Brown eyes Afghan summit to set handover timetable

By Alice Ritchie, AFP

LONDON (AFP) – Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered to host an international conference on Afghanistan in London, which he said could set a timeframe for a handover of security to Afghan forces from 2010.

In a speech here late on Monday, Brown stressed that such a handover was a requirement for the withdrawal of Britain's 9,000 troops deployed in the country.

"I have offered London as a venue in the new year," Brown said in his annual speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet. A pre-released version of the speech quoted him as offering to host a conference in January.

"I want that conference to chart a comprehensive political framework within which the military strategy can be accomplished.

"It should identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control and if at all possible set a timetable for transfer starting in 2010."

The Afghan mission is growing increasingly unpopular in some of the 42 countries that make up the 100,000-strong foreign contingent there, including 65,000 from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

Western leaders have insisted Afghan President Hamid Karzai tackle corruption as a condition for support in his second term which begins on Thursday.

Brown, tipped to lose next year's general election to the opposition, is facing mounting pressure over Britain's involvement in the war as the number of troops killed there rises.

Five soldiers were shot dead earlier this month by a "rogue" Afghan policeman they were helping to train -- marking a low point of the troops' involvement in the eight-year conflict.

Brown said handing over power to the Afghan army and police was a key element of bringing British troops home.

"For it is only when the Afghans are themselves able to defend the security of their people and deny the territory of Afghanistan as a base for terrorists that our strategy of Afghanisation will have succeeded and our troops can come home," he said.

He repeated his argument that the mission was key to preventing terror plots in Britain, saying international terrorism and in particular Osama Bin Laden's network remained the biggest threat to national security.

The prime minister said that "methodically and patiently, we are disrupting and disabling the existing leadership of Al-Qaeda".

"Since January 2008 seven of the top dozen figures in Al-Qaeda have been killed, depleting its reserve of experienced leaders and sapping its morale," he said.

"More has been planned and enacted with greater success in this one year to disable Al-Qaeda than in any year since the original invasion in 2001.

"We are in Afghanistan because we judge that if the Taliban regained power Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups would once more have an environment in which they could operate."

Opinion polls show an increasing majority of Britons want the country's 9,000 troops to pull out of Afghanistan within 12 months.

Brown pointed to the fact that Al-Qaeda, which once operated from within Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban, has been pushed into the border area with Pakistan.

But Al-Qaeda is still taking strength from "an extensive recruitment network across Africa the Middle East, Western Europe -- and in the UK," Brown said.

Brown said Britain must not retreat "into isolation" on foreign policy, but be both "patriotic and internationalist".

"As a nation we have every reason to be optimistic about our prospects: confident in our alliances, faithful to our values and determined as progressive pioneers to shape the world to come," he said.