Since taking office this year, Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has repeatedly said that NATO cannot be allowed to fail in Afghanistan.

The situation in the war-ravaged central Asian nation will top the agenda at the NATO heads of state and government summit to be held in Istanbul on June 28 and 29.

Yet nine months after the UN authorised the extension of peacekeeping troops into the provinces, almost nothing has changed on the ground in Afghanistan.

Commanded by NATO under a UN mandate, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) numbers close to 6,500 soldiers from more than 30 countries. Of this number, only 250 are stationed outside the capital, Kabul.

Head of the force in Afghanistan, Canadian Lieutenant General Rick Hillier, said last week he believed the expansion would come within days.

"NATO said it is going to expand," he said.

"It said it was going to do that by the Istanbul summit. I assume NATO will do what it said it was going to do."

Expansion would occur first in the northern regions of Mazar-i-Sharif and Meymanah, areas which have both recently experienced factional fighting, he added.

The peacekeeping expansion plan calls for small numbers of troops, grouped into provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), to be placed in northern towns and provided with a network of support, including air capabilities, emergency medical evacuation and quick response teams.

NATO plans for five of these 200-person teams to be installed in the north and northwest ahead of Afghanistan's landmark democratic elections scheduled for September.

The alliance controls only one such team so far, a German group of 250 soldiers stationed in the northeastern town of Kunduz.

But the teams are no guarantee of improved security. In the past fortnight, 11 Chinese road construction workers and an Afghan guard were shot dead by unknown gunmen in Kunduz, while last week a remote-controlled roadside bomb targeted a vehicle belonging to the German team and killed the Afghan driver and three bystanders, including two children.

The Afghan government, the UN and other humanitarian organisations have repeatedly called for the peacekeeping force to be extended and more troops deployed here as Afghanistan enters a critical phase in development ahead of elections.

The slow expansion of NATO outside the capital "is a source of frustration for the Afghans, for us, and, I'm sure, for ISAF itself," UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said in late May.

Yet so far NATO and non-NATO nations have been slow to commit troops and dollars to this quest.

"A failure for NATO is unimaginable but this is something that faces us unless the 26 countries think very seriously, very quickly about their mission in Afghanistan," the head of NATO's parliamentary assembly, Doug Bereuter warned last month.

According to one Kabul-based western diplomat, NATO wanted to install a quick reaction force of 2,000 to 3,000 men in Afghanistan.

"But NATO didn't get sufficient resources... so they will have to content themselves with a sprinkling of micro-PRTs," the man, who asked not to be named, said.

All these issues will be discussed at the upcoming summit.

"This will be a summit designed to allow NATO to save face," said one European diplomat, who asked not to be named.

Scheffer has already suggested NATO needs to reform its decision-making process to end the "intolerable" situation of the alliance having to beg member states to provide troops for operations.

"I don't mind taking out my begging bowl once in a while. But as a standard operating procedure, this is simply intolerable," he said recently.

WAR.WIRE