London: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Tuesday said several hundred foreign fighters were still based in the FATA area of Pakistan and were travelling to training camps to learn bomb making and weapons skills.
Delivering a major speech on foreign policy issues amidst growing demands for Britain to pull out of Afghanistan, Brown said the Afghan campaign was being prosecuted not from choice but out of necessity.
"We are there because action in Afghanistan is not an alternative to action in Pakistan, but an inseparable support to it," he said.
Brown referred to Pakistan often in the speech and repeated his earlier assertion that nearly three-quarters of the most serious plots Britain's security forces were tracking
had links with Pakistan.
Brown said he planned to host talks in the new year to discuss the timing for handing over the campaign in Afghanistan to the Afghan government.
He said he wanted the NATO meeting to "set a timetable" for transfer starting in 2010.
"Make no mistake, al Qaeda has an extensive recruitment network across Africa, the middle east, western Europe and in the UK.
And we know that there are still several hundred foreign fighters based in the Fata area of Pakistan and travelling to training camps to learn bomb making and weapons skills," Brown said.
"It is because of the nature of the threat, and because around three quarters of the most serious plots the security services are now tracking in Britain have links to Pakistan, that it does not make sense to confine our defence against terrorism solely to actions inside the UK," Brown said.
Stating that the "greatest immediate threat" to national security was from international terrorism, Brown said: "We know that from New York, Bali, Baghdad, Madrid,
Mumbai, Peshawar and Rawalpindi to London, men and women -- Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, of every faith and none -- have been victims of international terrorism".
Recalling that since January 2008, seven of the top dozen Al Qaeda leader had been killed, Brown said: "Tonight I can report that, methodically and patiently, we are disrupting and disabling the existing leadership of al Qaeda."
Al Qaeda, he said, relied on a "permissive environment" in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and added that it had links to the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban.
Bureau Report