LONDON, March 20: For the first time ever since 9/11 Pakistan has been officially mentioned along side Afghanistan as the launch site of the attack on the twin towers; and this, by an influential ‘friend’ of Islamabad.

“The reason that we're in Afghanistan is precisely because 9/11 was launched from the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Foreign Secretary David Miliband while answering a question from BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys for the ‘Today’ programme on Friday.

Talking on-line from Brussels where he had gone to attend a European summit on Afghanistan, Mr Miliband said that what was significant about American review on Afghanistan was that it looked for the first time at the balance between Afghanistan and Pakistan “and is determined to realign America's relationship with Pakistan”.

He said all the American leaders that he spoke to when he was in Washington on Wednesday -- Mrs Clinton, Ambassador Holbrooke and to General Patraeus -- all realise that “you cannot have a stable Afghanistan without a stable Pakistan”.

“They also realise, and I think this is very important too, that you cannot win in Afghanistan, or rather the Afghan government cannot win by military means alone, it certainly needs a bigger and more effective security force; the Afghan national army now has about 65,000 troops but the police force is pretty weak.

“You also need, though, a much stronger economic and political drive at the heart of a very, very decentralised and fragmented society, and finally you also need to divide the opposition. The Taliban is made up of some, who are ideologically committed to Al Qaeda, but many of them are effectively rented by the Taliban and they need to be brought back into the constitutional fold -- that's something that Barack Obama said for the first time in the New York Times interview and I think that's very important.”

Admitting that in parts of Afghanistan there is a strategic stalemate, he said that the point of recognising that this was a Pakistan problem as well as an Afghan problem, was to break that stalemate, “and I think that renewal of the strategy is absolutely essential”.

Answering another question, the foreign secretary said that the Afghans were trying to build a state and the reason that “we're there militarily is that Afghanistan is the incubator of choice for Al Qaeda, based in the borderlands with Pakistan”.

Rejecting the presenter’s allegation that it were the occupying troops which had provoked the insurgency in Afghanistan, Mr Miliband said that the 11th September 2001 did not happen because of “our provocation”.

“The reason that we're in Afghanistan is precisely because 9/11 was launched from the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he added.

Refusing to give a timeframe for the withdrawal of occupation troops, the foreign secretary said by 2012 the Afghan national army was due to double in size, “that is a very significant change, that is an important perspective, and I think you'll see from the American review that comes out in the next couple of weeks that they are... that they see this as a perspective in which we ensure... and I'm not going to put artificial timelines on it, what I am going to say to you is that this is a situation where we are building Afghan capacity to look after themselves and that's what we want to do”.
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