UK sending more troops to Afghanistan

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Britain's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has announced that he will send 350 more troops to Afghanistan.

This move increases the UK's military presence there to a total of 95-hundred.

Brown told the House of Commons on Wednesday that the additional troops will be sent to the central Afghan province of Helmand.

He said the increase is conditional upon other allies bearing their share, and also upon Afghan troops taking on more responsibility for security across their country.

He called for reassurance from defense chiefs that the extra troops would have the right equipment to take with them as well.

Gordon Brown, Britain's Prime Minister, said, "The combination of force levels, equipment levels, and tasks that I'm setting out today follows the clear military advice from our chiefs of staff and from our commanders on the ground on implementing our strategy and reducing the risk to our forces. And it's on this basis that I've agreed in principle to a new British force level of 9 and a half thousand, which will be put into effect once these conditions are met."

The announcement of a troop increase comes after a new poll revealed that 36 percent of respondents want the British military to pull out of Afghanistan. That's up from 29 percent as polled in mid-September.

Britain currently has about 9-thousand soldiers in Afghanistan, the second largest force after the US.

221 British military personnel have died in Afghanistan since the war started there in late 2001.