UK planned Taliban training camp in Afghanistan?

Britain planned to set up a camp to train 2,000 Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan as part of a deal to make them swap sides and fight against the remaining insurgents, a media report has claimed.

'The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders,' an unnamed Afghan government official was quoted by The Independent as saying.

According to the official, the training camp was due to be built outside Musa Qala in Helmand.

Nearly $125,000 had been spent on preparing the camp and another $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008, he said.

The plans were discovered on a computer memory stick seized by the Afghan secret police recently from the country's KGB-trained

National Directorate of Security, which intercepted a party of foreign diplomats visiting Helmand.

"When they were arrested, the British said the Ministry of the Interior and the National Security Council knew about it, but no one knew anything. That is why the President (Hamid Karzai) was so angry," a ministry insider told the newspaper.

The Afghan government insists that British agents were holding discussions with the Taliban without Karzai's permission despite Prime Minister Gordon Brown's pledge that Britain would not negotiate with the insurgents.

"Our objective is to defeat the insurgency by isolating and eliminating their leaders. We will not enter into any negotiations with these people," Brown had told the British Parliament last year.