ms. west, you talked about how foreign countries have not perceived how we ratified the convention, and i wonder if what you heard from business leaders around the world is further concerns about u.s. leadership on the issue of disabilities and the extent to which you think that might continue to be a road if we are not able to pass the treaty in this session of congress or of the senate. well, we see the convention as the means for us to really have a very first time way of understanding market requirements whether it s developed country or a developing country, and that by not finding the crpd, we will be in cases, excluded from some of these discussions which could lead to solutions, and for business community, it s all about being able to understand the customers requirement whether it s by country or industry, so we think it is a very important that we be at the table and be able to glean from these discussions about different industry whether it s transportation or b
far away as morocco. there are 200 more balkan troops serving in kosovo. we had thirdly an operation in the gulf of adden to support operation ocean shield which links to not only the european union but countries like china and indonesia and russia. in order to provide for security at sea, we had an air policing operation in the baltics as well as over iceland, and iceland in the future will see the participation of non-nato members, finland and sweden, and of course we had our operations in afghanistan and libya. let me spend two minutes on those operations and the lessons we learned for nato. afghanistan is a unique, truly unique operation. it involves 50 nations at the height, deployed 150,000 troops. a third of which came from european nato members. and in 2009, cartwright will remember those discussions, we found an afghanistan that was frankly a mess. it was a place where our mission was failing. and we had a strategy that was unfocused and means that were insufficient
better job in explaining why it is important that nations who would like to be taken seriously in the world require military capabilities to be partners in the larger endeavors that confront us. but let s be clear. it s not clear that in this country there is the kind of support we may need for defense spending at large, and it is definitely clear there is no support or no knowledge for nato. much of our parliamently our congre congressmen and senators don t know much about nato. most would be surprised that nato continues not only to run the afghan mission but have between a third and a half of the troops there from european countries. so we have done not a particularly good job of explaining the importance of nato to our own security, to our own to what it is that europe and nato contribute to what we do day in and day out. so before we start lecturing our european friends about how important it is that they go out and tell their parliamentarians how central nato is and
frankly a mess. it was a place where our mission was failing. and we had a strategy that was unfocused and means that were insufficient and we had a probability of success that was waning. that was the situation as we found it in 2009. we adopted a new strategy. when i say we, not only we the united states but we the alliance and its many partners adopted a new strategy that matched and narrowed the mission. up to this point the mission was to make afghanistan the next jeffersonian democracy, to make sure women would have the same rights as men, not only there but the same rights as women have in the nordic countries. it was a large and frankly unattainable mission. what we did is we made the focus of the mission real, which is to make sure that afghanistan would never again be a safe haven for terrorists. that is why we were there in the first place and ultimately had to be the reason why we were there in the last place. we also adapted our means to that mission. the means w