* NATO agrees Afghan exit timeline, new start with Russia
* Much work needed to turn visions into successful reality
By David Brunnstrom
LISBON, Nov 21 (Reuters) - In terms of choreography, NATO's Lisbon summit went to plan, with no unseemly public rifts and headline goals set, but closer inspection shows the alliance has kicked its most pressing problems into an uncertain future.
At a two-day meeting on Friday and Saturday, NATO leaders set a timeline for an end to combat operations in Afghanistan, hailed a fresh start in ties with Russia, and agreed on a programme to defend the alliance against missile attack.
They also approved a new vision statement for the coming 10 years and agreed to slim down the alliance's command structure and bureaucracy.
Leaders of the 28 NATO states managed all this with none of the fits of public pique that can mar such high profile events. Fears of a repeat of riots seen at NATO's 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg last year proved unfounded.
But the impressive list of what summit choreographers like to term "deliverables", masks the fact the hard work needed to turn plans into successful reality still has to be done, with no guarantees of such a tidy outcome.
By far NATO's worst headache is Afghanistan, where the war is widely perceived to be going badly for the United States and its allies despite the presence of 150,000 foreign troops and a nine-year effort costing billions of dollars a week.
With defence budgets under pressure from the financial crisis, public opposition to the involvement growing, casualties at record levels and little evidence of progress, NATO governments have been looking ever more keenly for the exit.
Their dilemma has been to find a way to extract themselves from what threatens to become an increasingly bloody quagmire while seeking to claim some kind of success from what analysts say could still become an embarrassing strategic defeat.
In Lisbon, they agreed on a timetable aimed at handing control of security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014 and said the NATO-led force could halt combat operations by the same date if security conditions were good enough.
But some NATO officials fear a rise in violence could make it hard to meet the target date set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the security handover, which would leave a vastly reduced number of foreign troops in a training and support role.
AFGHAN WORRIES
The Kabul government is widely seen as too corrupt, unstable and inept to survive long without foreign military support, and few analysts have much confidence that this perception can be changed even with several more years of foreign involvement and the hundreds of billions of dollars that will cost.
The Taliban, which has widened its insurgency throughout Afghanistan despite big increases in NATO troop levels, has demanded the withdrawal of foreign forces as a condition for any political settlement to the conflict.
The insurgents called the 2014 Lisbon timeline "irrational".
"Because until then, various untoward and tragic events and battles will take place as a result of this meaningless, imposed and unwinnable war. They should not postpone withdrawal of their forces even be it for one day," they said in a statement.
In Lisbon, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the former Cold War enemies had made a "historic" new start in relations strained since Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008.
They agreed to expand their cooperation global security issues, including Afghanistan, but despite the warm words and mood music the challenge will now be to see how they can turn success into fruitful cooperation in practice.
The two sides agreed to restart cooperation in missile defence suspended as a result of the Georgia war, but details as to whether this can be expanded to protect populations rather than just military forces still have to be worked out.
Allaying Russian fears about the impact of the system on its strategic deterrent could still prove tough and NATO still has to sell its vision of how the command and control system should function to a sceptical ally in Turkey, as well as Moscow.
NATO also faces a difficult effort to slim down its bloated command structure and bureaucracy and modernise its military capabilities to meet global challenges in an era of severe defence spending cuts brought on by the financial crisis.
The difficulties faced in Afghanistan have greatly cooled allies' willingness to consider similar operations in future.
And pressure on governments to protect jobs in a time of crisis is likely to obstruct efforts to encourage the collaboration needed to avoid duplication in defence projects and make best use of limited resources.
NATO leaders spared their Portuguese hosts embarrassment at Lisbon and kept Turkey on board on issues like missile defence by avoiding announcements of base closures as part of command structure reforms outlined at the summit.
But hard bargaining and some considerable public wrangling can be expected in the months leading to a decision date in June on closing four major NATO headquarters, with bases in Portugal, Italy and Turkey seen most under threat. (Editing by Peter Graff)
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