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Afghanistan: UK Forces

My Lords, we are not occupying Afghanistan; you cannot occupy a country with 7,700 troops. The answer that I gave to the noble Baroness was that we do not know how long it will take for Afghanistan to make this transition, as I called it, to democracy. I am being realistic with the House. At the same time, that is not saying that there is an open-ended commitment. The two are separate. The operation that we are embarked upon is one that we set out for three years, going through to 2009. We need to be realistic about the challenge that the United Nations and NATO have undertaken. It is a challenge that we can be successful in, but it would be unrealistic to predict the timescales.