Afghanistan can be 'mission possible' - Nato chief

President Bush appealed today for more troops for Afghanistan as the head of Nato claimed the operation was "mission possible".

Speaking before heading to Latvia for a Nato summit later today, Mr Bush expressed concern about the "national caveats"that restrict the terms of a country's troop deployment.

"Member nations must accept difficult assignments if we expect to be successful," Mr Bush told a joint news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

Canadian, British and Dutch troops have borne the brunt of fierce fighting with Islamist militias in southern Afghanistan, while other nations have confined their soldiers to relatively safer areas in the north and west and in Kabul.

General James Jones, Nato's top commander, said he was making progress in freeing up more of the 32,000 peacekeepers in Afghanistan for duty in the southern region, which has become the main battleground with resurgent Taliban fighters.

Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a security conference in the Latvian capital, Riga, that it was unacceptable that allied forces in southern Afghanistan were 20 per cent 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 said. "Afghanistan is mission possible," Mr de Hoop Scheffer said.

He reassured members countries concerned that Afghanistan could become an open-ended commitment that Nato had an exit strategy.

"I would hope that by 2008, we will have made considerable progress, with . . . effective and trusted Afghan security forces gradually taking control," he said. But he insisted that any talk of withdrawals at present in Afghanistan was premature.

He was speaking a day after a suicide bomber killed two Canadian soldiers in the latest attack on in southern Afghanistan, prompting Canada's foreign minister to warn public support could wane if allies did help.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the Nato meeting must send a clear signal of intent to the Taliban. "The Taliban have to know that they will be taken on and defeated wherever they are fighting," he said.

There are rumours that Russian President Vladimir Putin may attend the Riga summit. Mr Putin has not set foot in Latvia since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Agencies