BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO defense ministers are exploring ways Wednesday of ending the alliance's aerial campaign in Libya and training Afghan security forces for a larger role in their country's war.

In a speech before the meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta urged NATO member states to cooperate more closely and pool their resources in order to make up for the shortfalls that have plagued the alliance's operations in Libya and Afghanistan.

"It would be a tragic outcome if the alliance shed the very capabilities that allowed it to successfully conduct these operations," said Panetta, who is making his first visit to Europe after taking over from Robert Gates as Pentagon chief in July.
European members and Canada provided most of the strike aircraft used in the Libya campaign. But the war exposed shortages in their capabilities in strategic transport, aerial surveillance, air refueling, and unmanned drones, most of which had to be supplied by the U.S.

With the Pentagon facing $450 billion in budget cuts over the next 10 years, allies can't assume that the U.S. will be able to continue covering their shortcomings, Panetta said in a speech to the Brussels-based organization Carnegie Europe.
But there is little appetite in Europe for more spending on boosting such capabilities when defense budgets are being slashed as part of public spending cuts and other austerity measures designed to deal with the impact of the economic crisis.
The ministerial conference in Brussels is the first in a series of preparatory meetings by allied defense and foreign ministers in the run-up to NATO's summit in May in Chicago.
Ministers have praised the operation in Libya, which enabled Moammar's Gadhafi's opponents to oust his autocratic regime. It has been cited as proof that the Cold War alliance remains relevant to international security.

"Our operation to protect civilians in Libya has been a great success," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
NATO warplanes have flown nearly 25,000 sorties, including more than 9,000 strike missions, since the strikes began in March.
The campaign also revealed deep rifts within the Western military alliance. Only eight of the 28 members participated, while the others stayed away — mostly for fear of how the new mission would affect the alliance's commitment to Afghanistan.

Before stepping down as Pentagon chief, Gates bluntly criticized NATO for what he said were shortages in military spending and political will, warning of "a dim if not dismal future" for the alliance unless European members boosted their participation.
But diplomats said Panetta was not expected to continue with such a confrontational attitude.

In Afghanistan, NATO's troops and the government's security forces are still struggling against Taliban insurgents, whom they outnumber by about 15 to 1. Some 130,000 NATO troops are currently fighting in Afghanistan; more than 2,700 NATO troops have died in the war.
High-profile Taliban attacks this year have undermined NATO's claim that it has the upper hand, and the United Nations released a report last month saying the monthly level of violence in the country was significantly higher than in 2010.

The U.S. and NATO began transferring security responsibilities this year to newly trained Afghan forces with the goal of withdrawing all their combat troops by the end of 2014.

Fogh Rasmussen said the transition remains "fully on track" and that Afghan forces are already providing lead security for one-quarter of the population.
"I expect the next stage of transition to be announced soon, and I expect it to be substantial," he said Monday. "And at the same time, our military authorities assess that the insurgency has been weakened overall."

Other issues at the two-day NATO meeting will include the situation in Kosovo, where intercommunal clashes continue nearly 12 years after an alliance bombing campaign ended Serbia's rule there, and anti-piracy patrols off Somalia, stretching into a third year after a three-month authorization period in 2008.
Officials said they want at least one of these three missions — Libya, Kosovo or Somalia — to conclude successfully, quickly and for good.

PERUGIA, Italy (AP) — One family's judicial triumph has left another stunned and wondering who exactly murdered a daughter and sister who had only just arrived in Italy for a study abroad program.

Meredith Kercher's brutal stabbing death on Nov. 1, 2007 left her family in shock and — four years later — still searching for answers after the convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were overturned, allowing the two to walk free.

The Kerchers have also lamented the fact that the 21-year-old victim had fallen into oblivion, with Knox the center of worldwide media attention.
Lyle Kercher, the victim's brother, told reporters on Tuesday that the family is still trying to understand how a decision that "was so certain two years ago has been so emphatically overturned." He was in the Italian courtroom with his mother Arline and sister Stephanie on Monday night when the appeals verdict was read out.
A third man has been convicted in the brutal slaying. However, the court at his trial concluded he did not act alone. Rudy Hermann Guede's appeal upheld the guilty verdict, but cut his sentence from 30 years to 16.

"If the two released yesterday were not the guilty parties, we are obviously left to wonder who is the other guilty person or people? We are left back at square one," Lyle Kercher said.
The Kercher family has up to now rejected the defense notion that Guede acted alone. No other suspects have ever been named.
British tabloids summed up the feelings of the two families neatly: "Foxy's free. Meredith family agony as Amanda cleared," the Daily Mirror read.
"Foxy" is the nickname that the British tabloids have given to Knox.

