Al-Qaeda on back foot, but still main threat: British PM

LONDON (AFP) – US-led forces in Afghanistan combined with the Pakistan army are "disrupting and disabling" Al-Qaeda's leadership, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday.

But in a speech strongly defending the country's military involvement in Afghanistan, Brown conceded that international terrorism remains the biggest threat to national security, singling out Osama bin Laden's network.

"The greatest immediate threat to our national security, the greatest current risk to British lives, is that of international terrorism," he said.

"Tonight I can report that, methodically and patiently, we are disrupting and disabling the existing leadership of Al-Qaeda.

"Since January 2008 seven of the top dozen figures in Al-Qaeda have been killed, depleting its reserve of experienced leaders and sapping its morale.

"More has been planned and enacted with greater success in this one year to disable Al-Qaeda than in any year since the original invasion in 2001.

"We are in Afghanistan because we judge that if the Taliban regained power Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups would once more have an environment in which they could operate."

Brown offered to host an international conference on Afghanistan in London in the new year after President Hamid Karzai is sworn in for a second term.

The conference should set a "comprehensive political framework" for the war-scarred country, and possibly a timeframe for military handover to Afghan forces starting next year, he said.

"I have offered London as a venue in the new year," he said.

"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."

The proposal comes as the international mission grows unpopular in some of the 42 countries that make up the 100,000-strong foreign contingent in Afghanistan, 65,000 from the NATO-led force.

Brown is facing mounting pressure at home over Britain's involvement in the war amid waning public support as British casualties mount. A soldier was shot dead in Afghanistan on Sunday, bringing the death toll this year to 97, with 234 dead since the 2001 invasion.

Opinion polls show an increasing majority of Britons want the country's 9,000 troops to pull out of Afghanistan within 12 months.

Brown pointed to the fact that Al-Qaeda, which once operated from within Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban, has been pushed into the border area with Pakistan.

The prime minister's spokesman told journalists ahead of the speech that Brown would emphasise that allied airstrikes and an offensive from the Pakistani army had left Al-Qaeda "on the back foot."

But Al-Qaeda is still taking strength from "an extensive recruitment network across Africa the Middle East, Western Europe -- and in the UK," Brown said.

Brown, who is tipped to lose a general election to the opposition Conservatives due by June, said Britain must not retreat "into isolation" on foreign policy, but be both "patriotic and internationalist".

"As a nation we have every reason to be optimistic about our prospects: confident in our alliances, faithful to our values and determined as progressive pioneers to shape the world to come."