UK confirms 2014 deadline for its troops to leave Afghanistan

British Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed on Saturday that he was sticking to an end-2014 deadline for withdrawing British combat troops from Afghanistan.

"We ... want to have a long-term relationship with Afghanistan, long after our combat troops come home, and that will happen at the end of 2014," Cameron said during a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the prime minister's country residence Chequers outside London.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday that French troops would pull out of Afghanistan at the end of 2013 and said Paris would propose to NATO that all foreign combat operations in Afghanistan should be handed over next year, a year earlier that the alliance currently plans.