Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has said that the major focus of NATO allies at their ongoing summit was to assure the planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by 2014 while guaranteeing “peace and the capability” of Afghan security forces.

Passos Coelho, speaking to journalists on Sunday 20 May at the opening of the two-day summit in Chicago, also defended that the evaluation of the allies’ respective capabilities needed a “greater impulse” in order to “save resources and get a better final product for the conditions of intervention and security”.

On the sidelines of the summit, the Portuguese leader held his first meeting with new French President François Hollande, later saying the two had found “a good working basis” and a “common vision” of the need for budgetary consolidation across Europe to ensure greater competitiveness and economic growth in “the medium and long term”.

He said that Lisbon’s implementation of its EU-IMF bailout was being “fulfilled successfully” and would not need to go beyond the agreed three years.

Passos Coelho also held bilateral meetings with European Commission chief José Manuel Durão Barroso and his Icelandic and Norwegian counterparts yesterday on the sidelines of the NATO summit which ends today.

(Photograph: David Banks/EPA/Lusa)