PM defends forces pay on Afghan visit 20.12.11
3Prime Minister David Cameron has paid a morale-boosting visit to troops in Afghanistan and defended the one percent pay increase for the Armed Forces. Speaking at Kandahar Airfield he said limiting the pay increase had been the "right decision" but that the Government had also cut council tax, put extra funding into forces education, protected forces pensions from increased contributions and had doubled the operational allowance. He said: "I think we are doing the right thing - and remember, we have doubled the operational allowance so that people serving out here in Afghanistan get that extra £5,000. "Using the money that way, rather than having a blanket pay increase where a lot of the extra money would go to pay Generals and Colonels and the rest of it, is I think the right thing to do." He had been scheduled to travel to Camp Bastion to meet the 9,500 British troops based there but a sandstorm forced his C-17 military transport plane to touch down at Kandahar. After talking to some of the 500 UK troops there, including Tornado pilots and their support teams, he also met US General James Huggins, the head of ISAF Regional Command South, for talks on military progress in Afghanistan. Plans to take a helicopter to Lashkar Gah to meet the governor of Helmand and visit a frontline base in the province had to be abandoned. Speaking to journalists on the trip, Mr Cameron admitted it was "disappointing" but said British troops in Afghanistan faced the same issues every day. "You just have to take it as it comes in this job," he said. "What we have experienced today is what people working out here experience the whole time." He said there was "no point whingeing about it" and he had been able to meet service personnel he would not usually see. "You just have to take the rough with the smooth; I don't feel particularly jinxed," he added in response to the suggestion that he faced regular difficulties on foreign trips. The Prime Minister indicated that he was planning further withdrawals of troops in 2013 after the 500 due to be pulled out next year. He again refused to give an exact timescale for how Britain's deployment would be withdrawn ahead of his deadline for all combat troops to be out by the end of 2014. But he told reporters: "I don't want to see some massive cliff-edge in 2014 - I don't think that's practical. "But I don't think we need to make hard and fast decisions at this stage." He said there was "an ongoing conversation with our allies" about how and when NATO forces would be withdrawn over the next three years. "I'm absolutely clear that the British public deserve to know there is an endpoint to our involvement in Afghanistan and that endpoint is 2014," he said.