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NATO said it was winning the battle to set Afghanistan on the road to peace and democracy and pledged more troops, with a more flexible mandate, to confront the increasingly powerful Taliban-led insurgency.
“There is not the slightest reason to voice doom and gloom on Afghanistan. Afghanistan is being won,” NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at the end of a two-day alliance summit in Latvia.
In a declaration, the 26 NATO heads of state and government, including US President George W. Bush, pledged “to ensure that ISAF has the forces, resources and flexibility needed to ensure the mission's continued success”.
NATO had asked for up to 2,500 more troops to be deployed in Afghanistan and for soldiers in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) it leads there to be redeployed from relatively stable areas to hotspots in the east and south, where the Taliban insurgency is fiercest.
But few allies have been willing to provide troops or lift conditions on their use. These conditions range from geographical restrictions on where troops can be sent — the biggest problem — to a refusal to fight at night or in winter conditions for lack of proper equipment.
Scheffer said the call for more soldiers had almost entirely been met at the summit but other officials said air assets like helicopters and transport planes were still needed.
“The statement of requirements has an overall fill of 90 percent. Several countries have offered equipment,” he told reporters.
“Early next year ISAF will increase from three to four battalions.”
But the head of NATO's military committee, Canadian General Ray Henault, said the alliance would have to wait and see just how many countries would make good on their pledges to send more troops and equipment.
“We asked countries to take a new look at their capacities and I expect that we will have concrete responses in around two weeks,” he said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, which has been resisting pressure to redeploy any of its 2,700 troops from the relatively calm north to trouble spots in the south and east, said: “The idea of dividing Afghanistan into safe and unsafe zones is wrong.”
“We have the ISAF mandate and (US-led) Operation Enduring Freedom and we do not envisage changing anything either, but to continue to fulfill our mission under these mandates,” Merkel said.
Speaking after the summit, a top US official said Washington still hoped its NATO partners, including Germany, would agree to drop restrictions on the redeployment of their forces within Afghanistan.
“I'd like to remove all the caveats. I think it's important that NATO allies do (that) but it's also good that NATO allies understand that solidarity is critical,” said Dan Fried, assistant secretary of state for European affairs.
As NATO leaders were striking deals on Afghanistan in Riga, a suicide attacker in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar detonated a motorbike laden with explosives close to a NATO convoy, killing a civilian.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, which this year has lost 32 of the 2,500 soldiers it has in Afghanistan, was upbeat about the summit.
Alliance members are “getting a sense of the necessity to step up to the plate”, he said. “With just a little more help we can move this in an irreversibly positive direction.”
NATO took command of ISAF in Afghanistan in 2003. It comprises some 32,000 troops from 37 nations.
Nearly 12,000 of them are from the United States, with Britain being the second-largest contributor at 6,000 soldiers, followed by Germany and Canada.
NATO leaders backed a French proposal to set up a “contact group” tasked with coordinating actions to prevent Afghanistan slipping back into chaos.
At the summit NATO also opened its doors to Bosnia-Hercegovina, Montenegro and Serbia, sparking the anger of the United Nations tribunal trying suspected war criminals from the Balkans.
“Taking into account the importance of long-term stability in the western Balkans and acknowledging the progress made so far … we have invited these three countries to join Partnership for Peace,” said the NATO declaration.
The programme is considered a key stepping stone for countries hoping to join NATO but being invited into the partnership does not guarantee membership.
NATO chiefs also declared “fully operational” the alliance's 25,000-strong rapid response force, which can be ready for deployment within five days for combat missions or disaster relief operations lasting up to a month.
