The Chiefs of Defence Staff of the 28 NATO member countries met in Lisbon on Friday (September 18) to recap the progress of ongoing operations including Afghanistan, and to discuss future strategies.
The meeting began with a wreath-laying ceremony in a Lisbon monastery.
Probably the biggest challenge facing the NATO alliance at the moment is the war on terror in Afghanistan, where a Taliban attack earlier this week killed six Italian soldiers.
At the welcome ceremony, the chairman ... Read more

The Chiefs of Defence Staff of the 28 NATO member countries met in Lisbon on Friday (September 18) to recap the progress of ongoing operations including Afghanistan, and to discuss future strategies.
The meeting began with a wreath-laying ceremony in a Lisbon monastery.
Probably the biggest challenge facing the NATO alliance at the moment is the war on terror in Afghanistan, where a Taliban attack earlier this week killed six Italian soldiers.
At the welcome ceremony, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Italian Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, outlined the agenda for the two-day summit.
"We are going to discuss important issues as you can imagine but two of them stand in particular the present and the future. The present is our operation in Afghanistan and also the other operation that we are running on the coast of Africa, anti-piracy, and the future is the strategic concept, so we will set the reflection phase on what is the strategic concept should tell how should we chart the future of NATO," Admiral Di Paola said.
NATO has ushered in a new era of cooperation with the United States and Russia, calling for joint work on missile defence systems after Washington scrapped a planned anti-missile system.
However, NATO and Russia remain at loggerheads over the future of the zone between the alliance's current eastern border and Russia's western and southern borders. NATO leaders declared at a summit last year that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become members of the alliance. Close