to have "operational caveats" removed, some countries, notably France and Germany, were still not heeding their requests. Besides the above discussion about contributions and caveats, the summit was noticed to paint an optimistic picture of the war in Afghanistan and Afghanistan's future. For instance, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said that "real progress" had been made in Afghanistan and that this was the main highlight of the summit. He strongly disagreed with visions of "doom and gloom," and added that five years after the defeat of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan had become a democratic society that is "no longer a threat to the world." He also believed that the defeat of the insurgency was only a matter of time, stating that the war in Afghanistan "is winnable, it is being won, but it is not yet won because, of course, we have many challenges in Afghanistan." In his opinion, these challenges included besides military engagement mainly reconstruction and development work. Role of NATO The second, more fundamental rift, concerned a discussion about whether NATO should form close relationships with countries far beyond NATO's borders, in particular Australia, Japan and South Korea. The United States and some other NATO members pressed for a closer relationship with these countries. R. Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary for Political Affairs explained the US proposal: "We seek a partnership with them so that we can train more intensively (...) and grow closer to them because we are deployed with them. Australia, South Korea and Japan are in Afghanistan. They have all been in Iraq (...) [and] in the Balkans." It was however not clear how far this plan would have gone in practice, but the US insisted they were not seeking to turn NATO into a global alliance: membership would not be offered to the prospective new partners. The idea of a "global" NATO however was strongly opposed by France, which considers NATO a regional defense alliance that should not spread its wings too far over the globe. The French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie summarized the position of France as follows: "The development of a global partnership could... dilute the natural solidarity between Europeans and North Americans in a fuzzy entity [and it would] send a bad political message, that of a campaign launched by the West against those who don't share their ideas. What a pretext we would offer to those who promote the