Cheney visits Afghanistan and wants more NATO troops

By Tabassum Zakaria

KABUL (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney visited Afghanistan on Thursday and met President Hamid Karzai ahead of a NATO summit where Washington will urge its allies to send more troops to fight a tough Taliban insurgency.

NATO's Afghan mission is one of the toughest challenges faced by the 59-year-old alliance and has led to open differences among allies over strategy and troop levels.

Cheney said the mission of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan would be high on the agenda of the summit in Bucharest in early April.

"ISAF has made a tremendous difference in the country and America will ask our NATO allies for an even stronger commitment for the future," Cheney told a news conference in the Afghan capital, Kabul, where he made an unannounced visit.

ISAF has some 43,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting Taliban militants, who have regrouped since Afghan and U.S.-led forces toppled the hard-line Islamist movement from power after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

U.S., British, Canadian and Dutch troops are engaged in the bulk of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Other NATO members, notably France and Germany, have resisted U.S. pressure to allow their soldiers to operate outside the relatively safe northern part of the country.

"The United States and the other members of the coalition need to have a sufficient force here ... to deal with the threat that's been represented by ... radicals and extremists, the likes of the Taliban and al Qaeda," Cheney said.

The vice president later travelled to Bagram base near Kabul where a suicide bomber killed 14 people, including a U.S. and a South Korean soldier, when he was there in early 2007.