The Daily Mail pushed it even further: "Weeping Foxy is freed to make a fortune" — alleging that Knox would be paid by U.S. media to tell her life story.
The prosecutions case was blown apart by a DNA review that threw out key evidence used to convict Knox and Sollecito in 2009.
Prosecutors have said they will appeal the decision to Italy's highest criminal court after receiving the reasoning behind the acquittals, due within 90 days.

Before the verdict, the Kerchers expressed hope the decision would be made based on the facts, and not on media hype that has surrounded the case. The three family members appeared dazed when the verdict was read out in court. Older sister Stephanie Kercher shed a tear and her mother Arline looked straight ahead.
"It was a bit of a shock," Stephanie Kercher said Tuesday. "It's very upsetting ... We still have no answers."

Meredith's mother was still absorbing the reversal.
"You think you have come to a decision and obviously it has been overturned, I think it is early days really," she said.
Throughout the four-year ordeal, the Kerchers have maintained a low profile. They have granted few media interviews, rarely attended trial sessions and quietly remembered Meredith on the Nov. 1 anniversary of her death and on her Dec. 28 birthday.

The Kercher's Italian lawyer, Francesco Maresca, said the contrast with the Knox's active campaign to free their daughter may have been a factor in the acquittal.
"Definitely we had a David and Goliath situation," Maresca said. "In the sense that there was this enormous disproportion because the Kerchers never turned to the media."

Amanda Knox is the victim of prosecutors who have decided she is guilty "regardless of logic and reason," her attorney said Friday during statements in the appeal of her 2009 murder conviction.
Knox and former boyfriend, Rafaello Sollecito, are appealing their 2009 convictions for the death of Knox's former roommate, Meredith Kercher, whose body was found half-naked with her throat slashed on November 2, 2007.
Prosecutors said in their statements Friday that evidence against the pair is clear, from bloody footprints with particular characteristics to the spot where Knox's DNA was found on a kitchen knife believed by investigators to be the murder weapon.
"They are young, but so was Meredith. They've murdered. And they have killed for nothing. And for this they must be condemned to the maximum sentence," Manuela Comodi said.
But Knox's attorney, Maria Del Grosso, said her client is the victim of bad casting in a script in which prosecutors have decided she is guilty, "regardless of the logic and reason."
For the convictions to stand, Del Grosso argued, prosecutors need, "proofs, proofs, proofs, and in this case there is only the proof that they are strangers to this crime."
No ruling is expected until Monday, when Knox and Sollecito are expected to give final statements, according to the judge.
Knox's father, Curt Knox, said he is hopeful his daughter will be able to return home soon.
"It has been a very hard journey and hopefully we're near the end of it," he said.
Prosecutors claim Knox slashed Kercher's throat as Sollecito and a third defendant, Rudy Guede, held her down.
Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, while Sollecito got 25. Guede was convicted in a separate trial and is serving 16 years.
Knox and Sollecito's defense teams have suggested Guede could have been the sole killer and argue the police investigation was shoddy and incomplete.
Del Grosso said there was no evidence of a cover-up attempt, as prosecutors claim, and accused prosecutors of using a double standard when it comes to evidence in the case.
Sollecito's lawyer, Donatella Donati, told the court that her team suffered repeated roadblocks each time they asked for further reviews of the evidence and said it was clear that some of the evidence had been contaminated.
On Thursday, defense attorneys argued Knox had been denied a translator and was discouraged from getting a lawyer when she was arrested, and portrayed her as a young girl, inexperienced with world travel and unable to speak Italian.
Knox's attorneys also argued for the exclusion of some DNA evidence in the case, including evidence of blood that prosecutors said belonged to both women found in a bathroom they shared and evidence from the knife, which Knox attorney Carlo Dalla Vedova on Thursday called a "concentration of nothingness, a fantasy."
Friday morning, prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said Knox and Sollecito tried to blame the killing on Guede because Guede is black.
Comodi showed jurors a photograph of a bloody footprint found in the bathroom of the home were Kercher was killed. There was no way the footprint was Guede's as defense attorneys had contended, Comodi argued. She said experts have concluded that the footprint was not Guede's and probably was Sollecito's.
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She also told the court that just because the footprint was found "not usable" for positive identification, it doesn't mean that they are "non usable'" when you can do a process of elimination.
Comodi also used her microphone to demonstrate how the location where Knox's DNA was found on the presumed murder weapon -- at the junction between the blade and the handle -- suggests a stabbing motion, rather than a cutting motion.
Also Friday, Carlo Pacelli, the attorney for Patrick Lumumba -- who was initially accused in the case -- called Knox a "mixed concentration of sex, drugs and alcohol" who, despite the portrait painted by defense attorneys, was a "diabolical defamer."
Lumumba, the former owner of a bar where Knox worked, sued Knox for libel. In the Italian court system, criminal and civil portions of a case are heard in the same proceeding.