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Afghanistan: Provincial Reconstruction Teams

My Lords, this is a short dinner hour debate, which is a very unsatisfactory debate in which to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown. I say to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House that it signals a need for a much fuller debate on this as soon as we come back in October. The general consensus is clear that we face a very serious and deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. It has become one of the major priorities of British foreign policy. I understand that we now have one of our biggest diplomatic missions in Afghanistan. We have nearly 8,000 soldiers there. We have a long-term commitment, which as we well know from Bosnia and Northern Ireland can be a matter of 10, 15 or 20 years or more before we are able to work ourselves fully out of the role; and it is a rising proportion of our aid budget. This is one of the central themes of British foreign policy and, as a number of noble Lords have said, it is the crucial issue for the future of NATO. When I was at NATO 18 months ago, I found myself talking to a succession of people in SHAPE who said that the future of NATO now depends on success in Afghanistan. If that is the case, we have some real questions to ask about the future of NATO. The commitment of a great many British NGOs is evident in their efforts in Kabul and elsewhere. We all recognise that we lost that crucial early period of post-conflict reconstruction between 2002 and 2004, when the western community, in particular the Americans and the British, were distracted by Iraq and when we should have been putting much greater effort into Afghanistan. That is past; we now need to do the best with what we can. We suffer from divided command, with ISAF as well as the Americans working alongside, with differences over tactics, with the Americans, as in south-east Europe, sometimes preferring to bomb from a distance rather than be there on the ground. We are suffering from differing terms of engagement and differing attitudes towards nation-building roles for armed forces and, as the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, said, with the ambiguous roles of the provincial reconstruction teams, which are partly military and partly civilian. That makes things very difficult as the mission drifts from reconstruction towards security. We need to try as hard as we can to get back towards reconstruction on the ground without drifting too far into a war on terror and the war on drugs; security being the main occupation. We recognise that as insecurity grows in the region, as we saw with the British commitment in Helmand, you do drift unavoidably from one to the other. We clearly need not just an approach to Afghanistan but also a regional approach. I am horrified by the way in which debate in Washington over policy towards Iran takes place in an entirely different context from the debate about what to do about Afghanistan. Iran is a neighbour; there are still half a million Afghan refugees in Iran, and people come backwards and forwards across the frontier all the time. We have to co-operate with the Government of Iran if we are going to manage the future of Afghanistan, just as we all recognise that we had to co-operate with the Government of Pakistan and with Iran’s rather difficult northern neighbours. Here we are, with the future of NATO at stake, with a number of question marks about the quality of the American approach and about the analysis of American foreign policy towards the region, and with Britain—not for the first time by a very long way—attempting to hold the sceptical European partners together with sometimes misguided American leadership. That is not a comfortable role for the Government, or for the Minister to answer on, but we recognise that here we have at stake not just the future of Afghanistan but of south-west Asia, and the spill-over that any deterioration of the situation, particularly in Pakistan, would have on the streets of this country.