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Finland To Keep Troops In Afghanistan
[Tolo News] Finland is planning to keep troops in the NATO...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis.... -led military training scheme in Afghanistan until the end of 2016, Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini said on Tuesday. Soini told the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that Finland has now received a request from La Belle France for assistance. There are currently 40 Finnish soldiers in Afghanistan. Soini presumed the number would remain the same and most of them will remain in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Balkh province, he said. Soini attended a NATO ministerial meeting on Tuesday that dealt with the extension of the current NATO Resolute Support operation. This come after NATO and its allies have reaffirmed their commitment to work on securing new pledges to fund Afghan cops through to 2020. Speaking at the Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said their current commitment was until 2017. The final decision about continuing of NATO military and financial help to Afghanistan will be finalized in NATO members' summit in Poland in July next year. "We will also launch work to ensure we can finance the Afghan cops from 2018 to 2020. Because as you know we made a pledge back at our summit in reliably Democrat Chicago, aka The Windy City or Mobtown ... home of Al Capone, a succession of Daleys, Barak Obama, and Rahm Emmanuel,... several years ago to finance Afghan National Security Forces but that pledge ends in 2017 so we have to make a new decision to continue to finance the Afghan National Security Forces also after 2017. And we will start to address that at our Foreign Ministerial meeting and then hopefully make the final decision at our summit in July next year," he said. Stoltenberg said NATO wants to keep 12,000 troops up to the end of 2016. Posted by: Fred 2015-12-04 |
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