Australia and Britain warned Tuesday that 2011 and 2012 will be critical years in the war in Afghanistan, but said they were determined to deny terrorism a base in the war-torn nation. The long-running conflict, where Britain has 9,500 troops and Australia 1,550, was top of defence and security talks between the nations, which also touched on the rise of China and tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The countries said they were committed to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan between 2014 and 2015 but stressed that international forces had only recently gained traction there and difficult times lay ahead.
"In terms of having adequate manning, in terms of having adequate equipment we've only really been in Afghanistan for the last year, since the end of the American surge," Britain's Defence Secretary Liam Fox told reporters after the summit. Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith said he feared the mission may have become effective "half a dozen years too late" and agreed that 2011 and 2012 would be "key" in consolidating progress made in the past 12 months.
Afghanistan has become an increasingly thorny issue for Australia, with Canberra losing 10 troops to the protracted conflict in 2010, taking total deaths since 2001 to 21. Britain has lost 349 soldiers in the Afghan war. But Fox said their adversaries "should never doubt our determination to leave Afghanistan as a place where terrorists will be denied the territory they once had" to launch the kind of extremist attacks seen in the past.
It has been decades since a British foreign minister visited Australia - "by any man's reckoning somewhat long between drinks", joked local counterpart Kevin Rudd - and this is thought to be the first ever visit by a British defence minister.
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