Brown outlines steps to bring troops home
Updated on 28 January 2010
Prime Minister Gordon Brown tells Krishnan Guru Murthy that British troops will be brought home from Afghanistan by 2011 "if the Afghan army is strong enough".
"If the Afghan army is strong enough and if the Afghan police force is able to deliver security control to Afghanistan, then we want that to make it possible for British troops to come home," he said.
"But my first interest is the security of our own country - preventing terrorists threatening our country - so we have got to be pretty satisfied that the Afghans are going to be able to do the job.
"We're training them, we're putting a lot of money into partnering with them so that they can actually lead in some of the activities that our army is involved in. But the whole coalition knows it is the quality of the Afghan effort that will dictate whether we can reduce our presence."
On President Karzai's plan to tempt militants to defect from the Taliban with money, land and jobs, Mr Brown said: "There are those in the Taliban who are ideologically committed to a war base on an extreme view, a perverted view of Islam. There is no reconciliation with these people - that will not happen.
"But there are people who are associated with the insurgency who are local people, tribal people, young people who have got involved in this, who, if they are persuaded to leave the insurgency, if they renounce violence, if they join democratic politics, if they are prepared to sign up to the Afghan constitution, then it is right that we try to help them out of their association with the Taliban.
"It's a reflection of the weakness of the Taliban, their inability to make progress, the division within them that this process would represent.
"Our job is to build the Afghan forces so that they can have security control of their country and take on the Taliban. Once we can do that, then that is the point at which our soldiers can start coming home."
'Coming out of recession'
On the UK economy's emergence from recession, Mr Brown said: "We are coming out of recession, we are seeing some employment growth, we saw unemployment falling in two months. This is a very, very difficult process around the world. We've had a global financial recession. We've taken the action that is necessary.
"What we are seeing is a government that has been able to take people through difficult recessions, able to take people through without the same loss of jobs and the same mortgage repossessions we've had in the past.
"Now our task is to get the growth broadened across the economy, more balanced than it was. And you can see in these figures that while the financial sector is still very, very weak indeed, that some of our manufacturing and service sectors are starting to recover.
"We, Britain, have the basis in the new industries of the future…that the world wants to buy from us to build successful growth in the next few years."
Evidence at the Iraq inquiry
On the appearance of his predecessor, Tony Blair, at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war tomorrow, Mr Brown insisted that on the basis of the evidence "we made the decisions that any government would have made".
"I'm happy, and welcome the chance to go before the Chilcot inquiry, just as Tony Blair is going before the Chilcot inquiry tomorrow. And I'm happy to answer any of the questions and set out not only what we had to do, but also what, since I became prime minister, we had to do also to bring our troops home from Iraq as we have successfully done."
