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Middle East and Afghanistan

My Lords, it is my duty, but it is also a great pleasure, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and to congratulate her on a most accomplished and rather moving, if I may say so, maiden speech in which she brought attention to an aspect of the problem of Afghanistan that is sometimes overlooked but should not be so. I would like to say how welcome she is in this House too. She adds to both our regional and ethnic diversity, both of which are to the good. She has been given a highly topical but rather difficult and important subject—community cohesion—which I feel needs shaping and defining as well as prescribing. I hope that she will help us to do that. Perhaps I may also stray a little from the normal practices of this House by offering a pre-emptive welcome to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, who is speaking later. I think that I am not allowed in the practices of this House to refer to her as my noble friend, but she is undoubtedly noble and she is my friend. It is timely that we should have this opportunity today for a debate on the Middle East and Afghanistan. I am grateful, too, that the report on the European Union and the Middle East peace process, produced by the sub-committee on which I currently serve, is being brought within the ambit of our debate. With the important conference on the peace process summoned by President Bush due to take place next month, it was high time for the House to have an opportunity to discuss our recommendations and the Government’s response to them. I hope that the Minister will not take offence if I describe the latter—the Government’s response—as bland even beyond the normal average for my old department. I can see why references to keeping channels of communication open to Hamas and the need for an inclusive peace process might provoke an evasive response, but why on Earth the Government cannot agree that it is now important to begin to address final status issues as well as process completely eludes me. It would, I fear, be a triumph of hope over experience to say that President Bush’s conference is taking place under particularly propitious circumstances or with particularly high expectations of success. The weak position of both the Palestinian and Israeli Governments—and, one could add, that of the US Administration—increases the likelihood that tough choices will be ducked or fudged. The divisions among the Palestinians, with the exclusion of Hamas from any participation, can be welcome only to the most short-sighted. Nevertheless, it would surely be unwise to approach the conference in a spirit of cynicism or of exaggeratedly lowered ambitions; to do so would likely be self-fulfilling, and another failure will only stoke the fires of extremism that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester referred to in his contribution, which are already burning fiercely enough across the Middle East and more widely across the Islamic world. What is needed is not just another photo-opportunity conference—not some vapid declaration of principles which are then interpreted in totally contradictory senses by each party within a few weeks or even a few days—but rather the establishment of a robust and structured process designed to get to grips not just with interim deals and fixes like the road map but with the core issues of a two-state solution: frontiers, Jerusalem, security arrangements and refugees; a process that can survive the vicissitudes of next year’s US presidential election and which can be sustained through whatever acts of violence the enemies of a peaceful negotiated solution may throw at it. I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Howell, referring to a study on the US side of the Atlantic which comes to precisely the same conclusion as I have just suggested. It would be good to hear from the Minister what the Government and the EU’s objectives are for that conference and what enhanced role the EU can hope to play in its aftermath. There is also, I would suggest, a sub-plot here over the role of the United Nations in any process. There are renewed calls for the UN to pull out of the quartet and thereby, it is suggested, to regain what is described as its freedom of action. I believe these calls to be misguided and I hope the Government will advise the Secretary-General to resist them. It has been a mistake for two successive Secretaries-General, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon, to forbid their special representatives in the region to have any contact with Hamas, or with Hezbollah for that matter. The UN should be prepared to talk to all parties in disputes of this sort. But reversing that mistake does not require the UN to pull out of the quartet. After all, the Russians accept no such constraints on contact with Hamas and yet they remain in the quartet. And just what would be this freedom of action that the UN would have if it distanced itself from the key external co-ordinating group? Turning to Iraq, I do not want to get drawn into a detailed analysis of the prospects for stabilising the situation. Having tried a whole range of futile, counter-productive and poorly implemented strategies, the United States does now seem to be making the best of a pretty desperate job. But there is one particularly urgent problem that has the capacity to further destabilise the country and to which the Minister referred in his opening speech—it is particularly topical this week given the visit to London of the Turkish Prime Minister—namely, the tension between Turkey and the Kurdish region of Iraq over the incursions of PKK guerrillas and the possibility that Turkey will launch military operations across the border. That would be a high-risk policy fraught with many possible unintended and negative consequences for all concerned. I hope that the Minister will say something about the line that the Government will take on this matter with Prime Minister Erdogan. It is hard not to feel some sympathy with the Turkish Government, faced with the casualties to their armed forces, and also to feel that the Kurdish regional government are not perhaps doing all they could or all they should be doing to prevent their territory being used for these incursions. No doubt the Americans are better placed than we are to address that aspect of the problem, but concerted pressure on all and a concerted effort by all concerned will be needed if a Turkish Prime Minister who has done more than any other to alleviate the situation of his ethnic Kurdish compatriots and who has resisted the earlier pressure for military action from his generals is not to be drawn dangerously down that road. Then, there is the threat to the peace and security of the Middle East region posed by the doubts that still hang over Iran’s nuclear programme and by Iran’s refusal to accede to the Security Council’s request that it suspend its uranium enrichment programme. Neither Iran’s response so far to that request, nor the Iranian President’s overblown and often vicious rhetoric, nor the recent resignation of Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator leave any grounds for complacency or illusions. An Iran with nuclear weapons or with fissile material enabling it to develop such weapons in short order would seriously destabilise one of the already most unstable regions in the world, irrespective of the wider implications for our own and our Allies’ security and for the future of the non-proliferation regime. So a renewed effort and new initiatives to agree a diplomatic solution are now, I would argue, becoming overdue. It was quite right for the IAEA’s director-general to seek to clear up all the remaining doubt about Iranian past activities during the long period when it was operating a clandestine programme in breach of its international obligations. Dr El Baradei has been quite unreasonably criticised for doing what is simply his job to do. But however successful the agency’s work in that respect, it will not resolve the problems caused by Iran’s enrichment programme and the doubts about its future intentions. A further sanctions package may well be needed, but as our debate on economic sanctions earlier this month demonstrated, sanctions are not an end in themselves and they cannot work in isolation from diplomatic action. What is needed is that the United States should accompany any decision on further sanctions with an unconditional offer to join talks with Iran over the whole range of Iranian and international concerns. That, after all, is what it has done with North Korea, and it does seem to be having some beneficial effects. Why can it not be tried with Iran? I would be grateful if the Minister will say whether the Government would support such an approach. When the House last debated the situation in Afghanistan, the Minister said that the Government were currently reviewing all aspects of our policy there. I wonder if he could say a little more in his wind-up speech about the outcome of that review, though he did speak very interestingly about his recent visit there when he opened. I shall focus on one aspect only: the counter-narcotics strategy. As Afghan production of opium continues to rise, with forecasts of further rises next year, how long will it be before we recognise that present policies are not working and are almost certainly not going to work? Since our debate earlier this autumn, the Senlis council has produced what seemed to me at least some interesting ideas for pilot projects linking the controlled legal production of opium with the pharmaceutical use of the drug. We know that controlled production can work and has worked in Turkey and in India. No doubt Afghan conditions are much more challenging. But is it not time to give something like this a try? Any glance at the Middle East and Afghanistan is liable to leave one even more pessimistic and daunted than when one began, but pessimism is a poor prescription for effective diplomacy. We face massive challenges in this region, some of them due to our own earlier mistakes and miscalculations; and I am not speaking here only about Iraq. We need now to try to put that behind us and to work with as wide a degree of international co-operation as we can muster for better outcomes in the future.