LONDON - British defence chiefs warned the government to pull up to half of the countryÂ’s troops out of Iraq to help boost its campaign in Afghanistan against a resurgent Taleban, a newspaper reported on Sunday.In a message delivered six months ago to then defence secretary John Reid by the then head of the British army, General Mike Jackson, military chiefs warned that the soldiers stationed in Iraq should be withdrawn by May 2007, The Observer weekly said.
The warning followed a detailed analysis by strategic planners concerned by the pressure on British troops — they concluded that the army could cope with military engagements in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the short-term. However, “if we continue to have the same level of need for forces in Iraq, it will be difficult to find the number and types of troops needed to make Afghanistan a success,” an unnamed military source told the newspaper.
The same source told The Observer that the message conveyed by General Jackson to Reid was that “somewhere between one-third and one-half of our operational troops in Iraq should be brought out by next May”.
A spokeswoman for Britain’s defence ministry told AFP: ”Allegations that John Reid was advised that it was necessary to withdraw troops from Iraq to deploy to Afghanistan are false. Iraq and Afghanistan are separate operations but the planning for each fully factors in the planning for the other.”
| However it makes sense to pull some Brit troops from the south; it's not like they're stopping the Mahdi Army types anyway, and the whole idea is to turn security over to the Iraqis. |