Britain’s new government publicly assured the US on Tuesday that it remains committed to its central role in the war in Afghanistan, despite heavy losses in what US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called the “absolute middle of the thick of the fight.”
Britain’s new coalition government is considered less invested in the eight-year Afghan war than its Labour predecessor, and eager to offer an exit plan to a public increasingly impatient with the stalemate.
British Secretary of State for Defense Minister Liam Fox said that upon taking the job last month, “the first question I asked myself was, ‘Should we be in Afghanistan?’”
PHOTO: AFP
“The answer had to be, of course, yes. We still have a national security imperative,” Fox said.
That was a relief to Gates, who was standing beside Fox following a meeting that also focused on the Iranian nuclear threat.
US President Barack Obama’s administration needs Britain most among its allies in Afghanistan as it expands the war this year and then looks for ways to shrink it next year.
With 9,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, Britain has the second-largest number of troops in the war after the US. Britain helps manage the war’s heaviest fighting across southern Afghanistan and has also been a leader in recruiting help for the war from NATO nations, where the fight has always been unpopular.
“We’re committed to seeing it through to resolution,” Fox said.
Gates praised British forces for bravery and resolve in volatile Helmand Province.
“British soldiers are in the absolute thick of the middle of the fight,” Gates said.
However, he said that it was up to the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to assess whether US troops are needed to complement the British units in Helmand.
Gates said the Sangin district, which British troops dubbed “Sangingrad” after intense fighting three years ago, is “one of the toughest areas in all of Afghanistan.”
With a dam in the area needed to provide electricity to the local population, Gates said the district — which lies on the eastern edge of Helmand — carried strategic importance.
It was an area that “we cannot turn our backs on,” he said.
Fox all but dismissed the notion that British forces might be asked to expand to Kandahar Province as the US-dominated coalition expands the war there this summer.
Meanwhile, Gates voiced confidence yesterday that sufficient progress would be made in the war in Afghanistan to allow Afghan forces to take more authority in parts of the country this winter.
Gates predicted “a very tough summer” of growing violence as US forces push deeper into Kandahar Province. However, he said McChrystal was “pretty confident that by the end of the year he will be able to point to sufficient progress that validates the strategy and justifies to continue to work at this.”
Gates said the transition to greater Afghan control would begin in areas where security has improved and progress has been made in “civil governance — the ability to deliver some measure of a rule of law and government services to people.”
“The ground has to be ready on both the civilian and the military sides to begin the transition process,” he said in London. “I am pretty confident that we will, in fact, be able to begin that process sometime this coming winter in various parts of Afghanistan.”
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