While admitting US policy mistakes - and his own role in one of them - Mr Gates urged the allies to come together in the fight against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and said the credibility of Nato itself was at stake. -- PHOTO: AFP

While admitting US policy mistakes - and his own role in one of them - Mr Gates urged the allies to come together in the fight against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and said the credibility of Nato itself was at stake.

'We must not - we cannot - become a two-tiered alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not,' he told a gathering of security and military experts in Munich on Sunday. 'Such a development, with all its implications for collective security, would effectively destroy the alliance.'

His speech was the latest move in a campaign he has undertaken - sometimes quietly, sometimes through blunt public statements - to persuade Nato allies to supply more troops and resources for the mission.

Although France has indicated a willingness to send more troops, Germany has been adamant that it cannot do more.

Mr Gates said Nato could not afford 'the luxury' of letting some nations conduct less dangerous missions while others did more fighting and dying - a remark which appeared aimed at Germany, which confines its forces to the safer north of Afghanistan.

After his speech, several German politicians criticised Mr Gates, with one accusing him of public 'finger pointing', but the Pentagon chief said he had not meant to single out specific countries and called Germany 'a little overly sensitive'.

'This is a problem that the alliance has, not that any individual country has,' Mr Gates said. 'The finger was never pointed in Germany's direction.'

'False success'
Mr Gates expressed concern that Europeans did not fully comprehend the threat posed by Islamic extremism to the continent, conceding that public support for the war in Afghanistan was weak here.

Mr Gates branded Islamist militancy a movement built on 'false success', saying 'about the only thing they have accomplished recently is the deaths of thousands of innocent Muslims while trying to create discord across the Middle East'.

'What would happen if the false success they proclaim became real success - if they triumphed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or managed to topple the government of Pakistan? Or a major Middle Eastern government?' he asked.

'With safe havens in the Middle East, and new tactics honed on the battlefield and transmitted via the Internet, violence and terrorism worldwide could surge,' he said.

Mr Gates cited more than a dozen attacks or plots against European targets, including bombings in London and Madrid, and recalled the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

'Imagine if Islamic terrorists had managed to strike your capitals on the same scale as they struck in New York,' he said.

'For the United States, the lessons we have learned these past six years - and in many cases re-learned - have not been easy ones,' Mr Gates said. 'We have stumbled along the way, and we are still learning.'

Mr Gates said the Sept 11 attacks were especially poignant as the United States had been heavily involved in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to turn its back on the country after Soviet troops withdrew and it become a safe haven for Al-Qaeda.

He described the decision to abandon Afghanistan as 'a grievous error, for which I was at least partly responsible'.

Mr Gates was a senior official in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when it helped mujahideen guerrillas fight the Soviets and later served as US deputy national security adviser and then CIA director. -- REUTERS