US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and NATO's new military chief US General Bantz Craddock face a baptism of fire with their first official meeting, and both are expected to push the allies to do more.

Gates told lawmakers this week that an objective of his trip was to prod his partners to put up promised troops and other military capabilities for the 35,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

"And one of my requests of those folks, and one of the issues that I'll be pressing very hard, is that they meet the commitments that they made at Riga and help us out in this," Gates said.

A senior US defence official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said Craddock has drawn up a new set of requirements for the Afghan mission that will be discussed at the meeting in Seville.

Afghanistan is the world's leading opium producer and its lawless border regions with Pakistan are the major breeding ground for international terrorism.

NATO has taken a major gamble by trying to help spread the influence of President Hamid Karzai's weak central government throughout the country, faced with ever-bolder Taliban-led fighters.

Some 4,000 people were killed in the insurgency last year and US officials say suicide attacks have increased four-fold since 2005. In recent days, the Taliban has held control of a town in southern Helmand province.

Yet despite the US pressure, NATO officials played down expectations that the 26 allies would come to the meeting with specific troop contributions in mind, even as commanders on the ground call for force increases.

"Neither the secretary general nor General Craddock are going to be handing around the begging bowl looking for contributions," said John Colston, NATO's assistant secretary general for defence policy and planning.

On the eve of the talks, Germany announced that it plans to deploy six jet aircraft but for surveillance and not combat missions.

Discussions on Kosovo -- NATO's other major mission -- come a day after the alliance announced that its forces there would conduct exercises later this month as moves to grant the Serbian province a new status gather momentum.

NATO waged a bombing campaign against former strongman Slobodan Milosevic's regime in 1999 to stop a Serbian crackdown on the separatist ethnic Albanian majority there.

The ministers will also hold a regular council with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov, against a backdrop of US moves to widen its anti-missile defence system in Europe.

Also on the agenda is the NATO Response Force -- the flagship contingent maintained on standby for deployment to the world's hotspots -- which has struggled with funding woes and to find troop contributors.

earlier related report
Analysis: Germany beefs up Afghan mission
by Stefan Nicola
UPI Germany Correspondent
Berlin (UPI) Feb 08 - The German government wants to send six reconnaissance planes and 500 additional troops to southern Afghanistan to aid in the fight against the Taliban, but Germany's opposition and Afghanistan experts are not fully convinced the mission makes sense.

At Thursday's NATO defense ministerial meeting in Sevilla, Spain, the ministers were under pressure to round up more troops for its Afghanistan mission. Yet German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung was able to relax -- the German Cabinet a day earlier had decided to comply with an official NATO request for a German air reconnaissance mission.

Under the mission's guidelines, the German Air Force would deploy six Panavia Tornado jet planes for reconnaissance missions, to spot enemy positions and relay them back to mission control. While the Tornado planes --also used by the British Royal Air Force in Iraq -- are able to carry laser guided bombs and air-to-air missiles, the mandate explicitly cancels out German fighting missions.

Yet before the six planes and roughly 500 additional soldiers are deployed in April, Germany's Parliament has to sign off on the move. The government parties are expected to vote for the mission, which will cost Berlin an estimated $45 million, but opposition parties have said they may show their disapproval.

Some say the increased military focus of the International Security Assistance Force was the wrong approach to provide stability in Afghanistan.

The $45 million spent for the Tornado mission "would have been better invested in civil reconstruction, in the health sector, in education," Paul Schaefer, defense expert of the far-left Left Party, told German news channel n-tv. "I believe that the double strategy now pursued by NATO -- more fire power, more troops and at the same time more reconstruction efforts -- won't succeed that way."

Currently, Germany has nearly 3,000 soldiers stationed with the International Security Assistance Force, but they are confined to stay in relatively peaceful northern Afghanistan. Germany in the past has come under fire from NATO officials for confining their troops to the north while the death toll in the south is rising.

Observers say the German government is eager to prove to its allies that it wants to provide additional aid in Afghanistan. The deployment of reconnaissance planes is seen as a relatively safe way to do so, at least when it comes to human casualties.

The German 'yes' to the NATO request, however, comes only six months after Berlin turned down a similar request; opposition politicians are now wondering what has changed the government's mind.

The three German opposition parties -- the Green Party, the Free Democrats and the Left Party -- said they are mulling to refuse voting in favor of the mission, once Germany's lawmakers have to cast their vote, likely sometime in March.

Juergen Trittin, a senior Green Party politician, said the mandate currently was "not yet acceptable." He said the government had to come up with reasons why the mission was important, and also whether NATO will alter its strategy in the volatile south of the country.

"So far, the United States and Britain there have only acted with military means, and this has undermined the aid missions," he told Thursday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

Trittin also criticized that the German government quickly signed off on a $45 million air reconnaissance mission while at the same time unwilling to beef up its police training mission. Those are "the wrong priorities," he said.

Some observers doubt whether the German pilots are really able to stay away from fighting.

In southern Afghanistan, the U.S.-led anti-terror mission Operation Enduring Freedom is in a fierce fight against the Taliban, and experts fear the Tornados will relay coordinates for potential bombing targets, thus involving itself in war actions.

While Jung, the German defense minister, has promised that the German deployment would be a "reconnaissance mission, and not a fighting mission," in German military circles, generals are more realistic.

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