Rice in Afghanistan to support NATO troops

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN —  The top diplomats from Britain and the U.S. made an unannounced visit to one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous corners Thursday in a show of support for NATO allies that have been willing to suffer casualties in the fight.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband flew to this southern city, the cradle and former headquarters of the militant Taliban movement, to salute 200 NATO troops at sprawling Kandahar Air Base.

“On behalf of the people of the United States, thank you, thank you, thank you,” Rice told the troops, who were primarily Canadian, Dutch, British and Australian.

Though she denied any intention to slight other countries, her words carried a bite because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is locked in an intensifying internal struggle between member nations that have been willing to send combat troops to the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan and those that have limited assignments to safer zones.

Rice spoke to the forces in the southern city just weeks after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates criticized NATO troops here as lacking adequate training in counterinsurgency techniques, touching off a political firestorm.

U.S. officials also have been pushing hard for other countries to increase their presence in the hot spots, and have suggested that their refusal could undermine the alliance.

Gates, speaking ahead of Thursday’s meeting of NATO defense ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania, said Wednesday in Washington that the division “puts a cloud over the future of the alliance” that could “get even worse.”

After talks in Vilnius, Gates declared the alliance was not in crisis, but stressed that better participation would lead to improvements in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported.

Rice made it clear, as has Gates, that she intended to continue pressing the Western allies to step up their contributions.

“It’s not an overwhelming number of forces that is being sought here,” Rice said. “This is a troop contribution level that NATO can meet and should meet.”

Miliband signaled that he expected the debate over deployments to remain intense.

“As the debate hots up about what you are doing here, we will be defending you heart and soul,” he told the group, which had gathered amid low-slung beige buildings and barbed wire-festooned walls.

The defense ministers gathered in Lithuania are discussing how to reorient the 6-year-old mission, which some observers believe is losing ground.

NATO leaders have been trying to avoid an open quarrel over the issue, and Rice and Miliband muted their comments in Kandahar and later in the afternoon, when they appeared at a news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. But some senior European officials have made it clear that they resent the pressure, which has been aimed at such countries as Germany, Italy and France.

Rice said in London on Wednesday that the NATO countries were facing a test and that their citizens had to understand that the job was more than just peacekeeping.

Rice was the first secretary of State to visit Kandahar, whose surrounding province was a hotbed of renewed violence by the Taliban until NATO operations beginning in late 2006 took on the Islamic militant group. But in a sign of how dangerous the area remains, she stayed inside the sprawling Western airfield during the three hours of her visit.

The Canadian government has warned that it will pull its troops out of Afghanistan unless other NATO countries deploy more forces to the most dangerous areas.

The visit by Rice and Miliband was also aimed at building support among the European public. Many Europeans, hostile to the Bush administration, have pressured their governments to limit their commitments to the fight.

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paul.richter@latimes.com

Times staff writer Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.