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Britain admits forces stretched
04/09/2006 12:38 - (SA)
London - Britain's new army chief warned on Monday that the country's military was stretched to its very limits, as authorities reeled from a deadly weekend plane crash and a new attack by Taliban insurgents.
General Richard Dannat, who took over from General Mike Jackson last week, told the daily Guardian that the army can barely cope with the demands placed on it.
"We are running hot, certainly running hot ... Can we cope? I pause. I say 'just'," he told the newspaper, referring to deployments of British troops in global hotspots dominated by the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His comments came as military investigators continued to probe the cause of Saturday's crash of a Royal Air Force Nimrod MR2 reconnaissance plane over Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
The tragedy was the single biggest loss of the country's soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq since the US-led war on terror was launched in November 2001, prompting renewed debate about the mission there.
Then on Monday a car bomb exploded near a British military patrol in the Afghan capital Kabul, killing four Afghans and wounding four British soldiers, police and the Nato force said.
No timetable for withdrawal
Afghan police called the blast a suicide attack and said a foreign soldier had been killed, but the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) could not immediately confirm either report.
The British army chief insisted in the Guardian interview that the armed forces would be in Afghanistan for "the long term".
But when asked about whether other Nato countries should contribute more troops, Dannat said Britain was doing "more than its share of what is required in Afghanistan".
Asked about the hopes of some senior British soldiers that the number of British forces in Iraq could be halved by the middle of 2007, Dannat stressed that those possibilities had been described as a "hope" and pointed out that previous hopes about Iraq had not been fulfilled.
He also declined to set a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.
He added that the army was "meeting challenges on the hoof" but refused to comment on whether the current budget allocation for defence was sufficient.
The weekend plane crash brought the number of British armed forces personnel deaths in Afghanistan since the start of operations against the hardline Taliban regime to 36, including 15 in combat.
One report on Monday suggested that the crash was caused by an on-board fire.
According to The Times, citing an unnamed military source, a short circuit inside the aircraft caused a spark leading to a fire, with smoke engulfing the work stations of the men on board.
- AFP
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