Bush pleads for more NATO troops for Afghanistan
Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:25 AM EST


By Paul Taylor
RIGA (Reuters) - President Bush appealed to NATO allies on Tuesday to provide more troops with fewer national restrictions for the alliance's most dangerous mission in Afghanistan, hours before a summit of allied leaders.

"To succeed in Afghanistan, NATO allies must provide the forces NATO military commanders require," Bush told a joint news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves in Tallinn on his way to the NATO meeting in neighboring Latvia.

"Like Estonia, member nations must accept difficult assignments if we expect to be successful," he said in a veiled reference to numerous so-called national caveats that restrict where, when and how allies' troops can be used.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a security conference in Riga it was unacceptable that allied forces in southern Afghanistan, the main battleground with resurgent Taliban fighters, were 20 percent below the required strength.

"Just as we need combat forces that can also handle reconstruction, we can ill afford reconstruction armies that cannot handle combat," he told the Riga Conference.

"Afghanistan is mission possible," de Hoop Scheffer said. "While we have to be frank about the risks, we also have to avoid overdramatising the difficulties."

He was speaking a day after a suicide bomber killed two Canadian soldiers in a the latest attack on an alliance convoy in southern Afghanistan.

NATO's military commander says he needs an extra 2,500 soldiers on top of the existing 32,000 peacekeepers, with more helicopters and greater flexibility to use existing allied troops in the country.

NO CIVIL WAR?

De Hoop Scheffer gave a glimpse of NATO's exit strategy from Afghanistan 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 insisted that any talk of withdrawals at present in Afghanistan was premature.

Bush, weakened by election setbacks at home, rejected growing talk that Iraq has plunged into civil war, saying the latest bombings were part of a nine-month-old pattern of attacks by al Qaeda militants bent on fomenting sectarian violence.

"I am going to bring this subject up of course with Prime Minister (Nuri al-) Maliki when I visit with him in Jordan on Thursday. My questions to him will be, what do we need to do to succeed? What is your strategy in dealing with the sectarian violence?

"I will assure him that we will continue to pursue al Qaeda, to make sure that they are unable to establish a safe haven in Iraq," said the president, who has depicted Iraq as the front line in a global war against terrorism.

In a stark warning on the eve of the summit, a senior U.S. senator said NATO's credibility was at stake in Afghanistan.

"If the most prominent alliance in modern history were to fail in its first operation outside of Europe due to a lack of will by its members, the efficacy of NATO and the ability to take joint action against a terrorist threat would be called into question," Republican Richard Lugar said.

De Hoop Scheffer reeled off a string of statistics on education, health care and economic growth in Afghanistan to highlight what he called NATO's success in the country.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq nearly tore NATO apart in 2003 when France and Germany led opposition to Washington's drive to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Transatlantic relations have healed slowly, with Bush chastened by post-war setbacks in Iraq and the Europeans humbled by the rejection of their own constitution and less tempted to act as a counterweight to Washington in world affairs.

But Riga may be too much of a "lame duck" summit to chart a bold new course of cooperation in global security.

Bush is constrained by the Democrats' capture of both houses of Congress, while British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac are both almost certainly in their last months in office.



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