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Afghanistan

We have trained 55,000 members of the Afghan army to date, but they are not all trained to the level at which they can conduct operations without significant support from command and control, logistics and planning. As I said to the House earlier in Defence questions, the first kandak of that army has reached capability measurement 1, which means that it is capable of moving forward. There are other niche capabilities in the Afghan national army and security forces that are very effective. The other day, we saw the biggest ever haul of drugs seized by an Afghan force which we trained in part. From here, it is impossible to put a time limit on when that army will be able to conduct large-scale security operations on its own, but my right hon. Friend ought to look at what has happened recently in Iraq. In a comparatively short period, the Iraqi army has gone from being almost totally dependent on the support of the allies to being capable of carrying out operations that it plans and commands itself. When one reaches the tipping point in relation to the training of an army, then, at least in my experience over the past two years, the process of improvement accelerates quite dramatically.