Brown Steals Obama’s Show

Great Britain will increase its troop contingent in Afghanistan by 500 to a total of 9,500 soldiers. The prime minister made the announcement yesterday afternoon. In an address to the House of Commons, he said that all preconditions for the troop increase had been met. First, sufficient materiel to support the soldiers was assured, and second, eight NATO states other than Great Britain and the United States had promised to send additional troops. He did not identify those nations.

Beyond that, Afghan President Hamid Karzai will take part in the Afghanistan Conference scheduled for January 28 in London. He is expected to make a commitment to train 50,000 additional soldiers and send them into Helmand Province, permitting a gradual reduction in foreign troops in an area where 98 British soldiers were killed this year alone.

The goal of the conference is to set a binding schedule for the handover of security to the Afghan army. That could begin as early as the beginning of next year. By the end of 2010, the aim is to have five of the 34 Afghan provinces under local control.

Nations other than Afghanistan, its immediate neighbors and the NATO nations will also take part in the conference. Karzai is expected to lay out plans for the training of additional police forces and for combating corruption. Within nine months, 400 new regional governors and functionaries will be appointed.

At the Commonwealth Summit in Trinidad last weekend, Brown expressed his frustration that Pakistan’s government had thus far been unsuccessful in apprehending Osama bin Laden. “The Pakistan government has started to take on the Taliban and to take on Al Qaeda in South Waziristan, but we have got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September 11, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama bin Laden, nobody has been able to get close to Zawahiri, the number two of Al Qaeda,” he said. Pakistan’s High Commissioner in Great Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, rejected Brown’s accusations saying, “We are doing what we could. We have carried out two very big military operations at enormous cost to the country,” adding, “What do people want?”

Last week, the U.S. Senate criticized the previous administration in a report, saying it had missed an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden at the end of 2001, allowing him to escape to Pakistan. The report said the failure laid the groundwork that resulted in both the Afghanistan war and the London bomb attacks in 2005.

Immediately after his address, Brown prepared for a video-conference with President Obama, who will present his new Afghanistan strategy to an audience at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday evening. He will, in all likelihood, send an additional 35,000 troops to Afghanistan, nearly as many as originally requested by Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal, who submitted a report recommending a more complex military and political strategy to allow the U.S to begin withdrawing troops by 2013. Brown welcomed McChrystal’s recommendation, but is not happy that Obama took so long to respond to it. That’s why he now has no qualms about stealing Obama’s thunder.