BRUSSELS, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- Europe's newspapers may be full of lurid stories about CIA torture camps on the continent, but NATO officials say the allegations will not get in the way of business when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Wednesday meets her European Union and alliance colleagues in Brussels Wednesday and Thursday.
"Whether or not there are CIA camps in Europe is not a NATO issue," said one alliance official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It is talked about in the corridors, but it will not come up at the North Atlantic Council on Thursday."
Both U.S. and NATO officials are hoping Rice's vigorous defense of American tactics before leaving for Europe Monday will help defuse the issue and turn the spotlight on to Europe's role in combating the terrorist threat. Says one U.S. diplomat: "We have made our position clear; now let's move on."
Given the widespread public anger in Europe about the allegations, it is unlikely that Rice will be able to avoid the issue surfacing in head-to-head meetings with European meetings or at an informal dinner between EU and NATO foreign ministers Wednesday. But NATO officials argue the alliance has too many important decisions to take to get bogged down in a theological debate about whether CIA holding camps exist on European soil.
"The story is: 'NATO delivers,'" said one alliance diplomat when asked by reporters what news was likely to come out of Thursday's meeting of foreign ministers.
On the one hand the official is right. The alliance is more active in more places than ever before. It has 10,000 troops in Afghanistan and ministers are expected to give the green light to expand this to 16,000 Thursday. It is helping the African Union airlift peacekeepers to the troubled Sudanese province of Darfur. It has transported over 2,500 tons of emergency aid to remote mountain areas of Pakistan hit by October's devastating earthquake. And it is training Iraqi troops in Baghdad, keeping the peace in Kosovo and patrolling shipping lanes in the Mediterranean.
So far, so good. The problem is the alliance, which was set up to protect Europe against the threat of a Soviet invasion over half a century ago, can never seem to shrug off the existential question: what is it there for?
In a devastating critique of NATO's current direction published last week, former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar wrote: "The growing and even feverish activity of NATO has not lessened the feeling that the golden age of the alliance is a thing of the past and that the organization harbors a series of unresolved problems that could endanger its existence at any time."
NATO officials point to the alliance's ever-growing list of training, humanitarian and anti-terrorist missions as evidence that the military bloc is far from being a "zombie organization" -- as Aznar described it in a recent interview with United Press International.
But there is also a growing consensus within the 26-member bloc that the alliance needs to raise its game to justify its existence to an increasingly skeptical public. There are plans to hold a "transformation summit" of NATO leaders in the Latvian capital Riga late next year and an "enlargement summit" to rubber stamp Albania, Macedonia and Croatia's application bids in 2008. Holding such a high-level meeting in a former Soviet republic should be evidence enough of the alliance's transformation over the past decade. But some NATO members also want to take advantage of the summit to endow the military organization with a new "mission statement" that would define the alliance as more of a global anti-terrorist network than a North Atlantic defense club. Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer also wants to build stronger ties with North African and Middle Eastern countries and more binding links with like-minded democracies such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Some European states are uneasy about turning NATO into the world's super-cop or a United Nations with military muscle, but U.S. diplomats argue the alliance's choice is to go out-of-area or out of business.
"Do we have an option to turn our backs on what is happening in Darfur? Do we have any choice but to make sure Afghanistan does not go backwards again? Do we agree that the best solution for Iraq is for Iraq to secure itself?" asked one senior NATO diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Foreign ministers from the alliance's 26 member states will attempt to grapple with these questions at a dinner with their EU counterparts Wednesday and at a formal meeting of the North Atlantic Council Thursday. Their answers will not put an end to the debate about NATO's purpose in a post-cold war world, but officials hope they will be able to show that at least the alliance is capable of delivering on its promises.
