By Paul Taylor and Mark John
Reuters, 28 November 2006
RIGA (Reuters) - NATO leaders reported progress on Tuesday in freeing up more troops to fight Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, signaling that some nations had agreed to drop limits on their forces just before an alliance summit.
President Bush appealed to allies to provide more soldiers with fewer national restrictions for the most dangerous ground mission in NATO's 57-year history.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has not set foot in the Baltic states since they won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, threatened to steal the show with a plan to drop in to Riga on Wednesday after the summit to celebrate French
President Jacques Chirac's 74th birthday, officials said.
NATO's top military commander said he had received word that some nations whom he would not name were willing to allow their units in Afghanistan to be used more flexibly in moves equivalent to fielding an extra 2,000 troops.
The most urgent needs are in southern Afghanistan, the main battleground with resurgent Taliban fighters, where Canadian, British and Dutch soldiers have suffered heavy casualties.
"To succeed in Afghanistan, NATO allies must provide the forces NATO military commanders require," Bush said.
"Member nations must accept difficult assignments if we expect to be successful," he said, taking aim at so-called national caveats restricting where, when and how troops operate.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said it was unacceptable that allied forces in south Afghanistan were 20 percent below the required strength.
"Afghanistan is mission possible," he said, urging allies to deliver the resources to complete the job and pointing to progress in Afghan public health, education and economic growth.
A NATO spokesman said the secretary-general would ask all leaders to confirm they would come to the aid of any ally in "emergency situations" when NATO soldiers' lives were at risk -- a time-honored NATO principle.
EXIT STRATEGY
A suicide bomber killed two Canadian soldiers on Monday in the latest attack on an alliance convoy in southern Afghanistan, prompting Canada's foreign minister to warn public support could turn against the mission if allies did not help.
Asked what progress NATO was making in overcoming caveats, Supreme Allied Commander General James Jones told a news conference: "We have about 10 to 15 percent positive trend. That translates to about 2,000 more troops."
Soldiers would be freed up elsewhere in the 32,000-strong peacekeeping force to be deployed when needed, Jones indicated.
Asked if the nations involved were France, Spain and Italy, he said in French: "On verra (We shall see)."
Speaking before leaving for Riga, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Germany's N24 television she would do everything in her power to help ensure Afghanistan is a success for NATO.
"In emergencies we can help out in the south. But our place is in the north, where 40 percent of Afghanistan's population live. And it would be wrong to neglect the north now," she said.
De Hoop Scheffer gave a glimpse of NATO's exit strategy in an apparent effort to reassure nervous Europeans they do not face an open-ended commitment in a country where guerrilla warfare defeated the Soviet army in the 1980s.
"I would hope that by 2008, we will have made considerable progress -- with ... effective and trusted Afghan security forces gradually taking control," he said. But he said any talk of withdrawals at present in Afghanistan was premature.
Bush, weakened by election reverses at home, rejected talk that
Iraq has plunged into civil war and vowed not to withdraw his troops until the completion of their mission. NATO was nearly torn apart in 2003 when France and Germany led opposition to Washington's drive to overthrow
Saddam Hussein.
He also restated his belief that democracy would triumph in the Middle East despite recent setbacks and reaffirmed his support for further enlargement into the former Soviet Union, backing Ukraine and Georgia as future members.
Russia, which objects to those plans, was not invited to the Riga summit, which Bush called "the first time our alliance has met in one of the captive nations annexed by the Soviet Union."
But Putin found a way to haunt the summit by suggesting dinner on Wednesday with Chirac and Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a tough critic of the Kremlin. French officials said the arrangement was not yet confirmed.
(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan in Tallinn and Louis Charbonneau in Berlin)
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Citation: Paul Taylor and Mark John, "NATO leaders report progress on Afghanistan troops," Reuters, 28 November 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061128/ts_nm/nato_summit_dc_5
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