(Adds Pentagon comments, paragraphs 8-11, 17-18) BRUSSELS, March 13 (Reuters) - The United States is urging NATO allies at a summit next month to sign up to a five-year plan stepping up efforts to end the insurgency in Afghanistan, according to a document obtained by Reuters. Under the plan, alliance members would commit to plug troop shortfalls and supply enough well-trained and flexible forces to combat insurgents, while providing the support, training and equipment needed by Afghanistan's own security forces. The U.S. proposals also set out benchmarks for measuring success, such as the ability of Afghanistan to hold elections undisrupted by violence, and to field a trained army of 70,000 troops and a professionalized 82,000-strong police force. While they do not explicitly refer to the refusal of allies such as Germany to send troops to the thick of the fighting in south Afghanistan, the proposals call on allies to acknowledge a need to "share the burden" of the battle. The Afghan mission is the toughest ground war faced by the 59-year-old alliance and has led to open differences among allies over tactics and troop levels of its 43,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The proposed U.S. plan is part of an input paper for a "strategic vision statement" to be unveiled at an April 2-4 summit in Bucharest affirming NATO's long-term commitment to defeating the Taliban-led insurgency. Alliance diplomats in Brussels are drafting the statement and say the final version is far from finished. The U.S. paper is dated Feb. 3 but a source familiar with the U.S. position said it still closely represented U.S. thinking. NATO staff are due to deliver the latest version of the statement to U.S. officials on Friday, said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. Morrell would not comment on the content of the proposed U.S. plan or the current NATO draft. 'WORK IN PROGRESS' But he said NATO has not yet addressed all issues the United States hopes to cover in the statement. He would not say where differences remain. "This is still very much a work in progress and may very well require several additional drafts before we get to Bucharest," he said. The U.S. paper calls on NATO partners to commit to develop a five-year security plan but offers no target date for an exit of NATO troops, instead saying peace could take time. "ISAF and the international community must agree to make a long-term commitment to Afghanistan," the paper says. "Success in Afghanistan is nothing less than a test of our solidarity and commitment to each other and to our values. ... Failure would show that the will of the NATO allies is one of short-duration, close-to-home and non-risky engagements." Morrell stressed the benchmarks the Pentagon is seeking should be set by the Afghan government. Asked if there was agreement among the allies on that point, he would not comment directly. "Anytime you're working with as many different nations as you work with when you're in NATO, this is a fluid, evolving, sometimes difficult process," he said. (Writing by Mark John; Editing by Xavier Briand)
A British soldier keeps watch at the site of a bomb attack in Kabul March 13, 2008. A suicide car bomber killed six Afghan civilians in an attack on U.S. troops ...
