Poland Promises 1,000 Troops for Afghanistan

In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, Afghan security personnel inspect the site of a bomb blast at a mosque in Kandahar city, southern Afghanistan Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006. A suicide attacker was the sole victim when his bomb exploded inside a Sunni Muslim mosque in Kandahar, police said. The motive for the blast was unclear. (AP Photo/Xinhua) (AP)

WARSAW, Sept. 14 -- Poland announced Thursday that it would send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan in the first positive response to an urgent NATO appeal. But it said the soldiers would not reach the country until February.

NATO's top commander last week requested as many as 2,500 more troops to help combat fiercer-than-expected Taliban resistance in the south before the onset of winter in coming weeks. But at talks Wednesday, representatives of member countries failed to make any firm offers.

NATO has agreed that most of the new Polish troops would go to eastern Afghanistan rather than southern provinces where British, Dutch and Canadian troops are battling Taliban insurgents.

Poland's deputy defense minister, Boguslaw Winid, said it was still a matter of discussion whether some could be shifted south. "We have to talk through all details with NATO, and the final decision will be made by the president soon," he said in an interview.

While the Polish offer by no means solves NATO's troop and equipment shortfalls, Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer welcomed it and said the contingent could be a reserve force supporting operations across the whole country.

Thursday's announcement confirmed a long-held plan for Poland, which currently has 100 soldiers in Afghanistan, to add troops there as part of a NATO rotation due in February.

Opposition figures in Poland criticized the announcement, and military experts said that sending more troops to Afghanistan would overstretch the Polish army.

"This declaration is too ambitious," Gen. Stanislaw Koziej, a former defense minister, said on Polish television. "We are reaching the limits."

Alliance officials say the new deployment will take total troop levels of its International Security Assistance Force up to 21,000.

"It would have been nice to see it earlier," said one NATO source.

"It is urgent to try now to send these 2,500 forces, which would make a great deal of difference," the European Union's Afghanistan representative, Francesc Vendrell, said in Brussels.