Rice Briefing En Route Brussels, Belgium

On-The-Record Briefing En Route Brussels, Belgium

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Brussels, Belgium
January 25, 2007

SECRETARY RICE: I'll be at the conference -- the ministerial tomorrow. We thought it was an important time for NATO to meet to review our progress and the challenges in Afghanistan. I think that everyone knows that this is both NATO's greatest challenge and NATO's greatest opportunity. It is an extraordinary undertaking for NATO and I think we have to stop and pause and think sometimes that probably even ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, no one would have expected NATO to have the kind of commitment to Afghanistan that it has.

The United States has also been reviewing its policies in Afghanistan and as a part of that review the President is going to ask Congress to commit an additional $8.6 billion for train-and-equip of Afghan -- and 2 billion for reconstruction. Right.

QUESTION: Is that in a supplemental?

SECRETARY RICE: Yes, the President is requesting the funding.

QUESTION: So the total is 10.6?

SECRETARY RICE: So the total is 8.6 plus 2. Right, 10.6

QUESTION: Can you give us --

SECRETARY RICE: Dan is going to break it down for you, okay?

QUESTION: One follow-up.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.

QUESTION: Do you feel this is necessary now and how is it related to the Taliban's resurgence?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, certainly the challenges of the last several months have demonstrated that we want to and should redouble our efforts. But I take the Taliban's recent offensive as evidence that they're trying to destroy something that's been quite a success. And we expected that they might fight back. Frankly, they came back, I think, a little bit more organized than people expected. But NATO is having a lot of success against the Taliban and this is really to reinforce that success.

And particularly on the reconstruction side, the parts of the country in which the Taliban has been most aggressive are some of the most underdeveloped part in terms of reconstruction and infrastructure, and so a good bit of this goes to those efforts as well.

Okay? Thank you

QUESTION: Thank you very much.

2007/T2-7

Released on January 25, 2007

ENDS

© Scoop Media