US sees Afghanistan as test of NATO role

President Bush also focused on the issue, noting in a speech at Latvia University Tuesday that "this alliance was founded on a clear principle: An attack on one is an attack on all. That principle holds true," he added, "whether the attack is on our home soil or on our forces deployed on our NATO mission abroad."

French President Jacques Chirac responded Wednesday by announcing that France would allow "case by case" emergency assignment of its troops outside Kabul. But he gave a flat "non" to calls for additional troops – offering instead some additional materiel, including additional helicopters. Spain said its troops could be used in "exceptional circumstances" to evacuate wounded soldiers, but not for combat.

Bush left Riga directly after the traditional group photo Wednesday for talks in Jordan with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But the president came away from the summit "encouraged" by the substantive discussions and "the commitment to success" in Afghanistan, according to senior White House officials.

Still, the questions over deployment "caveats" and burden-sharing in Afghanistan will continue to rattle the alliance, some experts say. "Frankly, if an alliance does not face collectively and equally the central threats to its members – and by that I mean the terrorist threat and security challenges coming out of the broader Middle East today – then that alliance will not be central to their thinking," says Ronald Asmus, director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels.

Yet such doubts have not weakened the alliance's attractiveness to other countries. As evidence of that, NATO leaders overcame their lingering resistance and invited Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to become "partners" of the Euro-Atlantic Council – essentially pre-membership status. Some NATO countries, including the US, had resisted this step because they consider Serbia and Bosnia less than fully cooperative with the United Nations war crimes tribunal. They wanted to see first the arrests of two former Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, as goodwill gestures.

In the end, even the US lifted its opposition, with some officials citing as a deciding factor a letter from reformist Serbian President Boris Tadic, in which he called on NATO to send a signal of support to democratic forces in his country.

The NATO leaders' final communique does call on Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to "cooperate fully" with the UN tribunal and says NATO will "closely monitor" those efforts.

Offsetting to a certain degree the modest progress on deployments in Afghanistan was De Hoop Scheffer's declaration that NATO's new 25,000-strong rapid-reaction force is fully operational. The force, envisioned as a means of putting NATO quickly on the scene of security and humanitarian emergencies, was first tested last year in response to the Pakistan earthquake. The new force is expected to lead over time to increased flexibility and "interoperability" of forces from more than two dozen countries.

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