Turning a typical yes-we-love-you-but-lip-service-is-all-you-get pirouette, Germany and other European partners have successfully, well, lip serviced President Obama during this weekend’s NATO summit with a passionate endorsement Bussi (kiss) for his new Afghan strategy while handing him a great big nichts dahinter (nothing behind it) welcome bouquet.

To underscore their sincerity, or lack of it, our stalwart partners have agreed to send, now get this, a jaw-dropping contingent of 3,000 troops to protect elections there next August. Not only that, a few new military training teams will also be sent to strengthen Afghanistan’s, uh, already amazingly strong army. And just to put the icing on the top of the injury, I mean cake, a handful of European civilian experts will be flown in to “consolidate the government” down there, whatever that means.

These are promising promises which promise to bring even more promise to President Obama’s promising start in jolly old Europe – oops, I meant in jolly Europe, of course.

“At a closing news conference, Obama portrayed the outcome as a success for his maiden encounter with NATO summitry, suggesting that trainers and civilians can be just as valuable as fighters.”

Or lame, if you prefer. What some are praising as an impressive and welcomed response by Germany, others are clearly less than impressed. Germany will be sending litterally, uh, hundreds of new troops to the northern reaches of Afghanistan in the coming months while US forces in that country will be beefed up another 17,000.

Wasn’t everything supposed to be better after Obama? “The message (from Washington) is that it is a new administration and is prepared to make additional commitments to Afghanistan. But there clearly will be expectations that the allies must do more as well,” US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters the other day. He was basically asking for a few of NATO’s so-called Rapid Response Force (NRF) troops, which have never been used, of course.

And this is Germany’s response to the new message coming out of Washington? Like other European countries who have announced to send additional troops to Afghanistan, Germany will send hundreds, not thousands. And none of them are destined for combat with the Taliban, either.

And to top it off, Germany insists that the NRF should not be used for Afghan duty at all. “The NRF should not be used as a reserve,” German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said. “The NRF has fundamentally different tasks.” Yeah, like being kept on reserve in Europe, I guess, forever.

“US officials have long been frustrated by European reluctance to make new long-term troop commitments to the Afghan mission and Gates said it was unlikely that large increases would be forthcoming anytime soon.“