The Nato mission in Afghanistan will not succeed unless more troops are sent to the south, where the Taleban is concentrated, defence ministers were told yesterday. The claim was made by Søren Gade, the Danish Defence Minister, at the start of a two-day meeting in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.

On a joint visit to Kabul and Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taleban and the main city in the south, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, took up the same theme. Dr Rice said that more troops were needed “to give enough military power to do what needs to be done on the front end [the south] of the counter-insurgency effort”. At Kandahar airfield, Dr Rice told a gathering of troops that they were involved in a fight that would “transform history”.

After Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, said at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the alliance was split between those nations “willing to fight and die to protect people's security and others who are not”, desperate efforts were made yesterday to prevent Nato breaking up into a “two-tiered” organisation. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato Secretary-General, pleaded with the defence ministers to tone down their criticisms. It was also pointed out that in the previous 12 months the Nato force in Afghanistan had increased in size by 8,900 troops and that some countries, including France and Poland, had said that they were considering sending more soldiers.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, also tried to ease tensions. “Of the 25 [Nato] countries who have deployable forces, 12 of them are represented in the south and southeast of Afghanistan. So the sense that a small number of countries are doing this out of the alliance is not right,” he said, adding that France was also prepared to deploy in the south “in small but significant numbers”.

However, the ministers were aware that unless other alliance countries agree to send fighting troops to help out their colleagues in the three southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan, Canada and possibly the Netherlands may withdraw their soldiers from the south. Peter Mackay, the Canadian Defence Minister, said in Vilnius that the alliance had to return to an “all-for-one approach”. He repeated the threat to pull Canada's 2,500 troops out of Kandahar next year unless allies provided an extra 1,000 troop reinforcements.

In an hour-long session with President Karzai in Kabul, Mr Miliband and Dr Rice referred to recent criticisms made by the Afghan leader that the security situation in Helmand province worsened after the British troops arrived in spring 2006. However, at a press conference with his two visitors, President Karzai said that he had been misquoted. He said: “I'm terribly embarrassed that this has come up. That is not what I said. We appreciate the British role in Afghanistan.” He also expressed regret that Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon had not been appointed as United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, even though the Afghan leader personally blocked his candidacy, fearing that he would be too similar to a British colonial viceroy.

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