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Foreign Affairs and Defence

Everyone in the House will agree that, when he becomes President, President-elect Obama will find that he has the biggest in-tray since Harry Truman's. He will have to deal with the continued violence of Islamist fundamentalists, the fragility of the situation in Iraq and the worrying position in Afghanistan, as well as the instability in Pakistan and the fear in India and beyond, given the threats that they face. He will find a resurgent Russia, with the complications of the recent events in Georgia, and an Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear weapons state. All those matters were addressed in today's extremely interesting debate, during excellent contributions from both sides of the House. I shall begin by discussing Islamist fundamentalism, which we must all accept is the existential threat of our age. There have been different threats in the past, including the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s and the communism of the cold war, and we face an equally grave threat today, which we must take equally seriously. This threat undermines the stability of an increasing number of states and we will have to find the strength to confront it politically, militarily and economically. We have to accept, however much it pains us to do so, that there are those out there who hate us because of who we are and not just because of what we do. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) said, this will be a long struggle, which will require us to find a great deal of moral courage. We will need resolve and resilience from our people and our politicians and we will have to make assets available as necessary. In terms of foreign policy, we will need to receive much more vocal support from moderate Muslim states if we are genuinely to make a difference in this battle. Those who think that they can get away with silence in the face of the fundamentalist threat need to remember that if we feed terror, it simply gets more hungry. As something of a counterbalance, however, we must also accept—and point out at every possible opportunity—that Islam and Islamism are not synonymous, even though that is what the extremists want us to believe as they prosecute the conflict according to their criteria and on their terms. I had the privilege at the weekend of meeting and listening to the historian Bernard Lewis. He made an interesting point when he said that Nazism was undoubtedly German, but there was a Germany before Nazism, a Germany outside Nazism and, triumphantly, a Germany after Nazism. We have to start building bridges to moderate Islam, to get it to recognise that there is another way and that there has to be a potential for well-being, stability, security and prosperity if we are to deal with the threat within society at present. There will always be new challenges. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Mr. Walter) talked about Somalia. It has been pointed out recently that only 0.14 per cent. of all shipping in the Gulf of Aden is subjected to piracy, but the point is that it is not the threat that we face now that we need to deal with, but the threat that we might face in the future if we show inaction. Piracy is turning out to be a very nicely lucrative business. If we consider the combination of the profits made through piracy and what is now happening in a country such as Somalia, which is utterly lawless, we can imagine all the prospective benefits for organisations such as al-Qaeda and related groups. The mistakes that we made after the defeat of Russia in Afghanistan are all too clear. We did not invest in the long-term security and stability of the state, and the lack of adequate institutions made it all the easier for it to become a breeding ground for extremism and terror. We must not allow that to happen in Somalia or any other states today. My hon. Friend the Member for Newark also mentioned what had happened in Mumbai. I am always loth to use the term ““al-Qaeda””, because there is a danger of its becoming a brand, but the events in Mumbai, which included the targeting of US citizens, British citizens and Jewish citizens, certainly bear all the hallmarks of those who are sympathetic to the aims of al-Qaeda. No state can disengage from this, because no state is currently safe. My hon. Friend was right to point to our domestic, maritime and airborne security fragilities, but there is an element in the broader debate to which we must always be sensitive—the need to find ways of diminishing the forces that strengthen radicalism at home or abroad. That is the key to our long-term success. When we boil it down, we find that people who have nothing have nothing to lose, and people who have nothing to lose are much more willing to gamble with it. When we give people security and prosperity, we get some leverage for the first time and deny a recruiting ground to the men of terror. When we are discussing Afghanistan and other areas, it is important to remember that economics play a very important part in long-term stability and the defeat of terrorism. A number of contributions dealt with Zimbabwe and the soul-searching about what we should do there. Should we impose sanctions? They might strike a fatal blow to the regime, but at what cost to the rest of the citizens? It was an interesting debate and the Foreign Secretary and my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary pointed out that the arguments were quite well balanced, but these arguments are true in any conflict. They were true in Iraq. As several Members pointed out and as I have experienced myself, it is now possible to go to Basra without body armour. It is possible to be caught in a traffic jam, as I was, because of the number of people going shopping, showing that they have suddenly forgotten about security as the No. 1 issue and can take part in and appreciate the things that we so often take for granted. Those freedoms never come at zero cost: there is a price—sometimes a terrible price—that has to be paid for the end of tyranny and despotism and for people to be able to live in freedom and shape their own destinies. A key question about what happened in Iraq is why the surge was successful. There has been a lot of discussion, but perhaps not very much analysis, about that. The fact about the surge that is often overlooked is that it was not done just to put boots on the ground; it was done in specific support of a specific political objective. It took place to provide support at a time when the policy was to separate the reconcilables and the irreconcilables, the Sunni community and al-Qaeda. The US surge and associated increase in numbers allowed troops to move out of their large forward operating bases to secure the people where they lived, in their own communities. Many were embedded with small units of the Iraqi army and were able to hold on to areas once they were cleared. Ultimately, that provided Prime Minister Maliki and his Government with sufficient confidence and feelings of strength to take on the Shi'a militias that had held up so much for so long. We will be able to leave Iraq in a much more stable state when, as we understand from the press, we start to depart from the end of March next year. I hope that the Secretary of State for Defence will, for the sake of clarity, confirm this evening that we are to start to leave at the end of March and will be out by June. We should hold our heads high about the contribution of the UK and our armed forces to what is ultimately a much more stable situation in that country. Many people have said that what we need now is a surge in Afghanistan, as though we can read across directly from one situation to the other. However, for a start, Iraq was about reconstruction, while Afghanistan is about construction. There was a large middle class in Iraq, but there is no middle class to provide a degree of stability in Afghanistan. