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KABUL (SW): The NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would continue its train, assist, and advise mission in Afghanistan, and would not return back to a combat operation.<\/p>\n
The Secretary General recalled 13,000 NATO troops continue to train Afghan forces. “We will assess our level of support and the future of the mission. Training local forces is one of the best weapons in the fight against terrorism”, he said.<\/p>\n
In his doorstep remarks ahead of the meeting of NATO Heads of State and Government in Brussels, he said NATO’s aim is to train the Afghan forces to enable them to step up their efforts in stabilising their own country, countering the Taliban, but also fighting different terrorist groups in Afghanistan, including ISIS. “And again we have seen that Afghan forces, the special operations forces have been very effective in targeting and attacking ISIS and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan. NATO troops are not doing that, but we help and we train and advise Afghans in their fight against ISIS”, he said.<\/p>\n
Jens Stoltenberg added NATO joining the Coalition to Defeat ISIS is a strong political message of unity in the fight against terrorism. “It additionally provides a better platform for coordinating the efforts of NATO and other Coalition members in the fight against ISIS”, he said, adding NATO is also stepping up practical support by more AWACS support, the surveillance planes improving the air picture for Coalition planes, with more flying hours, with more information sharing and also with air-to-air refuelling.<\/p>\n
Main items on today’s summit agenda include stepping up NATO’s role in the fight against terrorism and fairer burden sharing in the Alliance. Responding to a question, he said t<\/strong>here are many challenges in Afghanistan and no one said that the situation in Afghanistan was going to be easy when NATO ended its combat operation back at the end of 2014. “But, we have achieved a lot. We have been able to train and build Afghan forces which are now able to take responsibility for security in their own countries themselves. That’s a great and important achievement. And the Afghans show professionalism and bravery in the way that they handle the security situation in Afghanistan”, he said.<\/p>\n ENDS<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KABUL (SW): The NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would continue its train, assist, and advise mission in Afghanistan, and would not return back to a combat operation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[93],"class_list":["post-84878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}