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Obama campaigns for European support in Afghan terror fight

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-04 15:52

STRASBOURG – Courting Europe with an American-style campaign, President Barack Obama on Friday talked up his plans - popular here - to eliminate nuclear weapons, close the Guantanamo Bay prison and tackle global warming.

In return, he's hoping for European popular support in the anti-terror fight in Afghanistan.

US President Barack Obama delivers his speech at the Rhenus sports arena in Strasbourg, April 3, 2009. Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons on Friday after arriving in France for a NATO summit, where he won French endorsement of his new Afghanistan strategy. [Agencies]

Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections.

But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Obama and his aides sought ahead of time to frame that outcome in the best possible light.

Related readings:  Obama pledges new US relations with Europe  Obama brings Afghan plan to NATO allies  Obama joins world leaders tackling economic crisis

"It's not just a matter of more resources, it's a matter of more effectively using the resources we have," Obama said.

That comment came in the midst of a remarkable event he created at a basketball arena in Strasbourg, a campaign-style "town hall" in which he fielded questions from young French and German men and women.

Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said securing new commitments from allies would neither begin nor end with the NATO meetings, noting that nations need more time to digest Obama's week-old revamped Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. "The NATO summit is not a pledging conference," she told reporters.

Obama's national security adviser, retired Gen. James Jones, said Obama's new approach to Afghanistan, which calls for increasing US troops by 21,000, narrowing the mission on uprooting terrorist safe havens and broadening the focus to include Pakistan, would inspire fresh involvement. "I think there's a new mood," Jones said.

Just hours before the summit was to start over dinner in the German town of Baden-Baden, just over the border from here, Obama continued his lobbying.

He wowed a 4,000-strong crowd of French and German citizens at the arena in Strasbourg. He also laid the flattery on thick with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and thicker with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sarkozy said Obama would visit France again in June, to mark the anniversary of the 1944 D-Day invasion by allied forces at Normandy.

At the town hall, Obama explicitly asked Europe to step up to a greater extent in Afghanistan, saying Europeans should recognize that the threat from extremists there and in neighboring Pakistan endangers them as much - even more, he said - as it does Americans.

"It is important for Europe to understand that even though I'm now president and George Bush is no longer president, al-Qaida is still a threat, and that we cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK," he said. "This is a joint problem. And it requires a joint effort."

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