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Afghanistan

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and for advance sight of it. I fully associate the Conservative party with all that he has said about our servicemen and women and the dangers that they face. Those who have given their lives in Afghanistan are irreplaceable to their families and friends and we will remember those families in our thoughts and prayers. We will also share their pride that we still have professional and courageous servicemen and women who are brave enough to sacrifice themselves for the security of the people of this country. We must always remember that we are in Afghanistan for reasons of national security, to deny a safe haven to those who would commit indiscriminate acts of terrorist murder on men, women and children. We must remember that it is an international mission sanctioned by the UN and led by NATO. The Afghanistan compact, which followed the London conference, set out four objectives: increased security, drug reduction, an efficient executive and economic and social development. Progress has been made on social development, but the process of government remains compromised by corruption and a lack of co-ordination between the military, reconstruction and political missions. The military command also needs greater clarity of purpose and simplification of structure—a point regularly raised by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, and he raised it again today in talks with President Bush. There has been no progress on the drugs issue, with no alternative sources of income being made available to those for whom growing poppies is the only means of feeding themselves. If anything, the situation has deteriorated. Security has improved in some parts of the country, as the Secretary of State said, but it remains undermined in the south by the continued insurgency, the breakout of Taliban prisoners in Kandahar, and the Pakistani Government's attitude to border issues. A former NATO commander, General McNeill, recently said that more troops were needed to defeat the Taliban-led insurgency. He said that"““it's an under-resourced force””," and he expressed concern that NATO could become a ““two-tiered alliance””, with an insufficient number of countries truly committed to fighting against the Taliban. We have seen how the fighting in the south of the country has been left to the Americans, the British, the Canadians, the Dutch and a number of valiant smaller forces, while some of the biggest NATO allies have been risk averse, to say the least. Will the Secretary of State give the House an assessment of how great a threat is posed to the achievement of the aims of the Afghan compact by the underactivity of some of our NATO allies, and does he agree that the message from the United Kingdom should be that it is unacceptable for all those in NATO to have the same insurance policy if only some of us pay the full premiums? We will now have 8,000 personnel in Afghanistan and 4,000 personnel on active operations in Iraq. We have consistently raised concerns about the force size in Afghanistan. Does the Secretary of State believe that, with the increase that he announced today, the force size is now sufficient for the safety and effectiveness of our troops, and can he tell us by how many troops General McNeill believes NATO, as a whole, is short? How confident can the Secretary of State be that he can fill the 630 new posts that he announced today with correctly qualified personnel who have had sufficient rest and training? He tells us that some of the announcements that he made today will take a year to come into effect; can he be more specific on that point? Recent deaths in Afghanistan have shown the Taliban's shift towards suicide bombing as a tactic. We have seen in Iraq what that can mean. Will the Secretary of State give an assurance that all necessary protective equipment is available to minimise the risk to our armed forces on the ground, and can he give an assurance that there is the fullest co-operation from the Afghan police and military in attempting to minimise those threats? The increase announced today was predictable, but does it not make a mockery of the Government's national security strategy, published only 12 weeks ago, which said that"““we are entering a phase of overall reduced commitments, recuperation of our people, and regrowth and reinvestment in capabilities and training””?" That is a dangerous and harmful fantasy; what we have is overstretch. I believe that the Government are genuinely committed to a successful outcome in Afghanistan, and they know that they have our full support on that objective, but they need urgently to address the gap between commitments and military capabilities if we are to succeed. Above all, we need to recalibrate expectations. We cannot simply drop a Jeffersonian democracy on to a broken 13th-century state and expect it to work in five or even 10 years' time. It will be a long haul, so we must properly plan for a long haul, and not for six-month rotations for our commanders, or sixth-month or annual budget allocations for reconstruction efforts. We need to bring our military and financial planning into line with the political reality. I am sure that those on both sides of the House agree strongly that the costs of failure are far too high to contemplate.