NATO offers Delhi strategic cooperation, missile defence technologies

Brussels: The US-led NATO alliance has offered to cooperate and share technology in the field of missile defence with India citing missile attacks from rogue states as a common threat. NATO officials have said though the nature of threats to Europe and India could be different, the ability to deal with it could be the same.

A group of visiting media personnel were briefed by senior NATO officials who chose to remain unnamed.

''You have a missile threat that confronts you. We have a missile threat that confronts us. It's a different one, but our ability to defend against it could be the same. We have cooperation on those kind of issues,'' said a top NATO official.

The official also suggested that NATO's security dialogue with India could perhaps be upgraded to the same level as that of the existing bilateral dialogue between the United States and India.

''Democracies face challenges that are common. We need to work together and resolve. We need to cooperate, because individually we cannot deal with such threats. It is better to deal with such issues commonly than deal with them individually,'' he said.

For much of the Cold War period India was identified with the Soviet-bloc, though it maintained an independent stance as part the Non-aligned Movement (NAM). For the same period, its hostile neighbour, Pakistan, remained an official ally of the NATO bloc in the region.