News Analysis: New NATO chief has mountains to climb

by Paul Ames

BRUSSELS, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The new top man at NATO is a politician renowned for working and playing hard. To relax, Anders Fogh Rasmussen likes nothing better than to cycle up some of the toughest peaks in the French Alps.

New NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen addresses his first press conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on Aug. 3, 2009. Rasmussen began his first day work on Monday. Rasmussen's tenure officially started on Aug. 1.(Xinhua/Wu Wei)

In his first day of the office, the secretary general set himself some new mountains to climb.

By time his mandate ends fours years from now, he wants Afghan forces to have assumed "lead responsibility" for security in most of the country. They will have to take over from the 90,000 international troops who have just suffered their bloodiest month in eight years of trying to pacify the country in the face of ferocious Taliban opposition.

Rasmussen insisted that target did not mean that NATO troops would be making a "run for the exit" that would abandon the Afghans to their fate.

"We will support the Afghan people for as long as it takes," the former Danish prime minister insisted in his debut press conference at NATO headquarters.

Rasmussen said his second priority would be building a "true strategic relationship" with Russia whose relations with NATO have yet to recover from the Georgian war a year ago.

He also wants to improve the security situation in Kosovo to the point where NATO can terminate or at least significantly scale down its mission and develop closer ties with Arab nations on NATO's southern flank, a task complicated by his role in the furor that erupted in the Muslim world following the publication of caricatures of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005.