LONDON (AFP) — A surge of thousands more US troops in southern Afghanistan will help break the "stalemate" with Taliban insurgents there, two top British generals said on Thursday.
General Jim Dutton, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, welcomed the new troops ordered by US President Barack Obama, as part of a strategy which has also cut forces in Iraq.
"In order to break that stalemate, to increase the capacity, the decision was made to bring many more forces into the south," Dutton, the top British general in Afghanistan, told the BBC.
"I am convinced that the addition of those troops is going to improve the security situation," he added, while cautioning that the full impact of the new troops would not be felt until later this year.
Obama has approved the deployment of more than 21,000 US troops as part of a bid to reverse the course of the war against Islamist insurgents challenging the Kabul government.
Britain has also increased its troop numbers, from 8,100 to 9,000 -- concentrated in the volatile southern province of Helmand -- to help boost security over the period of Afghan presidential elections in August.
The head of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, echoed Dutton's comments, saying the new US troops were "extremely welcome."
He said: "We're working hard to build up the Afghan National Army and, as I've said before, I don't really mind whose feet are in the boots on the ground as long as we've got the right number of boots on the ground.
"The Americans, the Afghans, the British, the Estonians, the Danes -- we're all working together," he added in a statement.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband denied that saying that more US troops could help break the stalemate in Afghanistan meant that British forces there had failed.
"We have to avoid the tendency of always running down our efforts," he told a BBC interviewer, calling Helmand province "the absolute anvil of the battle against the Taliban.
"We shouldn't see the arrival of extra American troops as something of a failure," he added.
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