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Defence Policy

I agree that we should be discriminating about where we deploy our troops, and I believe that we have been. Indeed, the early part of my speech was designed to give hon. Members and others who may read it an indication of the way in which I am putting into practice the objective that the hon. Gentleman so eloquently sets out of allowing our armed forces the opportunity to recuperate and rebuild from the challenges that we have asked them to face, through reducing our commitment and providing space. Early in the job, I learned something that was counter-intuitive to me, given that I do not have a military background. Outside the military, if people are trained to do something and then deployed to do it, they get better at it. The military has taught me that military skills are sustained by training people, and degraded—or at least in danger of being degraded—by deploying people into operational theatres. That is counter-intuitive, but I learned that quickly from the advice and briefings that I received. I subsequently consistently sought to reach the current position and move further. To that extent, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. However, I do not want to give the impression that I agree that it is not in our national interest to deploy our troops where they have been deployed. For example, it is manifestly in our national interest to deploy to Afghanistan. We lost the greatest number of UK citizens in a single terrorist incident in the attack on the twin towers in New York, and that terrorist atrocity was planned in Afghanistan. Ninety per cent. of the heroin that is abused on the streets and in the communities of the United Kingdom comes from Afghanistan. I understand that we will not deal with the supply of narcotics from Afghanistan in the longer term unless we deal with the issues here in the United Kingdom, but we need to do both. Our deployment is manifestly in the interests of the people of the United Kingdom for those two reasons, if not for the fact that we as part of the international community owe the people of Afghanistan a debt of honour to support them out of the decades of conflict that they have had to suffer. Some 2 million of Afghanistan’s own people have died in getting the country to the point at which it now enjoys a limited and fragile freedom. On each occasion in the past on which the international community has promised to support Afghanistan out of conflict, it has not done so. People in this country think that it is in our interests, as a responsible member of the international community, to live up to those commitments. For all those reasons, it is in the interests of the United Kingdom that we should have troops deployed to Afghanistan.