British Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed a renewed effort to defeat the Taliban insurgency, hailing the next months as critical while meeting troops in Afghanistan on Sunday. Brown made an 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 were born and one of the deadliest battlefields for Nato and US troops since the 2001 US-led invasion.
In an unusual move, Brown spent a foggy night on the sprawling base in a simple room with limited heating, sharing a shower bloc and latrine with troops, before heading into a breakfast meeting with British commanders.
The prime minister inspected new military hardware, including drones, that London has dispatched to Afghanistan in a bid to counter controversy over alleged short supplies, and wished British troops Christmas greetings.
"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 told reporters travelling with him.
The extra deployment, which will boost the number of British forces in Afghanistan to more than 10,000, would arrive "in the next few days", he added. Brown said equipment for the British mission, which is the second-largest behind the US contingent, was "improving every day" and said the number of helicopters had doubled in the last three years.
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