London, Jan 9, IRNA – British troops may be on the verge of leaving such government outposts as Sangin in Helmand province as thousands of American reinforcements pour into Afghanistan, it was reported Saturday.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government is expected to make a decision within the next six weeks on returning to the areas first envisioned for UK troops to be deployed four years ago, according to the Times newspaper.
British troops were supposed to focus on the five districts around Lashkar Gah, where most of Helmand’s population lives, in 2006, but the plan was said to have been abandoned under pressure from President Hamid Karzai and provincial governors.
The result has been that the majority of the 246 British troops killed and hundreds more injured in Afghanistan were suffered in the upper reaches of Helmand valley in Sangin, Musa Qala and Kajaki and the poppy fields around them.
The Times reported that British defence chiefs are considering to concentrate on securing the centre of the war-torn province, while ceding control of other areas to the US as part of President Barack Obama’s ‘surge’ plans.
“There is now a mismatch between the proportion of Nato forces, between the US and the UK, in Helmand, and the proportion of the population that they are trying to protect,” the Conservative’s shadow foreign secretary William Hague has said.
“The British [have] one third of the forces but they [are] trying to protect 70 per cent of the population,” Hague said during a two-day visit to Afghanistan this wek.
But senior military officers were said to be concerned that handing responsibility for Sangin to the Americans would echo the British withdrawal from Basra, which precipitated a massive US and Iraqi operation to clear the city of insurgents.
British troops were left humiliated when they were almost entirely frozen out of the so-called Charge of the Knights operation in Basra in March 2008.