NATO-Afghan talks over a future status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) have soured to the point where allied defence ministers "may have to take some tough decisions" when they meet at the end of February, according to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Although still expressing confidence that NATO and the United States will eventually get their respective SOFAs with the Afghan government, he said time was rapidly running out. "We need to know soon whether we are staying or going. We will discuss this by our minis- ters of defence at the end of this month and I think we may have to take some tough decisions," he told reporters in Brussels on 27 January. "I won't go into details, but it is clear that we cannot finalise our own SOFA until the US' [own bilateral security agreement with Kabul] is in place. I do believe that at the end of the day we will get the necessary [legal] framework to deploy NATO troops to train and assist in 2015, but time is of the essence."
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