LONDON - Britain says the 1700 troops it is rushing to Afghanistan to defeat remaining al Qaeda and Taleban fighters will stay there "until the job is done".
Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon was asked by opposition Conservatives to explain his surprise announcement of the biggest British combat deployment since the 1991
Gulf War, but he offered few new details of the mission.
"The remaining al Qaeda and Taleban elements must be dealt with. We shall pursue them until the job is done," he told MPs.
"That is why I am not prepared to give a precise date on when we will bring these troops back home ... Our exit strategy is that we will leave when the task is completed."
Hoon said he was also unable to judge the number of fighters that British troops might face in Afghanistan - or where they might be concentrated. "It clearly could be in the thousands," he said.
Hoon was addressing an emergency debate called by opposition Conservative defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin, who warned of the dangers of deploying a large British fighting unit alongside the British-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.
"It is unsound military doctrine to have two completely separate kinds of military operations in the same theatre under split chains of command with split objectives," Jenkin said.
Those charges were rejected by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who told Parliament that there was "no mismatch between a security force operating in Kabul and those forces ... that are going to deal with the last remnants of al Qaeda and the Taleban."
The first elements of the new British deployment, who were dispatched in response to a US request, are expected to be on the ground in days and ready to undertake operations by mid-April.
Hoon said Washington's request for the British troops was not prompted by US troop exhaustion after Operation Anaconda, which was the biggest battle of the Afghan campaign so far, or US fears of further combat losses.
- REUTERS
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