Germany to send extra troops to north Afghanistan

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany said on Wednesday it would send around 200 combat soldiers to northern Afghanistan as part of a NATO Quick Reaction Force but would not move troops to the more violent south.

The new German troops will replace a Norwegian unit.

"There is a readiness from our side now to fulfill this duty because we consider it a military necessity to have such a quick reaction force in the north in the future," German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung told reporters.

"This will happen in the summer of this year from our side."

Germany has rejected mounting pressure from NATO and especially the United States to send troops to the dangerous south of Afghanistan where U.S., British, Dutch and Canadian soldiers are fighting a fierce Taliban insurgency.

"If we neglected the north, we would commit a decisive mistake," Jung said. There was agreement with NATO partners that Germany's main responsibility was in the north, he said.

But referring to the possibility of temporary missions such as transport flights to other regions, Jung added: "If friends are in a situation of emergency, we will help them."

With the extra soldiers for the Quick Reaction Force, German troop levels will remain within the limits of a parliamentary mandate, under which the country can send 3,500 soldiers to the less violent north as part of the roughly 40,000-strong NATO International Security Assistance Force.

A large majority of Germans do not want the government to heed Washington's call to send troops to southern Afghanistan, a Forsa survey showed on Wednesday.

Eighty-five percent said they were against it while 12 percent said the government should comply with the United States request, the poll for n-tv television showed.

On Wednesday, the United States and Britain, the foreign countries with the most troops in Afghanistan, called on its NATO allies to share the burden of conflict.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in London for talks with British leaders, said only a small number of NATO nations had troops in the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

"We believe very strongly that there ought to be a sharing of that burden throughout the (NATO) alliance," Rice said.

Britain announced a rotation of its troops in Afghanistan on Wednesday but said their numbers would remain about the same at 7,800. The United States has 29,000 military personnel in Afghanistan, about half of them attached to the NATO mission.

Jung said he would discuss the situation in Afghanistan with his NATO colleagues at a meeting in Lithuania on Thursday.

(Reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich, Editing by Robert Woodward)