Manama: The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) summit this week will have a special significance in the context of the war in Afghanistan as the presidents and prime ministers of its 28 member states are likely to receive at their Lisbon summit much-needed logistical and strategic Russian support to their faltering mission.
President Dmitry Medvedev will be the first Russian head of state to attend a Nato summit. Alliance officials hope that shared objectives with Russia to deny terrorists a haven in Afghanistan will help persuade the Russians to get re-involved in a country that the Soviet forces left more than 20 years ago.
Initial plan
Medvedev's presence will help extend initial US plans at the summit to pressure reluctant and hesitant Nato members to provide more assistance in Afghanistan to include serious negotiations with Russia.
The war in Afghanistan, Nato's first armed conflict outside Europe and the first ground combat operations in its history, will figure high on the agenda of the summit on November 19-20, the 23rd since the alliance was established.
Nato currently has 140,000 troops from almost 50 nations in Afghanistan, assigned to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Alain Deletroz, the European Vice-President of the International Crisis Group think-tank, told Deutsche Welle that "Russia does not want to be involved in Afghanistan, but does not want to see Nato losing and the Taliban return with their potential to create troubles in the rest of Central Asia and even in the North Caucasus".
However, according to Russian media, Moscow is ready to cooperate with Nato on the question of missile defence and create a missile defence pool on condition that the security of all nations is taken into consideration.
"This is a more or less hot topic. Nato has proposed cooperation to Russia on this topic," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week.
