U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Brussels early Friday ahead of meetings with NATO ministers where she will seek to persuade European allies to pledge troops to strengthen the U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan. Clinton and other U.S. officials have been working the phones for days, trying to secure at least 5,000 soldiers from Europe and elsewhere to add to the U.S. surge of about 30,000. "We are encouraged that we"re going to, beginning tomorrow but not ending tomorrow, have a number of public announcements about additional troop commitments, additional civilian assistance and development aid, as well," Clinton told reporters minutes before her plane took off from Washington on Thursday. Clinton was also planning to discuss how to coordinate the unwieldy civilian aid effort in the war-torn country, which involves the United Nations, dozens of countries and hundreds of nongovernmental organizations. "We have a unified military command but we have an "un-unified" international effort" on civilian aid, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Clinton said her goal was a "coordinating mechanism" for civilian assistance.
