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Ministry of Defence

The report by the Select Committee on Defence states:"““Telling Parliament that the costs of the deployment to Afghanistan is ‘around a billion’ is just not good enough. This is a very large amount of . . . money, and the public deserve better information on how it is going to be spent.””" Costs are imprecise, because we do not know precisely what they will be. We are told that the aims are, first, to deal with instability, to extend the writ of the Afghan Government, not to allow Afghanistan to fail, to support the Afghan national army and police and to gain the good will of the Afghan people. Those are great aims, given the consequences of actions in Afghanistan that led to the events of September 2001. Secondly, as part of that we are there to assist the Afghan authorities in reducing the supply of drugs. About 90 per cent. of the heroin on the streets of my constituency—Gravesham—comes from Afghanistan and about a quarter of those drugs come from Helmand province, where our troops will be deployed. To my mind, however, those twin aims—stabilisation and the reduction in the supply of the opium poppy—are in conflict with each other. How do we gain the good will of people in Helmand province when a very large number of them are dependent on growing poppies, not as a great money-making adventure, but as a substance crop that they grow to feed their families? I have spoken to Afghan farmers who say that if we seek to interfere with their livelihoods and do not provide sufficient alternative means of income, they will take up arms against us. We are told that military operations will be against the greedy, not the needy, and that the involvement of the British military will be confined to"““cordons, airlift of Afghan National Army and Police units, and help with planning””." To my mind, the consequences will generate anything but the good will of the local people. Last week, at a    meeting at Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, jokes were being made about whether, as a consequence of that conflict in aims, British troops would become the duty targets. I and every person who is associated with planning for the deployment to whom I have spoken at the MOD and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office believe that the reason why the estimates of cost are so vague is precisely that we have no clear idea of the consequences of what we are proposing to do.