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Defence Policy

I agree; the hon. Gentleman’s point is well made and I referred to the same thing earlier. The hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) said that membership of NATO means taking on the full commitment entailed by combined security and joint defence. These operations cannot be treated in an à-la-carte way, as happens among some of our NATO allies, which is a real problem. We will be in Afghanistan for a long time and we must impress on our NATO allies that if the operation is to be sustainable, if it is to prevail and succeed, we must have more help in terms of manpower and finance from other members than we have had to date. Progress is being made. It is painfully slow, but there has been progress with hospitals, electricity generators, bridges, roads and water supplies. Goodness knows, there is a long way to go, but we should not be pessimistic just because sometimes the casualty figures are a lot higher than we would want. The success of many of the operations in which we are involved depends entirely on good intelligence, so I should welcome the Government’s assessment of whether we have enough ISTAR—intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance—capability. In the House, we have previously referred to air assets—especially helicopters—and they are still not adequate to the task in the long term. The fact that none of them is dedicated solely to the task of casualty evacuation, which has to be slotted into general helicopter tasking, is evidence that we do not have as many helicopters as we want. A separate, but slightly less obvious, problem is that the lack of helicopter capacity means that there is insufficient resource for some of the training that could improve the effectiveness of what we are doing. The terrain in Helmand is such that helicopters are vital, so unless we can address this issue for the longer term, it will continue to hold back what we are doing and undermine our aims. Helmand is also a punishing environment for equipment and vehicles, particularly for engines, transmissions and suspensions. All those are experiencing a heavy toll from the sort of work that we are undertaking in a hostile environment. As time goes on, we will need to work up the capability and capacity of the Afghans themselves. One of the prerequisites will be improving the ability of Afghan authorities to make medium-term and long-term plans. That is particularly limited now. Although the Afghan army is developing, Afghan policing is far more of a problem. At its best it is passable, but at its worst it comes down, at times, to militias and tribal police of varying loyalty, some of whom are involved in all manner of activities in which one would not normally expect or want the police to be involved. That issue will hold us back if we cannot address it. The issue of eradicating the poppy crop is serious. The Government have responded to the Defence Committee’s report on Afghanistan, which criticised the poppy policy as confused. The problem, as we can all see, is that the crop is an essential part of the livelihood and income of many Afghans. The point to make about the poppy crop is that the dividend—the crop itself—is obtained within six months of planting. Let us consider the pre-1979 period, before the Soviet invasion. At that time, successful and viable crops such as nutmeg, almonds, currants and sultanas could be found in Afghanistan. We may want to get people back into growing vines, but they will wait five years to get a dividend from planting them, as opposed to the six months’ wait after planting poppies. That is the critical point, so the aid effort and support that we can give will be our only hope of offering an alternative crop to the subsistence farmers.