US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left Sunday for a five-day European trip which will take in a key international conference on the future of Afghanistan. Clinton's trip starts in the German city of Bonn where she will lead the US delegation to Monday's conference, which aims to chart a course for Afghanistan after Nato's withdrawal at the end of 2014.
The State Department said in a statement that the conference, the first of its kind to be chaired solely by the Afghan government, "will be an opportunity to review progress achieved since 2001 and highlight the strong international support for Afghanistan through transition and beyond."
Clinton then travels on December 6 to Vilnius, Lithuania, where she will participate in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) ministerial meeting.
There she will also meet with Lithuanian officials and with Belarussian and a wide range of other civil society representatives from across the OSCE region.
The State Department said Clinton then will travel to Geneva to deliver remarks to mark International Human Rights Day, which falls later that week.
On December 7, Clinton will speak in Geneva at an event commemorating the 60th and 50th anniversaries of the Refugee and Statelessness conventions.