Security risks caused by the wave of unrest sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East will not affect the Western commitment in Afghanistan, Britain's defence minister said on Saturday. But Liam Fox said the events in Egypt and elsewhere should serve as a wake-up call to some European nations that have been cutting their budgets well below their Nato commitments and indulging in "fantasy defence".
"We've made it very clear that our primary objective is to see the Afghan mission completed and that's doesn't change," the minister told Reuters, adding that Britain's spending in Afghanistan was ring-fenced from a Treasury reserve. "The fact that other disputes are opening up in other parts of the world is not an excuse to in any way reduce our effort in resolving problems in Afghanistan," Fox said on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich.
At the same time, events in the Middle East and North Africa could serve as a warning, he said. "It may well be a wake-up call to some of the European nations who have been reducing and reducing their defence budgets way below the levels that they had agreed through their Nato commitments," he said.
"They may want to ask themselves whether they are leaving themselves with too little to deal with some of the flashpoints that may exist in the world. Without the budget and the political will to deploy you are in fantasy defence." On Friday, Nato's head criticised cuts in European defence spending, saying the turmoil in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East showed the need to invest more in security.
Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that in the past two years defence spending by Nato's European members had shrunk by a combined $45 billion - the equivalent of Germany's entire defence budget, widening the gap between expenditures by the United States and its European allies. Rasmussen said European nations needed to respond to tough economic times by pooling resources, boosting investment in development of multinational defence projects and by forging closer links with the private sector.
Nato has praised a treaty between Britain and France for closer defence co-operation and Britain has said it is willing to expand co-operation with Germany. Fox said, though, that bilateral deals were easier than multilateral ones, referring to problems that have hit the Eurofighter and A400-M military aircraft projects, which involved multinational investment.