Brown urges 'clear timetable' for Afghan security handover

A “clear timetable” for the handover of security to Afghan forces could be agreed by January, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested in a fresh bid to reassure voters about the war.

Mr Brown has offered London as the venue for international talks in the New Year and raised the prospect it could begin to set out the road towards withdrawal.

“The international community will meet to agree plans for the support we will provide to Afghanistan during this next phase,” he said in his annual Mansion House foreign affairs address.

“I have offered London as a venue in the New Year. 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.

“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.”

The speech, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, was the latest part of a concerted drive to shore up public support for the war amid opinion polls showing strong backing for UK troops to be withdrawn.

It came as it was announced that another British soldier had been killed in an explosion in Afghanistan, the 97th British death there this year.

Mr Brown paid tribute to the bravery of the armed forces serving in Afghanistan but renewed his insistence that the mission remained vital to protecting the UK from the threat of terror.

And he said that security chiefs believed there was an opportunity to inflict “significant and long-lasting damage to al Qaida” after unprecedented successes against its leadership this year.

The Prime Minister restated his confidence that Nato and other allies could be persuaded to commit further resources to the conflict.

Britain has pledged to provide a 500-strong reinforcement to help train up Afghan security forces if partner nations will share the burden.

But US President Barack Obama is still to make a decision over whether to meet his top general’s call for tens of thousands of additional American forces.