ANALYSIS: Could NATO lose in Afghanistan?

The last time NATO leaders met in the Baltic states, in November 2006 in Riga, they spent most of their time arguing about alliance troop levels in Afghanistan.

Fourteen months later, as NATO defence ministers began two days of meetings in Vilnius on Thursday, they were still arguing, with the same handful of countries accusing their partners of not doing enough to fight the Taliban in the south of the country.

"I worry a great deal about the alliance evolving into a two- tiered alliance, in which you have some allies willing to fight and die to protect people's security, and others who are not," US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said just ahead of the conference.

"And I think that it puts a cloud over the future of the alliance if this is to endure, or perhaps even get worse," he told the US Senate's Armed Services Committee.

NATO currently leads the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF's 43,000 troops are drawn from all 26 NATO member states plus 14 non-NATO members such as Australia, Jordan and Singapore, and cover the whole country.

But the brunt of the fighting against the Taliban is going on in the south.

And just four nations - the US, Canada, the Netherlands and Britain - are doing most of the fighting in the south, while other governments will not even allow their soldiers to go there.
You can't 'shock and awe' Afghanis, period