VILNIUS (AFP) — There was little sign of agreement between NATO member states over who was pulling their weight in Afghanistan, ahead of a meeting of defence ministers in Vilnius Thursday.
Speaking in London Wednesday US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said NATO was "facing a real test" over troop deployments in Afghanistan.
Washington is hoping she will be able to bring its European allies round to their way of thinking and persuade them, ahead of a NATO summit in Bucharest on April 2-4, that they need to send more troops. So far however, the results have been mixed.
With 1,600 troops stationed mainly in Kabul, France has offered several dozen military instructors to train Afghan national army forces in south Afghanistan where it carries out bombing missions against Taliban positions.
Paris did however hint that President Nicolas Sarkozy might announce further contributions at the Bucharest summit.
On Wednesday, German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung confirmed his country would provide some 200 troops to replace a Norwegian contingent acting as a reserve rapid reaction force in north Afghanistan.
But Berlin is unlikely to go any further in beefing up its existing 3,100-strong Afghan troop presence, despite a recent request by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
Jung has ruled out stationing soldiers in southern Afghanistan, saying the German mandate did not allow for sending troops into the turbulent region.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stoked the troop numbers row last month when he unleashed rare public criticism of the NATO forces deployed in southern Afghanistan.
"Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counter-insurgency," he said bluntly.
Diplomats at NATO headquarters in Brussels attributed the outburst to a need for Gates to justify the announcement that more than 3,000 additional US troops were being sent to Afghanistan -- with 2,200 to be deployed in the flashpoint southern Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly warned that Ottawa will pull its 2,500 soldiers out of restive southern Afghanistan if it does not get reinforcements from other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations.
However European allies whose forces are already stretched by engagements elsewhere -- including Iraq, the Balkans and Africa -- say they do not have much more to give.
Last week Gates upped the ante by writing letters to all NATO allies asking for troops and equipment, especially helicopters, for Afghanistan.
The message was aimed particularly at well-resourced European nations Germany, France, Italy and Spain with troops stationed in the capital Kabul or in the north and west of the country where they aren't greatly exposed to Taliban attacks.
A senior US official at NATO said Tuesday that the real problem was "that the letter hit the press".
A spokesman for the NATO secretary general has said Scheffer wants an end to the "very public calls" for more troops and hopes to bring the force generation process back behind closed doors during the two-day meeting in Lithuania.
While many others would also like to see the troop demands made discreetly, successive bouts of mainly US calls have had their effect.
In less than two years numbers in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have gone from 16,000 to 42,000, including around 18,000 US troops and 7,000 British.
There are another 20,000 with the US-led coalition, a separate military structure.
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