NATO chief urges end to "beauty contest" with EU

BRUSSELS, Nov 6 (Reuters) NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer warned today against rivalry between the U S-dominated alliance and the European Union on security issues, saying they should not engage in a ''beauty contest''.

De Hoop Scheffer said they increasingly competed with each other to win pledges of troops and equipment from stretched national armies, and bemoaned the lack of coordination between the two in operations from Afghanistan to Darfur.

''We need to break the deadlock in the relationship between NATO and the EU,'' de Hoop Scheffer told a conference staged by the Security and Defence Agenda think-tank in Brussels.

''NATO and the European Union are in the business of security and should not be engaged in a beauty contest,'' he said.

De Hoop Scheffer cited an embarrassing weeks-long turf war last year over who should coordinate international air transport to the African Union in Sudan's Darfur region. Washington wanted NATO to manage the entire effort but France insisted its planes were part of a separate EU support package.

He said the two also needed to better coordinate their activities in Afghanistan, where NATO's 31,000 troops are battling a fierce Taliban insurgency, proposing that the EU could assist by stepping up training of the Afghan police force.

Both NATO and the EU are engaged in an unprecedented number of security missions, with the EU running 11 operations from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Aceh in Indonesia, and NATO fielding over 50,000 troops from Afghanistan to the Balkans.

Nineteen countries are members of both organisations but there is a split between those led by the United States who see NATO as the fundamental security alliance and others, notably France, who want to build a stronger security role for the EU.

Formal ties between the EU and NATO have been largely paralysed by a dispute between NATO member Turkey and non-NATO EU states Cyprus and Malta, which Ankara insists should not have access to alliance planning.

De Hoop Scheffer said NATO-EU relations would not feature on the agenda of an alliance summit in Riga later this month, and acknowledged the situation was unlikely to improve in the near term.

He proposed an interim solution in which defence ministers of both organisations could meet on an ad hoc basis to explore how to improve cooperation on the ground.

REUTERS SP HT1742