One consequence of the Obama administration’s weeks-long review of Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy is that European allies are unclear about their role, even as they’re being asked to contribute greater resources. There’s a meeting today in Slovakia of NATO defense ministers, complete with a briefing from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that will address some of the allies’ questions, but it obviously can’t clear up all of them, and so members of the alliance are putting out their own form of public strategy deliberation.

Take Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s top civilian official. Rasmussen has backed McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy to the hilt. And he issued a statement that represents a nudge in President Obama’s ribs:

“To my mind, it is clear,” he said in a statement issued before yesterday’s opening session. “Hoping that Taliban extremists will never again host al-Qaida is not a strategy. They did it in the past. We can only assume they will do it in future.”

That’s a reaction to press accounts of Obama’s deliberations indicating that the U.S. might be prepared to accept some form of Taliban governing role. The reports are vague: after all, the Afghan government itself supports negotiation and reintegration of the Taliban, and has even reached out to Mullah Omar. But Rasmussen’s statement raises the question of how involved NATO actually is in a decision-making process that effects the entire alliance, however unevenly. If he had been looped in, Rasmussen probably wouldn’t feel the need to draw red lines for strategy in public.