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EU Council/Afghanistan, India and Pakistan

May I remind the Prime Minister that several years and four Defence Secretaries ago—the first of whom, the right hon. Member for Ashfield (Mr. Hoon), is now sitting next to him—when we sent our first small contingent to Afghanistan, I warned that, as the Russians had found in the 1980s, 300,000 men would not be sufficient to achieve military victory in that country, and that the Pashtun Taliban are a religious-tribal sect with no international ambitions who have always disliked the al-Qaeda Arabs and will be thankful to be rid of them if they can be rid of all foreign troops at the same time? Now that the Prime Minister has at last recognised that the threat of international terrorism comes primarily from Pakistan, why can we not have a settlement with the Afghans on that basis?