NATO defense ministers were meeting in Brussels yesterday, waiting to hear what help the US might want from them as it prepares to retaliate against the terrorist attacks of two weeks ago.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, standing in for US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was expected to give the transatlantic allies more details on Washington's plans.
For his part, NATO Secretary General, Lord George Robertson, was set to encourage the 16 European allies plus Canada and Iceland to spell out what assistance they can bring to the anti-terrorist effort.
Dropping in on the meeting was Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, two days after Moscow -- who, until a decade ago was NATO's overriding security threat -- offered an unprecedented level of cooperation to Washington.
Yesterday's informal meeting has been planned long before the US attacks and was originally supposed to have been held over two days this week in the southern Italian city of Naples, with the main focus on the Balkans.
But the venue and agenda were switched in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, as Rumsfeld explained he could not tear himself away from Washington at a moment of crisis to attend.
Speaking Tuesday in the US capital, Rumsfeld played down expectations of a full-scale military assault on Afghanistan and the hiding places of suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
"It is by it's very nature something that cannot be dealt with by some sort of massive attack or invasion," Rumsfeld said. "It is a much more subtle, nuanced, difficult, shadowy set of problems."
Only a day after suspected Islamic extremists crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the 19 NATO allies declared that they would regard the terrorist double blitz as an attack on them all.
But full implementation of NATO's collective security principle, a first in the 52-year history of the alliance, hinges on the US formally telling the alliance that the attack originated from abroad -- something it has not yet done.
That said, however, some NATO member states such as Greece and Hungary have said they would open their airspace to US warplanes, which are expected to strike first at targets in Afghanistan.
The landlocked Central Asian state, ruled by the fundamentalist Taliban militia, is presumed to be harboring bin Laden, the Islamist radical who is Washington's key suspect in the New York and Washington attacks.
Eleven NATO member countries also belong to the EU, whose leaders agreed last Friday to support as "legitimate" any targeted US counter-strikes, as part of a global fight against terrorism.
In an article in the Financial Times newspaper Tuesday, NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, proposed that NATO take measures similar to those put into place during the Gulf war of 1991.
That involved NATO putting warplanes and ground-to-air missiles in Turkey, a strategically critical NATO member country that borders on Iraq, and naval forces in the Mediterranean to check the risk of mines on busy sea lanes.
Robertson said NATO should also improve its counterintelligence and anti-terrorism capabilities, while making the North Atlantic Council a key forum for consultation and the exchange of information.
The council, which meets every week at NATO headquarters in Brussels at the ambassadors' level, is the alliance's top decision-making body.
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