Brown talks to Karzai, vows effort against Taliban

Updated at: 1334 PST, Sunday, December 13, 2009
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday vowed a renewed effort to defeat the Taliban insurgency and hailed the next months as critical during a visit to Afghanistan. Brown arrived on a previously unannounced visit two weeks after ordering 500 extra British troops into the war alongside a surge of 30,000 American forces as part of a sweeping new US strategy to turn around the eight-year war. He held talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at a military base in Kandahar, the southern province where the Taliban was born and one of the deadliest battlefields for NATO and US troops since the 2001 US-led invasion. "I think it's very important to say that the combined effort of allied forces with the Afghan government is the way we will defeat the insurgency, the way we will stop Al-Qaeda having any space to operate in Afghanistan," he told a news conference with Karzai. "I think the next few months are obviously critical," Brown earlier told reporters travelling with him.