---

NATO Summit

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for describing me in terms of my youth, but I feel the speed at which I am ageing doing this job. I agree that this is a very difficult area, with which the international community has to grapple. We have made progress. The issues relate to getting alignment, rules of engagement and national caveats to provide military commanders with the greatest effectiveness, given the resources that their community provides—while at the same time preserving the right level of national sovereignty control for those nations—so that politicians are able to balance the concerns that exist in the public of a nation that is committing troops. It is important for us to acknowledge the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that it is not very helpful to our force commanders to talk too much about the detail of the differences in the public forum. That needs to be done behind closed doors, so to speak, as much as it can be. We must recognise that this is a difficult and dangerous operation, and that all the coalition partners, at whatever level of national caveat they may be operating, have taken significant losses in support of the United Nations effort and NATO force in Afghanistan. It would not be right to criticise any nation that has lost people on operations in support of this cause.