Downing Street Says » Afghanistan

» Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Afghanistan

Asked to comment on today’s Guardian splash which claimed that the UK was consulting Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other countries in order to set up a counter-insurgency coalition to combat al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in the south of Afghanistan once US forces withdrew next year, the PMOS said that he was as mystified to see the story on the Guardian’s front page today as he had been to see a report on the same issue on ITN last night. He pointed out that this had first been announced in June 2004 at the Istanbul NATO Summit, at which we had said that the UK would take over command of ISAF from May 2006 to February 2007 and that we would deploy the Headquarters element of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC).

Final details of the expansion to the south and east were still being planned. However, it was important to recognise that it had always been the intention to expand into the south. Therefore, the suggestion that, in some way, it was a result of a deterioration in the security situation in Afghanistan was clearly untrue. Questioned as to whether the UK was consulting with Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the PMOS said that we were continuing discussions with our allies, as you would expect. However, we had no intention of providing a running commentary on them.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.