The US is to go ahead with stationing Patriot missiles in Poland, irrespective of the anti-missile project in the country, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said after meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, Wednesday.

“I was glad to hear from the Secretary of State that the US will implement the declaration signed parallel to the antimissile shield agreement, which concerns at first the temporary and then permanent stationing the Patriot rockets in Poland,” said Sikorski after the meeting.  

The statement coincides with remarks made by Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates after the informal meeting of NATO defence ministers in Krakow last week. Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government had demanded the Patriots as part of the anti-missile deal, signed in August in Warsaw by Sikorski and the then secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.   

Asked if he thought the anti-missile shield would, in fact, go ahead in Poland and the Czech Republic, Minister Sikorksi said: “I really don’t think they have decided yet. They have other trillion dollar priorities,” referring to the finance crisis, which President Barack Obama has marked out as the number one task of his administration.

Sikorski and Clinton also discussed issues of European energy security, relations with Russia, the economic crisis in Ukraine and the war in Afghanistan, where Poland has its troops operating within the framework of NATO-led operation.

Awareness of the situation in the Afghan region has been heightened in Poland since the beheading of Piotr Stanczak by the Taliban in the north west region of Pakistan on February 7.

Poland increased its troop deployment in Afghanistan last year – one of the few countries to do so - after NATO appealed for more help. But Sikorski, a speech to NATO’s Council of Ministers at a conference which marks the 60 years since the founding of the organization, appealed for a more realistic attitude to what is possible to achieve in the region.

I believe we should lower our expectations in Afghanistan and increase our resources. The gap between our ambitions and resources has been too broad recently," he said.

Minister Sikorski also lavished praise on the new Obama administration with a remark that could be construed as a criticism on the previous Bush government. “[Obama] has restored America's capacity to be the leader of the democratic world. You can only be the leader if others are willing to follow. And he has restored that function,” Sikorski told the council. (pg/jm)