AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
NATO members are set to meet to try to boost troop numbers to combat an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, but they were unlikely to secure considerable reinforcements.
On the eve of the meeting at NATO's military headquarters in Belgium, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a rallying call not to abandon Afghanistan as it struggles to build a stable democracy.
“If you allow a failed state in that strategic location, you will pay for it,” she warned, speaking on a trip to Canada where she expressed her gratitude for Canada's 2,300-strong troop deployment to Afghanistan.
Her comments coincided with stark warnings of the threat posed by fighters of the Islamist Taliban militia who are waging a bitter insurgency against foreign forces posted there after the Taliban regime was ousted in 2001.
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf said the Taliban had overtaken Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network as his region's biggest threat to security.
“The centre of gravity of terrorism has shifted from Al-Qaeda to Taliban,” he told European parliamentarians Tuesday in Brussels.
“It is a new element that has emerged, a more dangerous element because it has roots in the people. Al-Qaeda did not have roots in the people,” he told the EU assembly's foreign affairs committee.
The surge in fighting that has seen more than 90 foreign soldiers killed so far these year prompted the alliance's military chief, US General James Jones, to appeal last week for up to 2,500 reinforcements.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer chaired an extraordinary meeting on Monday to urge the alliance's 26 members to contribute additional troops.
But Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported that the Wednesday meeting was unlikely to see pledges of considerable troops to bolster the NATO-led international force. It currently has more than 20,000 troops from 37 countries including 8,000 troops confronting Taliban militants in the restive south.
“At the moment there's no indication of any substantive offers. The signs are that the conference will not produce what is needed,” an unnamed senior NATO official told the newspaper.
The Times, meanwhile, quoted an unnamed senior official in US President George W. Bush's administration as saying: “Germany, Norway and Poland could do more.”
But a German defence ministry spokesman told The Financial Times that the country does “not have the capacity to send more”.
Major NATO members Turkey and Italy are unlikely to make any contributions, given their roles in the peacekeeping force in Lebanon, The Financial Times reported, and the same is expected of France.
Spain's defence minister said this week that his country's deployment of troops in Afghanistan were “more than sufficient”, the newspaper said.
According to The Globe and Mail newspaper, Canada is preparing to send 15 Leopard tanks and an additional 120 soldiers to Afghanistan.
NATO's manning difficulties also come amid deep concern that nations which promised aid and donations in January to the conflict-torn country may be preparing to renege on their pledges.
Although a NATO spokesman earlier this week described Wednesday's gathering at the headquarters in Mons as a “troop generation meeting”, officials were trying to play down expectations of pledges of reinforcements.
Richard Boucher, the assistant US secretary of state for south and central Asian affairs, told journalists in Brussels that it was “probably a little too early” to “draw any conclusions about the efforts to get more troops”.
Wednesday's meeting comes less than two months after NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) took command of six restive southern provinces where the Taliban are active, the toughest mission the Alliance has taken on yet.
The deployment, for which NATO military chiefs had difficulty securing adequate troops from alliance members, is widely seen as a key test of its credibility that is likely to have ramifications on how it reinvents itself and abandons its Cold War origins.
