Rasmussen: NATO needs more Afghan trainers, ready to help Pakistan

Feb 1, 2010, 16:35 GMT

Brussels - NATO needs far more trainers to build up a reliable Afghan army and police force, but the alliance is ready to help train the Pakistani army in counter-insurgency operations as well, its top official said Monday.

NATO's members are desperate to create credible security forces in Afghanistan so that they can pull their own troops out of the firing line, but they have so far failed to find enough soldiers to train the new generation of Afghanistan's defenders.

'While our requirements for combat forces have, in general, been met, we still need more trainers for our training mission ... I will continue to push hard on this,' NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told journalists in Brussels.

At a pledging conference in December, NATO's members and their allies promised a major boost to the alliance's training missions.

But they still need to find 21 more army training teams, known as OMLeTs, and over 100 police training teams, or POMLeTs, in order to bring the Afghan forces up to the current requirements.

And they will have to dig deeper still if they are to increase the size of the Afghan security forces to a total of 305,000 men by the autumn of 2011, a target agreed at a major international conference in London on Thursday, Rasmussen said.

'To reach that target would require even more training teams ... This is the reason why I will put a lot of focus on this in the coming weeks,' he said.

Separately, he said that NATO would also be willing to teach Pakistani soldiers counter-insurgency techniques, if the country's government asked for such help.

'It is very much up to the Pakistani military and Pakistani government to present their ideas ... But if there is a request from (them), NATO is prepared to engage in training activities,' he said.

NATO is only mandated by the United Nations to carry out operations in Afghanistan, and is not allowed to enter the mountainous border regions of Pakistan where many Taliban-linked militants are reported to be hiding.