By Patrick Lannin and Sue Pleming
On a visit to troops fighting the Taliban, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice kept up the pressure on reluctant allies to share the combat burden.
"Frankly, I hope there will be more troop contributions and there needs to be more Afghan forces," Rice told reporters travelling with her on the flight from London with Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer acknowledged more forces were needed to combat mounting Taliban and al Qaeda violence but dismissed Gates' fears that NATO could become a "two-tiered alliance" based on a country's willingness to fight.
He renewed an appeal for countries to reserve requests for reinforcements for closed-door discussions. "Usually we do not do that in public," he said.
SHORTFALLS
"I think we are doing our bit fully in Afghanistan," Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung told reporters. He noted Germany's 3,000-plus contingent was the third largest in Afghanistan.
"These are issues that are being examined. To my knowledge no decision has been reached yet," Sarkozy's spokesman David Martinon said of possible new deployments.
"There was clearly a sense around the table that there are shortfalls that need to be met, that we need as quickly as possible to meet them," he told reporters.
"My view is you can't have some allies whose sons and daughters die in combat and other allies who are shielded from that kind of a sacrifice," he told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
After flying into the Afghan capital Kabul, Rice and Miliband travelled in a U.S. military plane to a sprawling base in the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and the main city in Afghanistan's most volatile region.
"We want to see more of a one-for-all approach, including more burden-sharing in the south," Canadian Defence Minister Peter Mackay told reporters in Vilnius, reaffirming a demand for reinforcements to help its 2,500 troops in Kandahar province.
"From a U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is a 'make or break issue'. A perceived failure would be blamed primarily on insufficient European engagement in the region," concluded the report, based on the conclusions of a seminar of NATO officials, military commanders, diplomats and security experts on January 28.
(Writing by Mark John; editing by Robert Woodward)
