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Defence Policy

I am certainly now aware of such reports, but there is not a jot of truth in them. My hon. Friend ought to be very careful about what he says, because of the possible effect on troops’ families back here in the UK of repeating some of the dishonesties that are at large about the circumstances of our forces on the ground in Afghanistan. I know that he will be careful, because he is a responsible person. He asks me directly whether there is any truth in this; I tell him directly that there is no truth in this. That having been said, however, we must understand that war fighting is dirty, difficult and dangerous. Part of what has been happening over the past months is that because of mass communications, the people of this country, including a generation that has never seen this before, are being exposed in real time—or as near to that as one can get—to the reality of what war fighting is like. Frankly, as I have said, it is dirty, difficult and dangerous. We ought to understand that that is what we ask some of our young people to do, and that it is what we train them for. It devalues their skill, commitment and bravery to point out every single deprivation that comes with war fighting as being somehow a failure on the part of the Ministry of Defence, the Government or some bureaucrat to support them. Sometimes, some of the circumstances in which our people find themselves—and in which their morale is at its highest—are simply a consequence of the very violence that they have to deal with, and from which they have to deliver the communities that they seek to protect. I make that point clearly to Members and others. We ought to be careful not to devalue the bravery and contribution of the people whom we train to do this difficult and dangerous work by describing all its difficult aspects as some sort of failure by a bureaucrat. And as a matter of fact, what my hon. Friend described is not happening.