The spokesman's perspective:

Continuing our new series of video commentary, NATO Spokesman James Appathurai gives his personal perspective on recent articles discussing NATO. He invites you to write in with your own comments and opinions, which could be featured in the next installment.

E-mail comments to: press@hq.nato.int

Officials from Georgia are embarking on a major diplomatic offensive in Europe, fearing that Russia will do everything possible to destabilize the country before NATO membership talks can begin in December.

David Bakradze, the Georgian foreign minister, who met Friday with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said his country was becoming caught in a bitter struggle between the West and Russia as it tried to anchor its political and security institutions solidly in Euro-Atlantic organizations and rid itself of Russian influence.

A massive exercise under way in the far northwest of Scotland is putting lambs, seabirds and possibly whales at risk. Around 70 aircraft and 36 warships are Durness, as part of a two-week exercise codenamed Joint Warrior involving 17 Nato countries, including the UK, US, Canada and France.

However, the area is surrounded by farms, is vital to Scotland's collapsing seabird populations and is frequented by whales and dolphins. Cape Wrath's northern sea cliffs have been designated a special protection area for birds under European law.

Defense ministers of the Visegrad Four (V4) countries of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary supported Ukraine's efforts to join euro-Atlantic structures, Czech Defense Minister Vlasta Parkanova said after their meeting here on Friday.

The ministers talked about the military operation of EU and NATO, said Parkanova, who chaired the V4 meeting said.

Afghanistan remains one of the most important operations of NATO and this was reflected in the NATO summit in Bucharest early this month wherein its member nations pledged more support for this war-torn country, top US officials have said.

Testifying before a Congressional Committee this week Daniel Fried, Acting under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and Daniel Fata, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy listed out the accomplishments at the NATO summit from the perspective of Afghanistan.

The attack by Taliban militants on President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, yesterday was designed to undermine the country's democratic progress, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.

“The Taliban has demonstrated once again that they will use the most extreme violence to oppose Afghanistan's freedom,'' de Hoop Scheffer said after Karzai escaped unharmed when the military ceremony he was attending was strafed by bullets.

Britain's government says it will respond shortly to a NATO request for British soldiers to help with the U.N. peacekeeping effort in Kosovo.

Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth says Britain has contingency plans to allow troops to be sent to Kosovo despite the large number of soldiers already fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ainsworth made the comments to Parliament on Monday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he will decide by late 2008 or early 2009 whether France will fully rejoin the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is one of the more important issues left unresolved at the recently concluded Bucharest Summit, where Sarkozy proclaimed: “I reaffirm here France’s determination to pursue the process of renovating its relations with NATO.”

NATO forces in Afghanistan are "critically" under-resourced, the foreign ministry said in a confidential document distributed to Western allies, the Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.

The three-page document, which the Telegraph said it had obtained, warns that "critical military gaps remain to be filled" with regard to the alliance's mission there.

The Nato mission in Afghanistan is "critically" short of key troops and equipment, Gordon Brown has told allies.

The Daily Telegraph has obtained a confidential Foreign and Commonwealth Office paper which admits to a catalogue of problems and weaknesses in Western attempts to stabilise the country.