China says not sending troops to Afghanistan: state media

China says not sending troops to Afghanistan: state media

(NSI News Source Info) Beijing - November 18, 2008: China has no intention of sending troops to Afghanistan, state media said Monday, downplaying recent reports quoting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as saying Beijing could do so. "Except the United Nations peacekeeping operations approved by the UN Security Council, China never sends troops abroad," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang as saying in a statement. "The media reports about China sending troops to participate in the ISAF in Afghanistan are groundless," it quoted him as saying. Qin was responding to reports that Brown suggested China could contribute to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Xinhua said. According to reports last week, Brown told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that China could one day contribute troops to ISAF. The international force includes nearly 50,000 troops, working to help stabilise the country and fighting insurgents from the Islamist Taliban regime. Originally mandated by the United Nations Security Council, ISAF was placed under NATO command in August 2003. In addition to ISAF, a separate US-led contingent of several thousand mainly American troops operates in the country as part of Operation Enduring Freedom and is also involved in training the Afghan security forces. Afghan blast injures four German soldiers: Berlin

A bomb attack on a German patrol in northern Afghanistan on Monday left four soldiers slightly injured as well as an unspecified number of Afghan civilians, the German army said. The Improvised Explosive Device (IED) went off on Monday afternoon local time outside the town of Feyzabad, the army said in a short statement on its website. It was the second such attack in as many days after a blast on Sunday killed two Afghan civilians and wounded two German troops. Germany has about 3,300 soldiers in the relatively safe north of Afghanistan as part of NATO's 50,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Last month Berlin boosted the upper limit on troops it has by 1,000 to 4,500 and extended the mission's mandate by 14 months until December 2009 but Chancellor Angela Merkel refuses to send soldiers to the more volatile south of the country.

Time not right to talk to Taliban in Afghanistan: US admiral

US military chief Michael Mullen said on Monday that conditions were not right yet for talks with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.Holding negotiations with elements of the Taliban should be part of a long-term strategy in Afghanistan at an appropriate time but "at least in my perspective, we're not there yet," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, told a news conference