Afstan: Who will provide the troops? Whither NATO?

Maj.-Gen. (ret'd) Lewis Mackenzie says NATO needs to double the strength of ISAF (dream on).

The time has come to be bold. With NATO's future hanging in the balance, fence-sitting NATO partners have to be convinced, coerced, intimidated to live up to their end of the contract they signed when they joined during more peaceful times. Failure to do so will signal the end of a 57-year-old alliance that failed when faced with its first real test in the field.

The US is firmly supporting Canada's demand that our allies do more.

The alliance "shouldn't have countries saying, 'No. We don't do fighting. We don't get our hands dirty,' " Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said at a briefing of defence correspondents ahead of the alliance's summit next week in Riga. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to press European allies to shoulder more of the load...

"We're very pleased to see the way that Canada and the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have acquitted themselves. Each of these three countries has taken a significant number of casualties," said Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. He said President George W. Bush's administration will press some NATO members to lift bans on their troops going into combat...

But the Germans still don't want to kill.

Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed on Wednesday to keep German peacekeepers in northern Afghanistan and resist attempts to transfer them to the more violent south.

With roughly 2,900 troops in Afghanistan, Germany is one of the largest contributors to a peacekeeping force in place since shortly after the 2001 U.S.- and British-led invasion to oust the radical Taliban regime.

Merkel has come under increasing pressure from the United States and NATO to move German soldiers from the north to the south where Taliban fighters are staging a violent insurgency.

The German mandate as agreed by parliament stipulates that its troops be stationed in the north and help out in the south only on an ad-hoc emergency basis.

"The German army will continue to assume its responsibilities under its current mandate, but I can envision no additional military responsibilities that go beyond the current mandate and I'd like to make that clear right here," Merkel said in a speech to parliament...

This would certainly help if it can be done--and this is the only true "exit strategy".

The US military has proposed doubling the size of Afghanistan's army as US President George W Bush prepares to urge NATO members to send in more troops to contain increasing violence...

He [Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry, commander US forces in Afghanistan outside ISAF] said the plan to double the size of the army was drawn up by the US military and Afghan defence and interior ministries, but had not yet received approval from their respective governments...

The plan calls for fielding a 70,000-member Afghan army by October 2008 instead of by 2011, as originally planned. That would double the size of the current force, which officials said now numbers 35,000.

The police would grow from 50,000 to 62,000, the officials said...