John Burns writes:

In an echo of the American tug of war over troop levels in Afghanistan, Britain’s recently retired top general said in an interview published Tuesday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government had repeatedly rebuffed his own military’s calls for an increase in troops.
Officials on Downing Street held fast to their insistence that Mr. Brown had never refused such a request. Noting that Britain has 1,200 more troops in Afghanistan now than when Mr. Brown took office in 2007, one official, speaking under ground rules of anonymity, said Tuesday that “any suggestion that the prime minister has been unwilling to deploy more troops or provide the necessary resources is simply wrong.”
The general, Sir Richard Dannatt, who has long had a fractious relationship with the government, said that the military’s advice to Mr. Brown since the beginning of this year had been for about 2,000 more troops, but that the advice had been rejected. He told the newspaper The Sun that the task of British forces in Afghanistan had been made harder with “at least part of one arm tied behind one’s back.”