Italy FM: Time to end Enduring Freedom

Italy FM: Time to end Enduring Freedom
By Alessandra Rizzo - The Associated Press
Posted : Wednesday Jul 25, 2007 18:22:23 EDT

ROME — The Italian foreign minister said Wednesday that the separate U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan overlaps with NATO’s mission and should be ended.

Massimo D’Alema, speaking to a parliamentary commission, said the NATO mission and the U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom raise problems of coordination, posing risks for the Afghan population.

His comments reflected recent NATO concerns that civilian casualties could undermine public support for the international security mission in Afghanistan.

“The overlapping between the ISAF Mission and Enduring Freedom — which in our opinion it would be appropriate to terminate — often ends up creating conditions for a less-than-coordinated military action,” D’Alema told a parliamentary foreign affairs commission, in comments reported by the ANSA news agency and confirmed by the Foreign Ministry.

This, he said, poses risks for the civilian population.

Speaking of civilian casualties, D’Alema said that “this is not acceptable on a moral level and is disastrous on a political level.”

U.S. State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack said later Wednesday that the two missions have separate but complementary duties, with Enduring Freedom focusing on training Afghan forces and NATO working on reconstruction and development, while also facing the resurgent Taliban in the south of the country.

“They’re both doing important work,” he said at a briefing in response to a question on D’Alema’s comments. “And the idea is that the work they’re doing is mutually reinforcing.”

McCormack added that all forces do their best to avoid civilians casualties and that most are caused by the tactics used by the Taliban. Afghan and foreign officials have blamed the rebels for using civilians as human shields.

Rome ended its participation in Enduring Freedom in December. It has about 2,000 troops in Kabul and Herat — far from Afghanistan’s restive south — as part of the NATO mission.

Premier Romano Prodi, however, has not heeded U.S. calls on European allies to provide more troops to fight insurgents in southern Afghanistan and lift restrictions on how and where soldiers can fight.

D’Alema has often criticized the American strategy in Afghanistan — saying that military action should be increasingly combined with nation-building measures — as well as other major U.S. policies.

Despite the criticism and other irritants, President Bush insisted that relations with Italy were “pretty darn solid” during talks last month in Rome with Prodi, who is at the helm of a center-left government that includes Communist and other radical leftists.

A possible visit to Rome by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this month was called off, Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman Pasquale Ferrara said, after the top American diplomat curtailed her overseas travel amid a new Middle East peace bid by the Bush administration.

Ellie