Miliband to follow up Brown's Afghan speech
Updated on 17 November 2009
Following Gordon Brown's call last night for a "clear timetable" for the withdrawal of troops from the country, Foreign Secretary David Miliband speaks on the UK's mission in Afghanistan.
The prime minister used his annual Lord Mayor's banquet foreign affairs speech to offer London as the venue for international talks in 2010 on the handover of power.
Mr Miliband is expected to further outline the government's position in his address the final day of the Nato parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh.
Writing ahead of last night's speech, Channel 4 News Political Editor Gary Gibbon blogged: "Gordon Brown's team feel he must get across to ordinary folk a sense that the Afghanistan military mission does not just grind on forever but is governed by a plan and has an ending."
Mr Brown told his audience at the Lord Mayor's banquet: "The international community will meet to agree plans for the support we will provide to Afghanistan during this next phase."
"I have offered London as a venue in the New Year. I want that conference to chart a comprehensive political framework within which the military strategy can be accomplished.
"It should identify a process for transferring, district by district, to full Afghan control and, if at all possible, set a timetable for transfer starting in 2010.
"For it is only when the Afghans are themselves able to defend the security of their people and deny the territory of Afghanistan as a base for terrorists that our strategy of Afghanisation will have succeeded and our troops can come home."
The speech was the latest effort to shore up public support for the war after a series of recent opinion polls showing strong backing for UK troops to be withdrawn.
Mr Brown's comments came as it was announced that another British soldier had been killed in an explosion in Afghanistan, the 97th British death there this year.
