Hamid Karzai: Afghan leader not forgotten says Blair

The prime minister has insisted Iraq has not deflected attention from the rebuilding of Afghanistan.

Tony Blair was speaking after newspaper reports suggested the country had been abandoned by NATO after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

MPs on the Commons foreign affairs committee have recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan ahead of a report on the country to be published in July.

Eric Ilsley, a Labour member of the committee, told the Independent on Tuesday that: "Afghanistan is a basket case. It's a forgotten country."

But Blair insisted he had not stopped focusing on the reconstruction effort in the country.

He said the leadership of Hamid Karzai had improved the security situation and economy and dismissed suggestions that Taliban elements are regaining control.

"It is absolutely wrong and unfortunate if people think Afghanistan has made no progress," Blair said at this monthly news conference in Downing Street.

"The idea that the Taliban is back in control is complete nonsense."

The prime minister pointed to statistics showing that 2.5 million refugees had returned home following the NATO invasion and reminded reporters that Britain had recently pledged £500 million in aid.

However he recognised that, like Iraq, Afghanistan had a long way to go and that NATO would be discussing its future at its Istanbul summit in June.

Blair insisted that Afghanistan was"neither forgotten nor is it a country that is going backwards".

And responding to the comments by members of his committee, chairman Donald Anderson said the media reports did not represent the "considered view of the committee as a whole".

"The truth is that we are still taking evidence. There is not even a draft report and the eventual report is not scheduled to come out until the end of July," he added.

"There are quotes in the story from individual committee members, but the committee has not even begun to discuss what to put in its report."