(AFP) – Dec 13, 2007

TOKYO (AFP) — The head of NATO said Friday he has not given up on persuading Russia to reverse its decision to suspend a key Soviet-era arms pact, urging Moscow to be flexible.

"It's deplorable. It's regrettable," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said of Russia's recent announcement that it had frozen its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty.

"Our allies have been very flexible and very forward-leaning over the past weeks and months," he told reporters during a trip to Japan. "We have unfortunately not seen this flexibility answered by our Russian friends."

"It is up to them to move and you cannot expect only the allies to move. The moves and flexibility should come from both sides. I've not given up yet."

Signed in 1990 and modified in 1999, the CFE places precise limits on the stationing of troops and heavy weapons from the Atlantic coast to Russia's Ural mountains -- a mammoth agreement that helped resolve the Cold War standoff.

Russia attributes its freeze to the failure of 26 NATO members to ratify a revised 1999 version of the treaty.

Moscow has also been riled by US plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in two former Soviet satellite states.

NATO countries have said they will only ratify the CFE treaty once Moscow lives up to a pledge made in 1999 to pull its troops out of former Soviet republics Georgia and Moldova.

The NATO chief also voiced frustration at a shortfall of coalition troops needed in Afghanistan, saying he would keep pushing for reinforcements.

"I'm not entirely happy with what we have on the ground and in the air in Afghanistan," visiting NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.

Scheffer said NATO had about 90 percent of the ground troops that it needed to battle a resurgent Taliban.

NATO is "unhappy, unsatisfied about being unable to fill the remaining 10 percent. I will go on fighting for that," he told reporters here.

His remarks came as British, US and other allied defence ministers gathered in Britain to start crafting a five-year strategy to combat a growing Taliban insurgency and to press for more NATO troops.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this week it was time for NATO to step back and reassess where it wants to take Afghanistan over the next three to five years.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has about 40,000 troops in all.

Asked whether NATO should become involved in the fight against narcotics in Afghanistan, Scheffer said the organisation needed to concentrate on improving security.

"What NATO should avoid in Afghanistan is being responsible or being held responsible for everything," he said.

Violence in the southern sector has climbed sharply since ISAF took over more than a year ago, but NATO allies have been reluctant to provide all the troops and equipment that were promised more than a year ago.

Among the forces that have so far failed to materialise are three infantry battalions, some 3,000 trainers primarily for the police, and about 20 helicopters.

Scheffer admitted NATO was also "lagging behind" in its efforts to train the Afghan national army.

"That is an ambition we have not fulfilled and I think we should fulfill. I'm very critical about my allies there as well," he said.

Meanwhile, Japan on Friday extended the current parliament session as the ruling parties fight to ram through legislation to resume a naval mission supporting the US-led "war on terror." The term was extended by 31 days to January 15, said a lower house official. It was the second extension since early November.

The opposition, which controls one house of parliament, has refused to back an extension of the naval mission supporting US-led operations in Afghanistan, arguing that Japan should not be part of "American wars."

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