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Armed Forces

My Lords, I warmly thank the noble Baroness for this opportunity. I hope the Government Front Bench will forgive me for raising questions about our role in Afghanistan which came up in the gracious Speech, but which the Minister was unable to answer. The central question for me has become a focus for seminars in every NATO country; is our military intervention in Afghanistan an anti-terrorist measure—a form of self defence—or is it to secure reconstruction and development for Afghanistan? How can it be both? Should soldiers be aid workers? I will draw no parallel with Iraq, although there are obvious similarities in the way we have approached post-conflict reconstruction in both countries. Because of my allegiance to a number of humanitarian NGOs—although I am not officially speaking for any of them—I see soldiers primarily as protectors rather than aid workers, but I am not one of those who in principle opposes the involvement of the Army in development. There have been many occasions in history when soldiers have restored infrastructure and rebuilt bridges and roads, which of course benefit the population. And there are recent examples in Sierra Leone, where UNAMSIL forces rebuilt mosques, or in the Balkans where our soldiers were working with refugees in Macedonia and lives were saved by soldiers. However, the conditions have to be right. The difficulty comes where there is no obvious correlation between war and reconstruction. In Helmand province and along the border with Pakistan, territory is repeatedly being captured and lost. As my noble and gallant friend Lord Bramall said, villages and farmland are devastated and civilian lives are continually risked and sacrificed. This is a frequent consequence of civil war in countries such as Sudan or Lebanon, but it is rarely today associated with foreign military intervention. There is a famous line in Tacitus, which the soldiers will know: "““Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant””—" where they make a wilderness, they call it peace. Of course that comment was made in very different times. There was never such an intention in Afghanistan. But what started in 2001 as the liberation of a country by an overwhelming force, approved by almost every UN member and intended to be translated quickly into a zone of peacekeeping, has turned into something quite different—and I think we all acknowledge that. Helmand is known as the ““lawless province””. Throughout the country civilians and Afghan aid workers are being attacked, and reconstruction work is held up in some of the formerly secure provinces such as Badghis, and even in areas closer to Kabul itself. We may be containing the Taliban, but we are not yet winning the hearts and minds of the people. There is still no clear allied strategy. Our military objectives in the south are becoming harder to define, let alone justify. NATO commanders are finding them out from their politicians because decisions now will dictate the way that the organisation behaves over a decade. The alliance is holding firm, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, mentioned, there is overstretch everywhere, and there are clear disagreements between the US position and some European countries. Surely we should respect the position of countries that prefer to support security for reconstruction and not for a full-scale war in Helmand and along the Pakistan border which we did not foresee. Germany's constitution allows only training and not fighting forces, but their training unit is being tripled. The Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said recently: "““We need security and reconstruction and development: that is the wider concept . . . That's why I think these calls simply for more and more military involvement are misguided””." The picture is complicated by the use of the provincial reconstruction team—the PRT—which is a clever combination of motives, which again was greeted with enthusiasm at the beginning. But students of PRTs—remembering its middle name is reconstruction—have shown that whatever the original model, Governments have strayed very far from it. Two of the PRTs have been widely quoted as ““successful””' models: one was our own in Mazar-e-Sharif where the British NGOs testified to its usefulness and cooperation with the community and its independence of humanitarian work, and there is the small New Zealand PRT in Bamyan. The Bamyan PRT keeps out of aid projects, although Governor Sarabi longs for a US-style budget for development. The US PRT in Khost, for example, has provided nine villages with drinking water, and the Hungarian PRT in Baghlan has a similar project which is arguably a form of public relations as well as development. Our PRT in Lashkar Gah has contributed substantially through ““quick impact projects””, but these local projects should really be reviewed—I shall mention that again in a moment—because while encouraging the population, they cannot be seen as part of an overall development plan while a war is going on so close by. My wife and I visited the Swedish PRT which has replaced ours in Mazar last month, and once past the barriers and menacing looks we were treated with great courtesy. We paused by the memorial to Lance Corporal Steven Sherwood, aged 23, who died on 29 October 2005—he is one of the 257 mentioned by my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig—a reminder of the constant danger to our forces and our aid workers, even in the north; and we must be proud of them all. The noble Baroness, Lady Dean, and others spoke of the additional dangers they face. The noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, in his maiden speech on PRTs said that in more stable provinces, "““we must try to graduate””" from a defensive model to one "““where development agencies can act independently””.—[Official Report, 11/7/07; col. 1473.]" No one could see the Mazar PRT as a friend of development; it is a bastion of military force above the town, hidden behind concrete and barbed wire, and, as a citizen, that is all you would see. A few inquiries showed that contacts with the local population were minimal although they went out on foot patrols. It is hermetically sealed and does not even purchase goods from the local market. Instead of meeting people and getting involved with development, its forces hardly venture out unless they receive an urgent security call, which is rare, because it is one of the safest places in Afghanistan. A recent study by the Overseas Development Institute's humanitarian network shows that outside forces tend to define peace and security in their own terms, with little reference to the aspirations and priorities of local people. It concludes that, where security is of paramount importance, assistance from the military is likely to continue but that local communities and governments must be more involved in decisions affecting their future. I doubt if that is happening in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is testimony to the continuing need of the international community to adhere to that obvious principle. So I ask Her Majesty’s Government to undertake a review of the contribution of the provincial reconstruction teams and of the impact projects to the reconstruction of Afghanistan. A couple of sentences from the Foreign Secretary during the debate on the gracious Speech still bother me because I know that he is concerned about hearts and minds. He said that, "““the front line of terrorism in 2001 was Afghanistan, and it is again the front line today””.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/11/07; col. 405.]" Later he said: "““The operations in Afghanistan . . . are test cases for the new NATO that we want to see””.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/11/07; col. 407.]" Added together, do not those remarks imply continuing uncertainty about the purposes of our military mission in Afghanistan? Is it really sensible to regard Helmand as the front line of terrorism in the world today in the same way as we saw the Taliban as an inspiration for al-Qaeda in 9/11? And can we really justify the Afghanistan campaign as a testing ground for NATO in the future, which as we have heard from my noble and gallant friends, is definitely the case? It is an excellent example of our Army and our Armed Forces in action. I would be grateful for clarification from the Minister, because I am sure she shares my view that the British people, while very supportive of our gallant forces, our reconstruction efforts in the country and our new ongoing diplomatic initiative, need much more reassurance about our military role in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Finally, I welcome the new Prime Minister’s commitment to more parliamentary involvement in war-making powers and look forward to taking part in a minor way in the new Bill, with the proviso, which we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, that our Members of Parliament learn a little more about the Armed Forces.