British forces are to be pulled out of the Sangin district of Afghanistan, the scene of heavy UK casualties since the deployment of soldiers to Helmand Province in 2006.
British Defence Secretary Liam Fox was scheduled to announce yesterday that British troops would be replaced by US soldiers as part of a reconfiguration of coalition forces in the area.
Of 312 British service personnel to have died in Afghanistan since operations began there in 2001, 99 were killed in the town of Sangin and the surrounding area. It has witnessed some of the fiercest fighting the British military has endured since World War II.
The area is particularly dangerous because it contains a patchwork of rival tribes and is a major center for Afghanistan’s opium-growing trade.
Political sources said the news would be presented as part of a reorganization of coalition forces in Helmand. Britain will concentrate on the center of the province, leaving the north and south to the US.
It is understood the withdrawal of British troops, which number about 1,000 in Sangin, will not begin for several months.
There has been a long debate in the British military about whether holding Sangin is worth the cost in terms of British casualties. It was argued that Britain did not need to hold the outpost of Sangin, and that British intelligence had been unable to get a grip on the tribal structure in the area.
About a third of all British forces’ casualties in Afghanistan have been in this area of operations. Only one tenth of Britain’s forces in Afghanistan are deployed there. The Royal Marines are currently holding the post.
One source said of the decision to withdraw: “I hope it will not be portrayed as a retreat. There may be people in the media who want to do that. It is a consolidation of UK forces so that we can get the proper density of UK forces in central Helmand.”
The US has been pouring extra troops into Helmand, making it easier for British forces to pull out of vulnerable outposts. However, there has also been an admission that the British have been unable to crack the complex tribal structure in the area making it hard to cut deals with the key players, and so protect UK forces.
The announcement of a British redeployment will raise questions about the whole Sangin operation by critics who believe the UK did not need to base its forces there in the first place.
It is understood that the redeployment was discussed with the US President Barack Obama, when he and British Prime Minister David Cameron held a bilateral meeting in Toronto on the margins of the G20 summit.
Cameron has always been sceptical about the value of the Sangin deployment, and recognizes that it has undermined fragile UK support for the Afghanistan operation.
Sangin has a long history of being troublesome for foreign troops. It was the scene of the first major military engagement in the south of the country during the second Anglo-Afghan war of 1878, when the British fought a cavalry battle against 1,500 fighters.
Meanwhile, former armed forces chief General Richard Dannatt told BBC radio: “The intention when we went into southern Afghanistan was to try to get the country on its feet economically. We all know it didn’t turn out that way.
“We spread our small resources thinly and that inevitably made the small number of British soldiers like flies in a honey pot and we got into this cycle of fighting,” he said.
In other developments, Afghan police said yesterday that six Afghan officers were killed in a NATO air strike in Ghazni Province.
NATO “friendly fire” on an army post killed the six late on Tuesday, in an incident that the US-led NATO force said it was investigating.
The air strike was aimed at Taliban militants, said Nawruz Ali Mohamoodzada, a provincial police official, but it mistakenly hit the army post.
NATO also announced that three NATO soldiers, whose nationalities were not given, died on Tuesday in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.
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