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Defence Policy

If the hon. Gentleman had been listening, or if he took an interest in what is recorded in Hansard, he would know that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes laid out our reservations on several occasions during that time. Unlike my right hon. and learned Friend, I was chairman of the party at the time, not the shadow Foreign Secretary—these things matter when one is in the official Opposition. It is clearly on record that we laid out our reservations and what we thought that the consequences of several mistakes that we outlined would be. I wish that my right hon. and learned Friend had been wrong, but he was right about many of the things of which he warned. When we took the decision to back the Government, we set out plenty of caveats, which are there for the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) to read whenever he wants. One aspect of our deployment to Iraq is not mentioned very often. What we are doing there is not simply a matter of grand geopolitical and military strategy. There is a human cost, not merely to Iraqi citizens, but among our serving British soldiers. According to parliamentary written answers obtained by my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne), 732 service personnel have been aero-evacuated from Iraq. Almost one in 10 of those were diagnosed with some sort of mental health problem. That is a fairly shocking figure, but after returning from deployment a further 727 soldiers have sought treatment from the MOD’s community mental health departments, which raises the question of how many soldiers there are out there who do not know where to turn for help. It is a matter of the utmost importance that those who risk life and limb in our name are given the health facilities that they require. I hope the Minister will give a commitment to find out whether sufficient information is available, so that those returning know where to go for help, the help they get is appropriate to their service background, and they are not simply treated in a civilian mental health institution, which may not understand the effects of trauma in a military setting. I turn to the other great deployment—that in Afghanistan, which also remains essential in the wider regional strategic context. As I have said before, while we could not have failed to act, we must not act and fail. The consequences of failure would be calamitous. A failed state would re-emerge, our enemies would be emboldened, and the hills and valleys of Afghanistan would once more become incubators of global terror. As a knock-on effect, Pakistan, already a nuclear state, could become destabilised. NATO’s reputation would be sullied by one of its first out-of-area operations, with the consequent dangers that the wider NATO membership could restrict operations to the Euro-Atlantic zone in the future. A loss of nerve within NATO, the emboldening of our enemies and the denial to the people of Afghanistan of a better way of life is not a legacy that Britain could or should contemplate. It is a source of great worry to many within and outside the military that our deployment may be under strength for the many and varied tasks assigned to it. Despite there being some 10,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan under ISAF command, we still do not have enough support or troops to cover the entirety of the areas of responsibility in the three regions that NATO is supposed to be covering. There is excessive duplication of logistics provision in particular, especially with regard to troop movement. NATO needs to co-ordinate this aspect far more than it is currently doing. With 71 separate caveats among more than 30 contributing nations, the effectiveness of ISAF is bound to be compromised. We are asking our troops to patrol one of the most dangerous provinces in one of the most dangerous countries in the world, yet we often lack the manpower and lift capacity to guarantee success. In particular, ISAF still lacks a reserve quick response force to deal with sudden incidents, such as when the Norwegians came under attack last February. We must acknowledge success when it occurs. Although there has been good progress in the training of the Afghan army, training for the Afghan police, the prime responsibility of the Germans, is at least two years behind schedule, yet the police are crucial stakeholders in the efforts of the peace and reconstruction teams and those helping to rebuild Afghan civil society. It is worth pointing out that there are still major incompatibility issues regarding the equipment of the major participating countries, particularly radios and frequencies. Most disturbing is the failure to agree to universal use of Blue Force Tracker, a system to allow HQs to follow all NATO forces via SatNav, down to an individual vehicle. The system is being used in Helmand, but the French and other countries refuse to use it, preferring to wait for a rival system built by Thales, which has yet to come off the shelf. That is not an acceptable position for the NATO operation to be in. The role of the police has also become enmeshed in the wider strategic mismatch and confusion of roles, of which many have spoken. The Afghan police are not so much a national force, in the way that we would understand it, as a large number of independent semi-militias. The border goes unpatrolled, drug trafficking continues, and it is an open question to what extent the police militias overlap with the forces of the warlords and/or Taliban. The UN and other NGOs have withdrawn from Helmand, claiming it is too dangerous. I raise these points, and they all matter, because we are in danger of losing the hearts and minds war among the local population, which is so crucial to the success of the overall mission. At the same time as we face these logistical problems, the poppy eradication projects have brought warlords and Taliban into coalescence on many occasions. To varying degrees we are seeing what NATO calls Talibanisation, where the Taliban pay local people for one-off strikes against NATO forces. Given the amount of money involved, funded by the drug trade, these incidents are, sadly, on the increase, as President Karzai noted today. I raise all these matters because there is still time to do something about them. Our troops are committed, they are brave and intuitive, and they will do almost whatever we ask of them, with whatever we give them. But we need to ensure that they are given all that they need to carry out the task demanded of them—no shortcuts, no shortages. The Government have a twin duty—to maximise the success of the mission, and at the same time to minimise the risk to our troops. We strongly support British participation in the war on terror in Afghanistan, as it is strategically in our national interest and our membership of NATO commits us to it. However, it is questionable whether our security footprint is large enough to achieve the goals identified, in anything like the time scale envisaged. Having acted, we absolutely cannot afford to fail. Let me deal with the issue that has dominated the newspapers and media coverage today—our nuclear deterrent. While North Korea threatens missile tests and there is the continuing stand-off with Iran, and when we cannot predict what new threats we may face by 2025, we cannot afford to leave ourselves exposed and vulnerable. Given such uncertainty, it is a strategic imperative that we replace our nuclear deterrent when the time comes. I remain to be convinced that any alternative to a submarine-based system is a credible option, but it is still an issue that we will consider in our policy review. All history tells us that the outbreak of conflicts is seldom accurately anticipated. The onus must therefore be on the nuclear abolitionist, not on the believer in deterrence, to explain why one can be confident that no nuclear or major chemical or biological threat will be posed to the United Kingdom during the long period so far ahead. I doubt if any such explanation will carry much conviction. The identification of a potential enemy once shaped the nature of our armed forces—the two power standard for the Navy, for example. With our nuclear deterrent, we enjoy a much greater degree of versatility. Intercontinental ballistic missiles such as Trident are sufficiently flexible, given their range and invulnerability, to deter any state that may seek to use, or threaten the United Kingdom with, weapons of mass destruction at any time in the future. In short, it would not matter which potential enemy posed a real threat. Each would face unacceptable retaliation from a modern strategic missile system such as Trident.