NATO defense ministers meeting in Poiana Brasov, Romania on 13 October 2004 agreed to commission options for merging the Alliance's International Security Assistance Force with the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said military planners would present integration proposals, including a unified command option, to ministers in February.
Germany and France both objected. Berlin's defense minister Peter Struck said ISAF's mandate was stabilization, not counterterrorism, and opposed combining the two missions. France's Michele Alliot-Marie likewise rejected a single command. Germany faces constitutional restrictions on frontline combat roles of the kind US forces carry out in southern Afghanistan.
US Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns called the outcome a "very good first step" toward greater cooperation between the two forces. Washington denied the merger effort was part of any plan to reduce its troop presence. The US had close to 20,000 soldiers in the country at the time, three years after the Taliban's fall.
On Iraq, allies agreed to place NATO trainers in the country before year's end, ahead of January elections. The plan calls for 300 to 400 officers to train senior Iraqi military personnel at an academy on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, with total NATO personnel potentially reaching 3,000 when support staff are included.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in October 2004, in its own words.