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David Cameron says during speech that event will be starting point for transferring responsibility to Afghan forces
A starting point for a timetable for transferring security responsibility to Afghan forces will be set out at the Nato summit this weekend, David Cameron disclosed tonight in the prime minister's annual set-piece foreign policy speech.
The handover is expected to start in the next 18 months to two years, with a prospective date 2014-15 for the withdrawal of all UK and American combat troops from the country.
In his Mansion House speech, his first as prime minister, Cameron described the British strategic goal in Afghanistan as a "hard-headed, time-limited approach based squarely on the national interest. We are not there to build a perfect democracy, still less a model society. We are there to help Afghans take control of their security and ensure that al-Qaida can never again pose a threat to us from Afghan soil."
The foreign secretary, William Hague, was tonight travelling to Washington for pre-summit talks with the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on a handover strategy, including the possibility of a political settlement. The two-day Nato summit starts in Lisbon on Friday.
Speaking to the foreign affairs select committee today, Hague said British combat troops would be leaving Afghanistan by 2015, the date of the next election. "It is a clear deadline," he said.
The US and UK governments are discussing which regions could be transferred to the Afghan army and will start to name them at the turn of the year. The phased handover is modelled on Iraq, where a US troop surge was followed by a region by region transfer.
Every region would be transferred by 2012, with the areas suffering the strongest Taliban insurgency handed over last. Some American or Nato forces may remain or be positioned "over the horizon" elsewhere in Afghanistan ready to respond quickly if necessary. British troops, and possibly some special forces, would remain to train Afghan security forces after 2014.
Hague agreed that in the past there had been over-optimistic assessments of progress, and said he would not encourage false optimism, or be blind to good news.
There have been suggestions, including from the former British ambassador to Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, that the British military's bullish claims that it was about to defeat the Taliban had over-influenced the political strategy.
Hague said today that he would be discussing whether the US military was right to conduct a "decapitation" strategy against the Taliban leadership while the allies are trying to draw other members into reconciliation talks. He said it was right to intensify the military pressure on the Taliban as a way of putting pressure on them for a negotiated settlement.
He claimed the Taliban had the support of only 10%of Afghans, and insisted that the build-up of Afghan forces was ahead of schedule, with 144,000 soldiers trained, 10,000 more than planned.
But members of the select committee said that on the basis of their recent visit to Afghanistan, the police were poor-quality cannon fodder, even though billions had been spent training them. Hague admitted the quality of the police was a huge challenge, but said the attrition rate had declined. He also acknowledged that that the exposure of corruption at Afghanistan's largest private bank, Kabul Bank, had been very depressing.
In his speech, Cameron denied that British influence was in decline. But he criticised the Labour government, saying: "In recent years we made too many commitments without the resources to back them up … We have the resources – commercial, military and cultural – to remain a major player in the world.
We failed to think properly across government what we were getting ourselves into and how we would see it through to success."
He said: "Far from shrinking back, Britain is reaching out. Far from looking back starry-eyed on a glorious past, this country can look forward clear-eyed to a great future."
Labour claimed that Cameron had been sidelined in the discussions at the G20 summit in Seoul last week, dominated by the issue of the currency rates dispute and global trade imbalances between China and America.
South Korea, hosts of the G20, had proposed to restrict the current account surplus of each nation at less than 4%, but the talks collapsed. South Korean negotiators have now admitted that they overplayed their hand.
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