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Armed Forces

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for this very timely debate. With courage and dedication, she has done much in her life for our country. I welcome the Minister. She may not entirely like what she hears, but we are here to help her and we will do so as much as we can. We will try to get her on net, as I think that that is rather important. I thank all noble Lords for their kind words about the SAS casualties. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, is our Colonel Commandant and I am the president of the SAS. We have obviously had a bad time. One hopes that the badly injured will survive. Lately, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, and I seem to be going to Hereford more than we would wish on such occasions. I was not amazed but I was sad that in the Queen’s Speech I could not pick out the word ““military”” anywhere. I would like to have seen a thank you or some gratitude from her Majesty’s Government for what the Armed Forces have done. It may not be a normal thing to do, but there are people wandering around saying that they have a bit of vision today. I think that it would have been very good news for the Government and very good PR. Everyone in the nation hears the Queen’s Speech and it would have awakened the population a little to what is happening overseas and the terrorist problems that we have in our country. I believe that the covenant has been broken, not just yesterday, but over the past 10 or 15 years. There is no one else to blame for that except the politicians—the parliamentary system and all three political parties. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, said, there is hardly anyone in your Lordships' House today for what is a mammoth and important debate. I think that all parliamentarians are culpable, because the military is often at war but the nation is not and Parliament is not. The Cabinet does not think like that. We have peace and everyone is looking to ensure that people get a new set of free false teeth, rather than to see that a serviceman is properly looked after and things like that. Briefly, the talk is that there has been no war or battle like Afghanistan since Korea and that they are similar. I do not subscribe to that entirely, although the close-quarter fighting can be the width of your Lordships’ House. Certainly, in Korea, it was that and less. But in Korea there suddenly seemed to be an awful of Chinamen about. They came from everywhere; it was an avalanche. I merely give your Lordships that as an example because, looking at the history and present position of Afghanistan, your Lordships will see that there are areas that the Taliban have and rule. History shows that, when that happens, various tribal chiefs and warlords get coerced into the Taliban net. Gradually, enemy numbers increase. I hope that it will not happen but have a feeling that it might; there will suddenly be an awful lot of enemies. Warlords suddenly give up their individual hatreds and cobble themselves together and you suddenly have outside your gates not just hundreds, but thousands. When I visited Afghanistan with the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, a seasoned and experienced solider, everywhere I went I asked whether our servicemen had sufficient ammunition. I once just about ran out of ammunition and it is not happy feeling. I understand that we do not make our own ammunition but buy most of it from abroad, and sometimes some of it does not work very well. We ought to ensure that we are stocked and supplied correctly and that there is no sudden panic that we cannot get it or do not have it. In the same way, perhaps the Minister has not yet been fully briefed, but there is a long supply route from Karachi to Kandahar by vehicle. It is open to all sorts of interference, of which, luckily, it has not had too much lately. But we owe a debt of gratitude to President Musharraf for allowing that to be and for the support that he gives. People are currently rather throwing bricks at the president, and our Foreign Office and our American cousins seem to think that there should be more democracy. We should be very careful; after all, it took us 400 years to sort of get democracy going. The people of Pakistan, with their Muslim way of life, do not necessarily want our type of democracy; they will develop their own. Your Lordships may be interested to hear that my taxi driver in Islamabad said to me, ““We have a saying in Pakistan: never pay your lawyer, never pay your barrister—buy the judge””. The president might therefore be quite right to make some changes in the chief justice’s department. It may be that bringing back failed, and perhaps not always very honest, politicians is not the best for Pakistan today. Coming down to earth, I was in America with my old friends the American Special Forces, whom I have known since the day President Kennedy started them. I was asking about the best sniper rifle. You are not going to win the war in Afghanistan, urban or countrywide, with sniper rifles, but they are an important weapon for the Army and the Royal Air Force Regiment. I was told the other day that we have a new one; I do not know when it is coming in. I asked about this in America and was immediately taken and shown four different sniper rifles, of which I would have taken three. I asked whether they were readily available off the shelf. ““Yes””, they said. I said, ““Well, I would only want to sell them or give them to the British Army or the RAF Regiment””. They said, ““We can supply tomorrow””. I merely point to this: why do we not buy equipment off the shelf? The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and I gave the Minister’s predecessor a tough time about C17 aircraft. We asked: ““Why don’t we buy more?”” and ““Why don’t we buy helicopters off the shelf?””. People reply: ““Well, who would maintain them?””. If you can put 10,000 civilian security personnel into these places, you can put civilian maintenance crews in. You have to hire them. We went through a great deal of trouble in your Lordships’ House getting civilian practices properly into the forces’ new military law. In business, if we want something we go and get it, whether simple or technical. This was where the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, was so good: he knew how to do these things and had business management experience. I was going to do this slightly differently from the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater. I was going to ask why members of the Cabinet cannot sit around the table and say that the military and defence forces matter, that they must do something about it for the present day and the future and that they must really take an interest and be seen to want to be part of the defence of Great Britain. They have singularly failed to do that so far.