Gordon Brown vows renewed effort to defeat Taliban in Afghanistan

British prime minister Gordon Brown vowed a renewed effort to defeat the Taliban insurgency during a visit to Afghanistan today and hailed the next few months as critical.

Brown arrived on 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 was born and one of the deadliest battlefields for NATO and US troops since the 2001 US-led invasion.
 
"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 had earlier told reporters travelling with him. "What we need to show is... a determination to take on the Taliban and weaken them," Brown said.

The extra deployment, which will boost the number of British forces in Afghanistan to over 10,000, would arrive "in the next few days," he added.

The prime minister held over an hour of talks with Karzai, who is under huge Western pressure to clamp down on corruption and form a transparent government after winning a controversial election mired in fraud in August.