Meeting with Frank Boland
Thursday, September 25
The Director of Force Planning, NATO Defence Policy and the Planning Directorate, Frank Boland, is paying an official visit to Georgia. Minister of Defence Irakli Alasania hosted the NATO official. At the meeting held in the Ministry of Defence the implementation plan of the substantial package granted to Georgia at the NATO Summit was discussed. The sides also evaluated fulfillment of the commitments by Georgia under the Planning and Review Process (PARP) and the Annual National Program (ANP).
“This visit had two main purposes - one was to complete the work on the planning and review process assessment with Georgia which we do every two years and looking at the implementation of partnership goals which we agreed to last year. That’s gone very smoothly and I think we are very happy with the outcome. The other major purpose was to discuss the implementation plan for the substantial package of cooperation that was agreed upon at the Wales Summit a few weeks ago. We spent the afternoon going through this in its final form and I have just spoken with the minister about this. We’ve been working with the staff here in Tbilisi on continuing bases on this over the past three months. I think we’ve put together between this something which is very ambitious but realistic and likely to be accepted in the major part by Allies when it’s discussed next month. That will cover the full range of issues which was set out in the summit declaration in relation to the substantive package to Georgia. I’m looking forward to taking that work forward and to see further improvements in interoperability and cooperation between Georgian and rest of the allies,” declared Frank Boland.
