Updates to NATO/ISAF Troop levels in Afghanistan

Yesterday's entry discussed the reluctance of many ISAF members to send additional troops to Afghanistan, with various news services claiming that Germany and Australia were not planning to send any additional troops to Afghanistan.

My European fans would beg to differ, apparently. I wound up with a few articles in my inbox, many of which I had to run through Google Translator, as they were mostly in German.

Here are some quotes from a few articles in the European press regarding NATO and ISAF troop levels. Please excuse the fact that I had to run these through Google Translator, so the wording may not be great. In some areas, I tried to clean up the English language translation. I hope I got it right. In sum, Australia, Germany, and a few other countries will be debating increasing their commitments to the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. Also of note is that NATO is claiming that there are an additional 7,000 non-US NATO troops being added to the ISAF contingent. Again, I wonder if this offsets the loss of the Canadians and the Dutch (assuming they are going to leave as soon as they claim they will).

Two dozen NATO countries have pledged yesterday at the Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels, 7,000 extra forces for the ISAF Protection Force in the Hindu Kush - a large proportion of them are trainers for the Afghan police and army. This followed that the appeal of U.S. President Barack Obama, who wants to increase the U.S. troop contingent by 30,000. ISAF currently has 71,000 soldiers, in Afghanistan. With the reinforcement, it would be 108,000.

Another article from a German news source:

Rasmussen has not said the precise commitments of the countries. Known so far is that Italy will send 1140 soldiers, Georgia 920, and Poland 680. Britain and South Korea wanted to increase their troop levels by 500 and 250 respectively. Slovakia, Albania, Croatia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Turkey, Armenia, Australia, Finland, Macedonia, Sweden and Ukraine also pledged reinforcements.

Another article from what appears to be the same newspaper (excuse the Google Translation):

The [German] government will decide at the end of January about a possible increase in German troop levels. First, the Afghanistan conference in London aims to provide information about how the international application is to design the future and when it can be terminated. Greens and the Left refuse to send more troops to Afghanistan, because they believe that more troops will not solve the problem. 4300 German soldiers are currently deployed in Afghanistan.