---

Armed Forces Personnel

I am suitably corrected by you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The point that I am trying to make is that the failure of planning, and the lack of appreciation of the scale of the challenge of what is sometimes mis-called the global war on terrorism, is having a devastating and intolerable impact on the long-term effectiveness of our armed forces personnel, and on their lives and families. I will fast-forward to Afghanistan, where we are involved in another extremely complex operation. The planning for that operation has not fully provided for what our armed forces personnel are having to face. I agree with my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Defence that the price of failure would be intolerable and that it would have global security implications, but I am not at all sure that enough people back here understand what our armed forces personnel are having to face. They are fighting a counter-insurgency war. Afghanistan is not like Northern Ireland, which has 175 miles of open borders; it has 1,500 miles of open borders with Pakistan, and it is impossible to see how the unlimited supply of insurgents will cease pouring across the Pakistani border. We talk about bringing democracy to Afghanistan, and I am lost in admiration for the ability of our armed forces—the people on the ground—to understand the complexities involved in dealing with a village in the dusty heat, to build relationships, to extend the hand of friendship between nations and to build confidence in the security situation, at the same time as dealing with the threats posed by the Taliban. But this is a country in which the armed forces have had a sporadic presence for more than 100 years, and its culture is not to rely on outside forces. A 30-year commitment could be required to stabilise Afghanistan. Is there an appreciation in the Ministry of Defence, at the heart of Government or in this House of the fact that stabilising and building up security and using—dare I say it?—the blood of our armed forces to build that country is a very much greater commitment than was suggested when the then Secretary of State came to this House to announce this substantial deployment. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring that we need to match commitments and resources. We need to have our commitments matched by other countries, as he pointed out, which is clearly not happening. We need to support our armed forces personnel in the field, and that applies as much to the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force as to the Army, about which I have been talking. We need to develop a more comprehensive doctrine for combating international terrorism, weapons proliferation and rogue states. I suspect that that means, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex intimated, substantially increased defence spending. The present state of doctrine and policy sells our armed forces short and ill serves the personnel on whom we rely so much and whom we expect to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. What of the relationship between the military and the politicians? Ministers rely on advice from the service chiefs and it is the worst defence of Ministers to say, when something goes wrong, that they relied on the advice of the service chiefs. Do the politicians really want to hear the truth at all times from our most senior armed forces personnel? I recall that Admiral—now Lord—Boyce warned about putting our hand into the mangle of Afghanistan and embarrassed the Secretary of State by saying that our armed forces were overstretched. His term was cut short. I submit that the way we treat our service chiefs is just as important as the way we treat our armed forces personnel lower down the chain of command. We have to recognise that they are servants of the Crown and rightly loyal to the Ministers they serve. In the spirit of the armed forces, they are most unlikely to stand up publicly and say that this cannot be done and we will not do it—indeed, I question whether they should. That is not their job. But we are putting them in an impossible situation, loading the armed forces with new commitments. It is their spirit to say that they will do their best with what they have got, on any job the politicians give them to do. I am reminded of what Admiral Sir John Woodward, the commander of the Falkland Islands task force, said when explaining what preparing for a military commitment actually means. He said that the first question one asks is, ““What have we got?”” That is because what one has now is all one has. I submit that the House needs to understand that to serve our armed forces personnel effectively, in the present global climate and the present commitment load, we have not got enough. It is the armed forces who will suffer the consequences of that the most, because we have hardly begun to understand the consequences of 9/11 or to appreciate the real nature of what must be done to defeat international terrorism in the modern world.