Angry Afghan villagers approach a ramshackle teahouse and begin to remonstrate with a guard of German soldiers. Almost unnoticed, a lone man enters the village square and moves deftly towards the protesters, whose raised voices are suddenly drowned out by a shattering explosion.

Two bloodied bodies sink prostrate to the ground amid a collection of torn limbs and the bomber’s severed head as the soldiers clamber hurriedly into their vehicles.

Fortunately for the Bundeswehr’s 37th mechanised infantry division this incident was not the work of Taliban insurgents but a simulation cooked up by German military planners at the Altmarkt military base in eastern Germany.

It is the soldiers’ final chance to adapt to Afghanistan’s challenges before deployment in Nato’s 62,000-strong International Security Assistance Force.

“I'm really looking forward to getting out there,” said Hauptmann Sean Miller before his first deployment to Germany’s base in Faizabad, in northern Afghanistan, which began last month.

Such enthusiasm for the Afghan mission is common among the German army but rare among the country's political leaders and wider public. An ARD poll published on Friday found that two-thirds of Germans want their soldiers to pull out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, with only a third in favour of staying put.

This coolness could dampen the celebrations of Nato’s 60th anniversary which began on Friday night in Baden-Baden, south-west Germany. High on the agenda will be Barack Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan, with the US president calling for allies to commit more resources and personnel to the struggle against the Taliban.

The US has pledged an additional 21,000 troops but there is little likelihood that Germany will make a similar gesture. It says it is doing more than many of its European allies in training Afghan security forces and is already the third biggest contributor to Isaf after the US and the UK.

“We Germans can be proud of our achievements since 2002 in the context of the alliance,” Angela Merkel, chancellor, told parliament last week, promising to defend this track record “forcefully” at the summit.

Berlin has already sent another 600 soldiers to provide security in the run-up to the Afghan election, bringing its current troop level to 4,100.

Franz Josef Jung, defence minister, told a meeting of foreign reporters last week that Robert Gates, his US counterpart, had reacted positively to the Bundes­wehr’s engagement in Afghanistan.

Berlin has dispatched 140 police and training experts and has promised to increase this number as it rolls out “mentoring teams” district by district. It will also establish more military training units, with the aim of becoming the first regional command to meet its Nato obligations. Finally it has pledged to increase its funding for civil reconstruction this year from €140m ($188m, £127m) to €170.7m. But while there is broad agreement between the US and Germany on many strategic issues, such as the need for a “comprehensive approach” to co-ordinate security and development, a regional strategy and a “civilian surge”, Berlin’s efforts are still likely to be found wanting in some eyes.

A perception remains that German troops are too few, they are confined to the comparatively safe north of the country and they are prevented from taking part in offensive missions. Meanwhile, strict rules of engagement dictate that German troops can fire only if fired on, prompting a joke among US soldiers that Isaf stands for “I Saw Americans Fight”.

The fact that Berlin is unlikely to budge on these issues may be clear to the US, which has so far not tabled a specific demand for more troops, officials say.

This reluctance to put German soldiers in harm’s way is partly a legacy of history. The idea that the Bundeswehr should be deployed abroad was still controversial until 1999 when parliament agreed to send 8,500 soldiers to join the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.

German forces are still there as well as in Bosnia, Georgia, Sudan and Congo and in waters off the Horn of Africa and Lebanon. 

Given these commitments, some German politicians argue that the Bundeswehr risks running out of capacity. “It wouldn’t be easy to send more troops,” says Ruprecht Polenz, a Christian Democrat who chairs the parliamentary foreign affairs committee.

Others give this suggestion short shrift, noting that Germany has about 200,000 professional soldiers at its disposal. “Saying ‘we can’t send any more’ is objectively false,” says Bernhard Gertz, former head of the Bundeswehrverband, a kind of trade union for German soldiers. “If you don’t want to send more troops . . . then you have to say why.”

Defence experts argue that a lack of discussion about why the Bundeswehr is in Afghanistan is at the root of the mission’s unpopularity at home.

Having initially underplayed the dangers, politicians have difficulty explaining why 31 German soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, meaning they may try to ignore the subject in this year’s federal election campaign as Ms Merkel’s coalition partner, the Social Democratic party, fights to prevent supporters abandoning it for the anti-war Left party.