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Afghanistan

There are, I think, 55,000 trained Afghans in the national army. There are also a greater number of police officers, who have been partly trained but who substantially need retraining, and we are working our way through that. Properly equipping an army of that size to face an insurgency is a challenging task. Every day we make more investment in doing that, but at the same time we are trying to ensure that the Afghan institutions of government learn how to do that for themselves and to sustain their own army. So we are doing many things, investing billions of dollars from the international community—mostly from the United States of America—in equipping this army to deal with the insurgency challenge that it faces. I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a measure of exactly where we are in that process from the Dispatch Box today, but I know from my observations of that army, as it has been trained and equipped over the past two years, that we have made a lot of progress. All those soldiers who are deployed and working with ours in the south are equipped well enough to deal with what they need to do.