AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
London: Britain's new army chief warned Monday that the country's military forces are stretched to the very limit, as three soldiers died in a grim day for Britons on the frontline in Afghanistan and Iraq. General Richard Dannat, who took over from General Mike Jackson as head of the British army last week, told the daily Guardian that the army can barely cope with the demands placed on it.
“We are running hot, certainly running hot…. Can we cope? I pause. I say 'just',” he told the newspaper, referring to deployments in hotspots dominated by the post-September 11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Iraq Monday two British troops were killed and a third seriously injured when insurgents attacked an army unit escorting a reconstruction team near Basra in the south of the country.
In Afghanistan a British soldier was killed, and another seriously injured, in a bomb attack on a military convoy in Kabul, Britain's latest casualties in the increasingly violence-scarred country, officials said.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair voiced “sadness” at the latest killing, adding: “It underlines again our debt of gratitude to the (British) army.”
The killings came as military investigators continued to probe the cause of Saturday's crash of a Royal Air Force Nimrod MR2 reconnaissance plane over Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan in which 14 soldiers died.
The tragedy was the single biggest loss of the country's troops in Afghanistan or Iraq since the US-led war on terror was launched in November 2001, prompting renewed debate about the mission there.
British military commanders generally downplay suggestions that they lack resources in Afghanistan.
But experts disagree. “They are certainly overstretched,” said Ayesha Khan of the international relations institute Chatham House. “It's important that other NATO countries ease the burden of the British troops.”
The British army chief insisted in the Guardian interview that the armed forces would be in Afghanistan for “the long term.”
But when asked about whether other NATO countries should contribute more troops, Dannat said Britain was doing “more than its share of what is required in Afghanistan”.
Asked about the hopes of some senior British soldiers that the number of British forces in Iraq could be halved by the middle of 2007, Dannat stressed that those possibilities had been described as a “hope” and pointed out that previous hopes about Iraq had not been fulfilled.
He also declined to set a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan. He added that the army was “meeting challenges on the hoof” but refused to comment on whether the current budget allocation for defence was sufficient.
The weekend plane crash brought the number of British armed forces personnel deaths in Afghanistan since the start of operations against the hardline Taliban regime to 37.
One report Monday suggested that the crash was caused by an on-board fire.
According to The Times, citing an unnamed military source, a short circuit inside the aircraft caused a spark leading to a fire, with smoke engulfing the work stations of the men on board.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence declined to comment on the reports, saying only that: “The indications are that there was a technical problem of some sort.”
