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 the latest attack on an alliance convoy in southern Afghanistan, prompting Canada's foreign minister to warn public support could turn against the mission if allies did not come to Ottawa's assistance.
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