20031776 Club
NATO takes formal command of Afghanistan's peacekeeping force in Kabul
Fifty-four years after its founding as a European defense pact, the alliance runs a mission neither in Europe nor North America.
By the summer of 2003, Germany and the Netherlands had spent nearly two years leading the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul and no longer wanted to carry that burden alone. On August 11, 2003, NATO formally assumed command of ISAF in Kabul, marking the first time in NATO's history that it took charge of a mission outside the north Atlantic area. The handover, agreed to by NATO in April, put the entire nineteen-member alliance behind a mission thousands of miles from the North Atlantic it was built to defend…
