PHIL HAZLEWOOD, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
Britain announced Jan. 26 that its troop numbers in Afghanistan will peak this year at 5,700 with the deployment of thousands of fresh soldiers as part of a NATO expansion there.
The 4,600 additional troops include 3,300 for a special task force charged with reconstruction and fighting the drug trade in the volatile southern Helmand province, where members of the ousted Taliban regime still lurk.
The airborne assault and infantry troops will be armed with eight new U.S.-made Apache and four Lynx attack helicopters as well as six Chinook transport helicopters, Defense Secretary John Reid told the House of Commons.
More than 1,000 troops will also be sent to the Kabul headquarters of the British-led Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARCC), which assumes command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) force from May until February 2007.
Following the peak in the middle of the year, Reid said, troop numbers were then expected to stabilize at about 4,700, including the 1,100 British troops already there.
The contingent will form part of a three-year expansion of the NATO force to some 18,500 troops, including 9,000 in the south, with commitments from the United States, Canada, Romania and Estonia, his ministry told Agence France-Presse.
It is the third phase of the expansion of NATO, which has already deployed in Kabul and northwest Afghanistan in a bid to stabilize the nation, rebuild it and help impose the authority of Afghan President Hamid Karzai
