NATO hears Australia's voice
The Australian ^ | 11th February 2008 | Patrick Walters

UNTIL last week, NATO's defence ministers had never listened to Australia.

We are not a member of the 59-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and until the Afghanistan conflict have had little cause to become involved in the goings-on of the Brussels-based organisation.

Joel Fitzgibbon has just changed all that.

Not only has he become the first Australian defence minister to attend a ministerial meeting of NATO, which has 26 member countries including the US and most of Europe, but Fitzgibbon now expects to become a regular participant at NATO gatherings,given that Australia is the 10th-largest contributor to the NATO-led military campaign in Afghanistan.

At the NATO defence ministers gathering in Vilnius he warned his NATO counterparts that popular support at home for the Afghanistan mission could not be guaranteed if other NATO countries did not pull their weight. The thrust of Fitzgibbon's remarks was that Australia was happy to play its part in fighting the Taliban but, in return, needed to be guaranteed access to NATO's planning and overall strategy in Afghanistan.

The other key message was that the success of NATO's mission remained in jeopardy without a change of strategy and a greater military effort from some key NATO members.

When he left Canberra for Lithuania last week, Fitzgibbon was shocked to learn that Australia's defence planners had no access to any draft NATO plans for Afghanistan. Since taking up the Defence portfolio in December, he has quickly learned just how little say Australia has had in NATO's Afghanistan strategy.

In Vilnius, he said bluntly that Australian public support for its military commitment to Afghanistan could not be guaranteed if the Government could not demonstrate that it was master of its own destiny.

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