Georgia offers NATO troops for Afghanistan

By Mark John

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Georgia offered several hundred troops on Monday to support French and Dutch NATO troops in Afghanistan, two days before an alliance summit it hopes will boost its membership aspirations.

Foreign Minister David Bakradze said in an interview that Georgia had already indicated last year it planned to send troops and their deployment was not dependent on the outcome of this week's NATO summit in Bucharest.

However the formal offer of support to two countries which, according to diplomats, believe it is too early to offer Georgia and ex-Soviet Ukraine membership plans buttresses Tbilisi's argument that it can add value to the military alliance.

"Whatever happens in Bucharest, they will go and fight," Bakradze told Reuters by telephone.

He said Georgia was offering to send some 120 troops to support the French contingent in Kabul and 200 to accompany the Dutch in the southern province of Uruzgan which has seen some of the worse violence in a Taliban-led insurgency.

"Altogether there will be something over 350 troops ... The reaction was positive," said Bakradze, adding that they were expected to deploy in late August or early September.

The Georgian forces will be deployed without "caveats", the national restrictions on what tasks they may perform and where they will go, which NATO commanders say have hampered the 47,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Bakradze said some smaller units would also be deployed alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan. A Georgian Defense Ministry source said the whole contingent could reach 500.

To date, the ex-Soviet state's only contribution to the NATO Afghan force has been one doctor, but it has several hundred servicemen in Iraq as part of a U.S.-led coalition.

Georgia hopes to be given a Membership Action Plan (MAP) -- a roadmap to eventual entry to NATO -- at an alliance summit starting on Wednesday in Bucharest.

It has support from the United States and ex-communist central European NATO members but is facing resistance from up to seven or eight west European allies, with Germany the most vocal skeptic.

They argue that NATO cannot set the tiny Caucasus nation on the path to membership until it has settled territorial disputes with Russian-backed separatists on its soil, and point to its heavy-handed suppression of opposition protests last year.

They further contend the move would unnecessarily damage ties with Russia, which is already seething over the Western-backed secession of Kosovo from its ally Serbia.

Georgia offered a power-sharing deal to its breakaway Abkhazia region on Friday which went further than previous offers, but Abkhazia's foreign minister rejected it.

(Additional reporting by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Paul Taylor)