UK troops to leave deadly district

British troops will hand over control of the violence-wracked Sangin area of southern Afghanistan to US forces by the end of the year, British Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced Wednesday.

The Sangin valley, a restive spot of sustained fierce tribal strife and booming opium trading, has reportedly been one of the deadliest regions, where 99 of the 312 UK soldiers have perished in the nine-year war.

Fox said the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force would restructure its op-erations in southern Afghanistan "so that it can consolidate a US Marine brigade in northern Helmand that will assume responsibility for security in Sangin later this year.

He stressed that the move was a logical redeployment, and not a withdrawal, because there were now more US troops in the area following President Barack Obama's troop surge.

The announcement came as the newly appointed commander of US troops in Afghanistan, US General David Petraeus, said Tuesday that a review of the original Afghan plan at the year's end would herald significant adjustments and a possible postponement of the mapped-out military draw-down starting next summer.

Peng Guangqian, a military strategist at the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, cautioned about the potential risks of a premature exit from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

"An untimely pullout strategy will result in a security vacuum and deteriorate the situation by fanning the Taliban insurgency and extremists," Peng told the Global Times.

Meanwhile, Afghan Taliban Wednesday claimed credit for British troops' planned pullout and warned that the US forces set to take over the troubled region will face "the same fate."

"This is the start of the British forces' defeat in Afghanistan," said Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, reading what he said was a statement by Mullah Omar, the militant group's fugitive leader. "We defeated them in Sangin. They'll be defeated in the rest of the country soon."

Britain's anti-war campaigners, Stop The War Coalition, said the Sangin redeployment was a tacit admission that the war in Afghanistan was failing.

Citing the British casualties in Sangin, they said, "Many people will be asking what exactly they died for."

AFP - Global Times