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NATO defence ministers sought to calm Islamic anger over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons at a groundbreaking meeting with counterparts from Israel and six Arab nations designed to boost counterterror cooperation.
"What is important here is the word respect, respect for each others values," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said recently. "Violence cannot be the answer."
The NATO ministers also stressed the need to modernise the alliance so it can confront new threats - highlighted this week by attacks on its peacekeepers in Afghanistan by Muslim protesters enraged by the publication of the caricatures in European newspapers.
Allies agreed to find the troops needed so the elite NATO Response Force could meet an October deadline for full readiness as the spearhead of the military makeover.
But they failed to overcome differences over how to pay for NATO's increasingly diverse and far-flung operations.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed allies to increase defence spending so they could develop forces able to confront new threats from terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and failed states.
"We need to be willing to make the investments," Rumsfeld told a news conference.
He said NATO had to shift from "the Cold War defense posture ... to one that is more agile, certainly more expeditionary and better able to respond to the defuse global terrorist network."
The meeting with NATO's "Mediterranean partners" -- Israel, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Mauritania -- was called before the cartoon controversy broke to focus on counter-terrorism cooperation in North Africa and the Middle East.
NATO backed a statement issued this week by the Islamic nations, the European Union and the U.N. urging calm.
"De-escalation is the message we have today," German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said. "We need to make clear how important it is to have a dialogue between cultures."
The United States and other NATO nations have been seeking to build ties with friendly nations in North Africa and the Middle East as useful partners in fighting terrorism.
However, de Hoop Scheffer made clear that tentative efforts to build ties with the Palestinians had been ended by Hamas' election victory.
"Contacts with Hamas are out of the question," he told a news conference.
The NATO chief said Algeria, Morocco and Israel "had shown a keen interest" in joining NATO's naval patrols to deter terrorist traffic in the Mediterranean.
Russia also plans to join that mission. Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov came to Sicily accompanied by a cruiser so Russian sailors could train with their NATO counterparts in preparation for their planned participation later this year in joint anti-terrorist patrols in the Mediterranean Sea.
Although Ivanov stressed increased military and intelligence cooperation with the western alliances, differences were clear over Russia's perceived strong-arm tactics against former Soviet neighbours Georgia and Ukraine and over arms sales to unfriendly nations.
"The U.S. prefers that countries not sell arms to countries that are on the terrorist list; we prefer that sales not be made to countries that are being notably unhelpful in Iraq," Rumsfeld said in an apparent reference to Syria and Iran.
NATO ministers expressed determination to expand the alliance's security mission in Afghanistan despite the violent protests over the cartoons.
NATO is preparing to expand its Afghan mission from 9,000 to 16,000 troops and move into the more dangerous southern region currently patrolled by U.S. forces.
Dutch Defence Minister Henk Kamp said he expected NATO to be able to take the security operation for the whole of Afghanistan by the end of this year, a move that would allow the separate U.S. force there to concentrate on the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban holdouts.
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