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NATO should expand its role to include counter-terrorism, fighting cyber-crime, and the security of natural resources, according to a confidential document that will be endorsed at a summit next week, the Financial Times said.
The document, which the newspaper obtained prior to its being made public next week, has already been endorsed by defence ministers, ahead of a conference in Riga, Latvia beginning on Tuesday. Presidents and prime ministers at the Riga summit will also endorse it, the newspaper said.
According to the FT, however, diplomats' hopes for the conference are being scaled back because of the continuing struggle to quell a violent insurgency in Afghanistan, where more than 30,000 troops are under NATO command.
The summit, unnamed NATO officials told the newspaper, is unlikely to provide major new commitments of troops.
“Are we magically going to get big new news against the artificial deadline of the summit? I don't think so,” an unnamed senior NATO official told the FT.
The classified document obtained by the paper seeks to “provide a framework and political direction for NATO's continuing transformation … for the next 10 to 15 years.”
Over that period, it says, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are “likely to be the principal threats to the alliance”. Other challenges for NATO will include instability due to failed states, more sophisticated conventional weapons, and the disruption of the flow of natural resources.
The document also says that NATO should be ready to fight more than one major operation at a time, along with an increasing number of smaller ones.
“This requires forces that are fully deployable, sustainable and interoperable and the means to deploy them,” the document reads, according to the FT.
Officially called the “comprehensive political guidance”, it says that the alliance should put a premium on “the ability to deter, disrupt, defend and protect against terrorism, and more particularly to contribute to the protection of the alliance's populations, territory, critical infrastructure and forces”.
Other priorities for NATO should be “the ability to protect information systems of critical importance to the alliance against cyber attacks”, greater flexibility in responding to crises, the ability to carry out operations in difficult terrain, and increased protection against weapons of mass destruction.
