Pat Dollard | Young Americans

General Dan McNeill

KABUL, Oct 27 (Reuters) - NATO is taking a risk by not sending enough troops to Afghanistan and restrictions on deployment of some countries’ soldiers hampers operations, NATO’s commander in Afghanistan said on Saturday.

Afghanistan has seen an increase in violence this year, with more clashes with Taliban insurgents and more suicide bombings, killing as many as 5,000 people since January.

While the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claims significant battlefield successes against the Taliban, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has led calls for NATO nations to send more soldiers and allow them to do more.

ISAF commander General Dan McNeill said NATO countries had not even sent troops already promised.

“NATO agreed last year to a force level here … it prescribed a minimum force … that force has not been filled yet. On that basis alone, I think, no, I don’t have enough force here,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“We are taking a certain amount of risk by having an unfilled force,” he said.

Many of the 37 nations contributing troops impose tight restrictions, known as caveats, barring them from offensive operations or from deployment in the more dangerous south.

German troops in the relatively safe north, for example, are not allowed to patrol at night, officials say.

“The caveats impinge on my ability to use all those principles of war in both planning and prosecuting operations,” McNeill said.

“When countries say their forces can only operate in certain ways and in a certain geographic space that certainly impinges on my ability to mass forces.”

NO PURELY MILITARY SOLUTION

But the four-star U.S. general said there was no purely military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan and ISAF was simply buying time for Afghan forces to take on the Taliban.

“A military dimension is part of the solution, it is not the whole solution. We have to build robust and fully capable Afghan national security forces,” he said.

While the Afghan army is becoming more capable of independently engaging Taliban rebels in the field, McNeill said there was still a long way to go to build up the Afghan police which is key to combating the threat of suicide attacks.

More than 200 people have been killed in around 130 suicide attacks this year — more than all of 2006 — as Taliban insurgents switch to what the military calls asymmetrical warfare after suffering heavy defeats in pitched battles.

Security has improved since a year ago though, McNeill said, when many feared the rebels would seize their former stronghold city of Kandahar and follow it with a large spring offensive.

“The rhetoric from last fall has been ‘we’re coming, we’ve got an offensive coming’. Well maybe they did, but none of us has seen it,” he said.

Military success against the Taliban has been marred by a number of incidents in which civilians have been killed.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded foreign forces use fewer air strikes as they kill too many civilians, he said in an interview to be broadcast on U.S. television on Sunday.

McNeill said he had issued a directive in June slightly modifying the rules of engagement for launching air strikes.

“I think President Karzai’s statement to me about seven or eight days ago was that, yes, he thought that that had had the desired effect,” he said. “We take every precaution to minimise risk to non-combatants as well as to the property of Afghans.”

The general said the Taliban used civilians as human shields and attacked from houses, inviting civilian casualties, and had harmed their own cause with indiscriminate suicide attacks.

Similarly, the accidental killing of civilians hurt ISAF’s efforts in Afghanistan.

“If you inflict harm … on the people you will begin to lose their support. We are very conscience of that and we will always be taking the measures not to see that happen,” he said.