AFGHANISTAN: The senior United Nations envoy to Afghanistan has warned that some Nato troops in the country are operating under excessive restrictions that are hampering the alliance's mission there.
The alliance, whose credibility is widely seen as hanging on its success in the country, is facing fierce opposition from resurgent Taliban fighters that has alarmed some Nato governments.
The warning from Tom Koenigs, the UN's special representative for Afghanistan, came as Nato's leadership flew out to the country. Nato said the visit had been long planned to demonstrate a commitment to the mission - but officials said it should help fight the perception that the alliance was losing its way there.
Mr Koenigs said Nato needed more troops and fewer restrictions on their freedom of manoeuvre. In particular, he said there were "around 71 caveats", which he argued were "too many and must be removed".
Caveats limit the combat role of Germany's 2,800 troops and restrict them to Kabul and the north of the country.
Nato can deploy them elsewhere only "under exceptional circumstances and on a temporary basis".
Mr Koenigs, a German, added that the country's soldiers had been "lucky to be deployed in the relatively peaceful north [of Afghanistan] but they must now accept having to go to the south".
Both the local police and military were currently "hopelessly overstretched", he said.
Yesterday, the Netherlands confirmed that about 100 Dutch soldiers had been temporarily reassigned to the south to assist Canadian forces.
Mr Koenigs was scheduled to meet the Nato delegation, headed by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, secretary general, and James Jones, the alliance's top military commander, during its three-day trip to Afghanistan.
Yesterday, a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan was killed because of "friendly fire" from the US, while a British soldier died as a result of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul along with at least four civilians, including an Afghan working for the foreign troops.
The bomber rammed his car into a Nato convoy on the highway between Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad, said interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai.
A Nato spokesman said three British soldiers were also wounded, in what was the third suicide attack against Nato forces in Kabul this year. These followed the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in a weekend offensive against the Taliban and of 14 British personnel in the crash of a Nimrod aircraft on Saturday. Nato said the weekend campaign killed more than 200 insurgents, although the Taliban labelled such claims as "propaganda".
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper yesterday, Gen Richard Dannatt, Britain's chief of general staff, said the UK army could "just" cope with the demands made by its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The alliance said it had begun thousands of infrastructure projects in the south of the country and was carrying out up to 1,000 patrols a week.
Mr Koenigs also stressed that Afghanistan's income per head had doubled in the past three years, while four million refugees had returned.