that there is no need to rush ahead just so that we can start to build the system on European soil in the last 20 months of George W. Bush’s presidency. If the president wants to make creating a third missile defense site part of his legacy, he can still contribute — by setting up a formal NATO process to study the idea and give our allies a greater voice in the debate. Not only would this calm their concerns, it would give the Pentagon more time to design and test the interceptors.
Zdroj: New York Times (USA)

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15.05. 2007
Rift over NATO's Afghan tactics spills into open
(By Peter Graff)
A U.S. commander's repudiation of a ceasefire in Afghanistan that was backed by his British predecessor reveals rifts among the main Western allies over how to defeat Taliban insurgents and win hearts and minds.
Zdroj: Reuters (United Kingdom)

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04.05. 2007
Finland, Sweden and the Lure of NATO
(By Stratfor)
For Finland and Sweden, the question of membership ultimately depends on geopolitical security. As matters stand, such security will come via integration with NATO -- the regional collective defense pact that also boasts global reach. Member states will be protected from any military threat by NATO's collective security agreement, but one major and rather obvious fact remains. The only potential military threat that either Finland or Sweden is likely to face is Russia, and joining NATO is certain to take the threat to new heights.
Zdroj: Stratfor (USA)

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30.04. 2007
Will NATO and Russia once again count tanks and aircraft in Europe?
(By Alexander Khramchikhin)
Russia's displeasure with CFE limitations is surprising because like most countries, it has fewer weapons than the quota allows. It is not clear, either, why Russia is worried about NATO's eastward expansion because it has been accompanied by rapid arms reductions both by its old and new members. Today, NATO's 26 members have 33% fewer weapons of all classes than its 16 participants had in 1991, and these reductions are continuing.
Zdroj: RIA Novosti (Russia)

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24.04. 2007
Turkey boosting its defense systems
(By Lale Sarıibrahimoğlu)
Wary of neighboring Iran's alleged ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons, Turkey has accelerated efforts to acquire different sorts of missile defense systems to deter a possible attack on its homeland.
Zdroj: Today´s Zaman (Turkey)

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13.04. 2007
Kosovo solution may mean partition
(By Matt Robinson and Ellie Tzortzi)
The northern slice of Kosovo above the River Ibar is home to some 40,000 Serbs. About 60,000 more live in isolated enclaves to the south, surrounded by two million ethnic Albanians. NATO allies and the European Union reject partition. But on the ground, Kosovo is already partitioned. In terms of administration, telephone links, water and electricity, the north has no ties to the Kosovo capital, Pristina.
Zdroj: Reuters / Alert Net (Great Britain)

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03.04. 2007
Iranian Missiles and Russian Threats
(By Eckart von Klaeden)
Europe has long been neglecting the new strategic threats arising from missile proliferation. For some years now, the international community has been devoting a great deal of attention to the Iranian nuclear program. Germany has been playing an active role in the efforts of the international community to dissuade Iran from pursuing its nuclear plans. Tehran's parallel development of delivery technology in particular would make a nuclear-armed Iran a direct threat to us.
Zdroj: Moscow Times (Russia), Wall Street Journal (USA)

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