The Guardian of London is reporting the British government is set to announce the deployment of another 1,000 British troops to Afghanistan. The increase would come just days after British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the withdrawal of 1,600 troops from Iraq. The Bush administration has been urging NATO countries to step up troop deployments in Afghanistan. Meanwhile Thursday, a top Afghan insurgent leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, compared the current fight against the U.S. military to the struggle against the Russian invasion of 1980s.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: “The previous policy of the invading force in Afghanistan did not succeed, and its new policy in Afghanistan will not succeed. The occupying forces have only one option for success, and that is to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. And hopefully they will choose that (option) without wasting time.”

Hekmatyar is believed to have received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Reagan administration when he led one of the leading Mujahideen groups against the Russian occupation.