US president Barack Obama has asked the Netherlands to make a ‘serious contribution’ to the police training mission which Nato hopes to send to Afghanistan, prime minister Mark Rutte said on Saturday.

Rutte said Obama had acknowledged the major role which the Netherlands had already played in the region. ‘So he was not asking for thousands of people,’ Rutte told reporters at the Nato summit in Lisbon.
At the summit, all 28 Nato countries apart from the Netherlands made a formal commitment to make a contribution to the mission, news agency ANP reports.

Fact finders
Earlier this month, the Netherlands greed to send fact finders to Afghanistan. The team will look at the ‘possibility and desirability’ of joining the training project and has been ordered by the foreign affairs ministry.
Rutte said the US president is not disappointed and understands the political situation in the Netherlands.
The minority VVD CDA cabinet supports a training mission but the anti-Islam PVV, which props up the government, is opposed. This means Rutte will have to look for support from other parties to get approval for a new mission.
The previous government collapsed over calls on the Netherlands to keep its troops in Afghanistan.
Transfer
According to ANP, Rutte also had a short meeting with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in which he also stressed the Netherlands wants to take part in the international training mission. Dutch troops were pulled out of the southern region of Uruzgan in August.
At the summit, the leaders of Nato’s 28 states backed a strategy to transfer leadership for the fight against the Taliban to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
For the BBC report on this, click here.