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary said today, Conservative Members' support for the Government's policies for Afghanistan has been acknowledged by Ministers on a number of occasions. However, I echo what he said earlier—that any requests for more UK troops must take into account the overstretch in our forces and the disproportionate contribution we are already making, especially in southern Afghanistan. If more troops are to be deployed there, it must be in support of a specific political process and we must have a proportionate increase in our assets to match our increase in the number of troops. Real pressure must be placed on the Afghan Government not to block in any way what the international community is trying to achieve, and we must have a greater effort by NATO allies in burden sharing in Afghanistan. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) and the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) said today, we need clarity in the strategies that we pursue because at the moment it is hard to know how we will know when we have been successful. It is hard to know what the benchmarks are to tell us when we are getting things right, when we are failing to make real progress and what our exit strategy should be. As we said in our last defence debate, when we talk about strategy in Afghanistan, the question is which strategy—the UN strategy, the NATO strategy, the Afghan Government strategy, the American strategy or the reconstruction strategy? They are not all tied together in a coherent format. We know that some things are going much better than others. The Afghan national army is doing relatively well. We are making good progress and the British armed forces have done a great deal to encourage that. However, as the Foreign Secretary said, the same cannot be said of the police force in Afghanistan. We need to ask why not. Why is it that some things have made better progress than others? Where does the blame lie and, far more important, how can we put it right? As my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes (Mr. Lancaster) said, we have to ensure that we have the right equipment at all times to give support to our forces. I am sure that the whole House will look forward to the publication of the report that he discussed. The subject of Iran was raised a number of times. The primary question for the international community is whether it finds the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran acceptable. We have set out three reasons why we believe that the prospect is unacceptable. The first is the nature of the regime and its leadership, not least its threat to Israel's very existence. The second is Iran's record in exporting terror to other parts of the region. Adding fissile material to that situation would be utterly irresponsible. The third is that if Iran becomes a nuclear weapons state, others in the region will want to join the nuclear club. I was recently in Turkey, where it was made clear to me that if Iran becomes a nuclear weapons state, so will Turkey, and so will Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Do we really want a new nuclear arms race in the world's most unstable region? If we are to influence Iran's behaviour, we must have international solidarity on matters such as sanctions. We will require the co-operation of countries such as Russia, yet Prime Minister Putin was recently reported as saying that Russia is aware of what Europe is still doing in Iran and that it will not hand over this valuable market to Europe. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) said, President-elect Obama would be in a much stronger position if there was international unity, yet Europe is failing to show resolution where it matters. As he said, there is no ban yet on European investment in Iranian oil and gas fields and no ban on Europe-wide export credit guarantees, which subsidise trade with Iran. If we want security, we cannot say one thing and do another. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) made a passionate speech about the need for multilateral disarmament. It is fair to say that with bipartisan support, the United Kingdom's approach is within the spirit and the letter of the non-proliferation treaty because our new nuclear deterrent will be at a lower warhead level than is currently the case. We are making our contribution; others must do the same. However, his speech echoed other contributions about the need for a new framework for non-proliferation. We will be in a world where more countries will want access to civil nuclear power. At the very least, we will need to be able to control the fuel cycle, with new structures and safeguards, if that is not to become a new proliferation problem. A number of hon. Members talked about the relationship between the EU and NATO. NATO remains the cornerstone of our security. There can be a role for the EU in defence, but it must be as a delivery mechanism within NATO policy, not in conflict with NATO. It should do things that NATO cannot or will not do—elements of nation-building, and peacekeeping that is complementary to NATO's actions, not in competition with them—and have additional resources, rather than diverting scarce resources. Far too few members of NATO pay what they are supposed to in terms of their share of GDP. In fact, if all NATO members paid 2 per cent. of their GDP, we would have $67 billion extra for NATO defence spending every year. That is a considerable sum. We heard about piracy. Why is it that some hon. Members—a couple of my hon. Friends alluded to this—chose not to reinforce the Combined Task Force 150 mission or the NATO mission and chose to fly the EU flag instead? It smacks of politics first and piracy second. Of course, everything depends on the capability of our armed forces. We are still operating on 1998 defence planning assumptions. We need a strategic defence review. The Ministry of Defence still has a mismatch between commitments and resources. We are now told that there will be further cuts or delays to programmes, but on what basis? Against what strategic analysis? The suspicion is that the present Government have not the will to fund fully what the Government themselves, in the strategic defence review, said was necessary for our national security. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon) pointed out, there is a danger that the use of urgent operational requirements will destabilise the procurement budget. We must defend our defence exports, because that is how we can protect British defence jobs in the long term. Let me end with a tribute to our armed forces, their families and the civilians who contribute to our country's safety. Whether Members visit Iraq, the Gulf or Afghanistan, they will observe that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines—all the men and women in our armed forces—show courage, dedication and professionalism. Those men and women have a right to expect the Government of the day, of whatever colour, to maximise the success of a mission, and to do all that they can to minimise the risk to them. If they are injured, they will be looked after properly; if they are killed, their families will be looked after properly; and if they leave the armed forces, they will be valued as veterans who have made sacrifices for the country. That is the covenant. It is the ultimate underpinning of our security in this country, and if it is broken, all of us will be the losers.