EU has the troops for 2007 challenges-top soldier

BRUSSELS, Jan 16 (Reuters) Several European armies are being stretched to the limit by peacekeeping demands across the world but the European Union still has the troops to grow as a global security player, the bloc's top soldier said today.

European participation last year in expanded NATO operations in Afghanistan and the UN force in Lebanon added to existing deployments from Iraq to Africa, with Britain and France among those who signalled their armies were being stretched.

Some nations became cagier about the prospect of new EU missions, with Britain for example declining to offer troops for the 1,000-strong EU operation which helped protect last year's watershed elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

''The growing number of UN, NATO and EU missions is posing a problem for some nations. Some nations are certainly at the limit of what they can do,'' said Henri Bentegeat, the French general who chairs the EU's military committee.

''But I think the personnel pressure we see on some nations, especially the larger ones, is temporary...For 2007, I do not see any particular problems -- always bearing in mind that we do not know what operational needs we will be confronted with.'' Bentegeat said the pool of soldiers that EU military planners could draw from should rise in 2007 as the bloc wound down some existing missions, and as smaller nations gradually made their armies fitter for duty around the world.

He noted the EU was not only ending its peacekeeping mission in Congo, but aimed to cut its 6,000-plus stability force in Bosnia this year to 2,500 as the tiny Balkans country gradually recovered from a 1992-95 war.

''And most EU nations are in a process of transformation, and their forces are increasingly deployable and sustainable,'' said Bentegeat, who began a three-year term as chief of the military committee in Brussels last November.

Bentegeat's assessment of the growing readiness of European armies to take a greater burden of security tasks contrasts with the general perception in Washington that Europe can still do more -- notably within NATO-led peacekeeping in Afghanistan.

The EU is preparing to send more than 1,000 civilian personnel to help with policing and the rule of law in the UN-administered Serbian province of Kosovo once its future status is set later this year. There are also plans for a smaller police training operation in Afghanistan in coming months.

No new EU military missions have been announced as yet but analysts point to a range of possible conflicts -- from Darfur and Somalia in Africa to nearer home -- which may ultimately require some kind of European involvement.

''The enlargement of the EU brings it closer to the arc of instability that runs around its eastern, southeastern and southern flanks,'' Daniel Keohane, defence analyst for the London-based Centre of European Reform, said of the EU entry on January 1 of Black Sea nations Romania and Bulgaria.

''It is bound to become more involved in countries such as Belarus, Georgia and Algeria,'' he said, noting the EU strategy for dealing with such neighbours would have to include a military component alongside trade, aid and political dialogue.

Reuters AB RS2239