Gates: Iraq discourages Europe in Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

Gates: Iraq discourages Europe in Afghanistan
By Robert Burns - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Feb 8, 2008 13:41:52 EST

MUNICH, Germany — Lingering anger in Europe over the U.S. invasion of Iraq explains why some allies are reluctant to heed U.S. calls for more combat troops in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.

Gates said he would attempt, beginning with a speech Sunday at an international security conference in Munich, to decouple perceptions of the Iraq war, in which NATO has no fighting role, from views of Afghanistan, where NATO is in charge of the war but has fallen short on commanders’ requests for more troops.

On a flight to Munich from Vilnius, Lithuania, where he attended two days of NATO talks dominated by Afghanistan, Gates for the first time publicly linked Iraq to what lay behind Europe’s general skepticism about fighting in Afghanistan.

“From our standpoint, I worry that for many Europeans, the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused,” he told reporters traveling with him, implicitly acknowledging a political cost of the Iraq invasion.

“I think they combine the two,” he said. “Many of them I think have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan and don’t understand the very different — for them — very different kind of threat” posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, as opposed to the militant group in Iraq that goes by the same name and is thought to be led by foreign terrorists linked to al-Qaida.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/02/ap_gates_080208/