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Defence Policy

Not as it is put there, although there are some elements of truth that both the Secretary of State in what he said and I in what I am about to say would take from that. There has been much discussion about the parallels between what recently happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan. However, the differences are that, first, in Iraq we were talking about reconstruction, while in Afghanistan we are talking about construction. There is very little to reconstruct in Afghanistan, and that makes a big difference. There is a substantial middle class in Iraq, which does not exist in Afghanistan, and, again, that will take a long time to develop. Clearly there are political elements that need to come into play before we can talk about a mission being completed or a victory, but we must accept that were we not to have a military presence there, we could go back to handing over a space to those who are fundamentally opposed to our national interest. That would be quite unacceptable, not least given the sacrifices that our service personnel, our allied service personnel and our taxpayers have made so far in Afghanistan. Many people have talked about the surge in Iraq and whether that could be applied to Afghanistan. We must be careful about this, because in Iraq there was a genuine political purpose behind the surge. General Petraeus saw putting extra troops on the ground as a way of supporting a political impetus, which was to separate out the reconcilable and the irreconcilable—the point that was being made about those who could be brought into the process; a point that the Secretary of State made. What would be the purpose of such a move in Afghanistan at present? We are not at the same juncture; simply putting more troops on the ground would risk inflaming the insurgency without our having anything specific to support. As Frederick Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise institute and the architect of the Iraqi surge, said, Afghanistan is not Iraq and we cannot just template Iraq's solutions on to Afghanistan's problems. We need to understand that. For example, Afghanistan has 10 major ethnic groups; there are only two in Iraq. A major part of the Iraqi surge was the creation of the conditions for the Sunni awakening, and the structure and beliefs of Iraq's tribal system allowed that to occur. However, it is very unlikely that pashtunwali, the Pashtun tribal code of honour, would allow that to happen easily in Afghanistan. In the House and outside, we have to be wary about simplistic solutions that apply what happened in one place to another; there is no guarantee that they would necessarily succeed. If we are to be successful in Afghanistan, we need a clearly defined end state, which we have not had until now. We need realistic benchmarks so that we do not fool ourselves into believing that we are making progress when we are not. The recent National Audit Office report into the Department for International Development was a shot of reality in respect of what has happened there. Above all else, we need realistic expectations. Pretending that we can achieve things quickly does no good to the political case of those of us who believe in our engagement in Afghanistan, and it does no good to the morale of our forces or to public support in this country or those of our allies. Afghanistan is not Iraq; it is about construction, not reconstruction, and that will take time. Noble purposes are all very well, but they have to be allied to realistic time scales. If they are not, things become unsatisfactory and unhelpful.