London will host a trio of military commanders and senior officials working on Afghanistan this week, with pressure building on President Barack Obama to decide on a new strategy for the eight-year conflict. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, is in London ostensibly to deliver a speech to military experts, but his visit coincides with that of Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Nato's top commander in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis.
Officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Britain's Ministry of Defence played down the fact all three are set to be in London over Thursday and Friday, calling it a coincidence rather than anything more. But the visits, and the speeches that will accompany them, come at a critical time for policy and planning on Afghanistan, with Obama weighing a request from McChrystal for more troops, and European powers looking to shift their strategic role.
Britain, which has just appointed a new army commander, is the biggest contributor to the coalition in Afghanistan after the United States, with 9,000 troops. But public opinion is against the war and the government is reluctant to send more forces amid a rising death toll and an election due next June.
McChrystal, who will speak at the International Institute for Strategic Studies on Thursday, has presented a plan to Obama requesting up to 30,000 to 40,000 more combat troops and trainers, according to US defence and congressional officials. Without such a "mini-surge", which would take the total of foreign troops up to 140,000, McChyrstal has said he believes the war, launched after September 11 2001 to drive al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan, could end in failure.
While considering McChrystal's request, Obama is also conducting a series of discussions with senior advisers to determine whether the right strategy is being pursued in the conflict, and if not, how it should be modified. Reaching a decision is expected to take several weeks, officials say.
Both issues - troops and strategy - are critical not only to the US-led war effort, but to the level of contributions Washington's major Nato allies in Europe, particularly Britain, Germany, France and Italy, will make to the campaign. While British military commanders have suggested they would like to have more combat troops deployed to southern Afghanistan, where the battle against the Taliban is fierce, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has indicated that any increase in the number will be for training Afghan security forces only.
Rasmussen, who is holding talks in Washington before flying to London to speak at a conference on Thursday, emphasised Europe's commitment to the war in a speech on Monday, but spoke also of Europe's desire to focus on training over combat. That was a line pushed at an informal meeting of European defence ministers at the weekend, as major European powers in Nato look to shape what's been called a "Europeanised" position on how the conflict should be pursued.
While Rasmussen is scheduled to speak about security in his speech, he will also touch on Afghanistan, officials said, continuing a process of relaying US thinking on the war back to Europe, and vice-versa, ahead of Obama's decision on where the war is headed and the strategy for winning it.
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