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UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown - Source: Reuters -
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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, his slim chances of re-election undermined by attacks on his Afghan policy, told critics that bringing peace to Afghanistan would make Britain a safer place.
Brown is under fire from opposition Conservatives, the media and retired generals who accuse him of putting British soldiers' lives at risk in Afghanistan by failing to give them enough helicopters or sufficiently robust vehicles to survive roadside bombs.
He suffered a further blow when a parliamentary defence aide resigned on Thursday in protest at the government's strategy.
Britain has 9,000 troops battling Taliban insurgents, the second largest foreign contingent after the United States.
Polls suggest public opinion is increasingly against the conflict after some 50 British soldiers were killed there in the last four months. Further heavy British casualties could damage Brown in a national election due by next June which the opposition Conservatives are on track to win.
Brown justifies the British presence in Afghanistan by saying three quarters of terror plots in Britain originate in the mountain areas of Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan.
"When the security of our country is at stake we cannot walk away," he said in a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank in London.
"We cannot just do nothing and leave the peoples of Pakistan and Afghanistan to struggle with these global problems on their own. A safer Britain requires a safer Afghanistan."
Broadside
Eric Joyce resigned as a parliamentary aide to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth on Thursday with a stinging broadside against Brown's Afghan policy.
Joyce, a member of Brown's Labour Party and a former army officer, said he did not believe the British public would accept for much longer the argument that British forces needed to be in Afghanistan to stop terror attacks in Britain.
Joyce called for a timetable for reducing British forces in Afghanistan and urged the government to say clearly that many of its allies were not pulling their weight.
The government said on Thursday that two more British soldiers had died in Afghanistan, bringing the total to 212.
The Taliban are unable to defeat the more than 100,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan in head-on fighting, but aim to force their withdrawal by weakening Western support for the war by inflicting casualties with roadside and suicide bombs.
Brown argued the British government was giving its troops the resources they need in Afghanistan, saying British spending per soldier fighting there had more than doubled since 2006.
Britain will have succeeded in Afghanistan "when our troops are coming home because the Afghans are doing the job themselves," he said. During a visit to British soldiers in Afghanistan on Saturday, Brown called for accelerated efforts to train Afghan soldiers and police.
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