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Ministry of Defence

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I would like to finish my remarks, but if I have time to spare, I will of course give way to him. My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham dealt with Afghanistan briefly but with considerable authority. The fact that he has received accounts that people at Permanent Joint Headquarters are now referring to the British forces going to Afghanistan as the ““duty targets”” gives some indication of the depth of concern and perhaps cynicism about the likely success of that operation. The estimates that we are considering today are extremely vague, as the Defence Committee pointed out. They refer to £1 billion here or there over three years, for example. The money is vague because the role and the mission are alarmingly vague. There is broad consensus that we are not sending enough troops to deliver the mission that they have been invited to undertake, but the force is also too large to extract easily. My worry is that, as the Americans downscale their operations in Afghanistan, the United Kingdom could be left holding the Afghan baby. The history of Afghanistan for foreign forces is an extremely unhappy one. The Afghan population will not easily be able to differentiate between the British—with our long history of association with Afghanistan, the rules of engagement that apply to our forces and the restraints that we place on them—and the Russians, the Americans and perhaps the British of the 19th century. We will all be lumped together in the same category by the Afghan people. The hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil (Mr. Havard) spoke of the importance to the soldiers on the ground of civil-military relations, but chose not to dilate on the state of civil-military relations likely to be faced by our troops during their operations in Afghanistan. Our forces are being invited to destroy the method by which most Afghan people earn their money. That method is, admittedly, unacceptable to us, given the huge danger to our constituents and our country, as well as to the whole of Europe, represented by the heroin emanating from Afghanistan. However, if we destroy the Afghan people’s main income earner, they are unlikely to be too pleased with our presence, and we shall not easily be able to establish good civil-military relations there. I am worried that our troops will quickly end up behind armour, having to defend themselves from attacks not only from those who are already hostile to us, but from those whom we are about to make hostile. In that sense, we will never be able to achieve during forthcoming operations in Afghanistan, on any basis, the civil-military relations about which the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil was talking.