DAVOS, Jan 27: Afghanistan will probably need foreign troops to ensure stability and security in the country for another five or ten years, President Hamid Karzai said on Friday.

Speaking days before international partners are expect to renew support for Afghanistan at a conference in London, Mr Karzai told journalists at the World Economic Forum that the country was too fragile to envisage life without international security forces.

“Our armed forces have to turn into strong institutions to be able to defend the country and maintain internal stability and peace,” the Afghan president said in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos.

“That will take a number of years... between five and ten years perhaps — it probably will take longer or less,” he added, cautioning that it was an off-the-cuff estimate.

“But if you take as long as it takes to better institutions, until then you will need the presence of international security forces in Afghanistan.”

Mr Karzai said the country’s internationally-trained army now had 33,000 troops, and was likely to expand.

“But the numbers and the equipment do not alone make institutions.”

US troops are gradually withdrawing from some regions of Afghanistan and there have been vivid debates in some European countries, notably in the Netherlands, about sending their own military to replace American forces.

Afghanistan last year held its first full parliamentary elections in about three decades, following the removal in 2001 of the Taliban by a US-led military intervention.—AFP