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Defence in the World

I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) on what he has just said. I was proud to sign his early-day motion and I would like to reassure him about one thing. I do not know what the parliamentary term for "scum" is, but when people such as those in the British National party behave in the way he described, we can be all the more reassured about how right we are to condemn, oppose and disrespect them and all their works. I only hope that, despite all the provocations from Westminster to our constituents, they nevertheless have the maturity and good sense to do the same to the BNP in the elections today. However, in the spirit of partisanship, which I cannot entirely resist, I say to the hon. Gentleman that if it were not for the Liberal Democrats' policy of proportional representation, the prospects of the BNP leader entering the European Parliament would be much smaller. In March 2008 I had the privilege of giving a joint presentation—I must stress that I was very much the junior partner—to a group called First Defence, of which I was the parliamentary chairman. The presentation was entitled "Counter-Insurgency in Principle and Practice". I was talking about some of the principles of counter-insurgency, but the person everyone came to listen to was Dr. David Kilcullen, who was talking about his experiences in practice in Iraq. One of the most important points about people such as Dr. Kilcullen—who was, among other things, a special adviser to General Petraeus and subsequently to Condoleezza Rice—is that the architects of what we hope will be the ultimately successful strategy in Iraq are also some of the people who are least dogmatic about the methods that one can adopt to deal with terrorists and insurgents. In his book "The Accidental Guerrilla", which has just been published, Dr. Kilcullen says that in many cases the people against whom we find ourselves fighting would not have taken up arms against us had we not gone into their countries in the first place. That is a message that one gets from all parts of the House, although it is at the same time acknowledged that sometimes, even though such fighting is a consequence of our having had to go into those countries, we had little alternative. However, as Dr. Kilcullen stresses, we should do so only as a last resort. I have pointed out previously that there are some similarities between orthodox political campaigning and the methods used by terrorist groups, albeit not in the moral dimension. There are at least five principles that terrorist groups adopt. I shall quickly list them. The first is:""always fight on ground where you are strongest and your opponent weakest"." The next two are:""always seek maximum impact for minimum effort"" and""try to manoeuvre your opponent into a situation where he is damned if he does, but damned if he doesn't"." That is precisely what I described in relation to the reaction, in the case of Afghanistan, when an attack was mounted against the American homeland from a country in which it would be difficult and bloody to intervene. The last two principles are:""use your opponent's own weight to drag him down ('military jiu-jitsu')"" and""apply these methods simultaneously and repeatedly"." To a large extent, the methods adopted by the Americans and the British have been to try to use conventional military power against such unconventional enemies. We need to try to avoid being bled dry, however, in a form of warfare that involves fighting on the enemy's strongest ground, not ours. Of the many wise words in Dr. Kilcullen's latest book, which I commend to Members in all parts of the House, he says:""In military terms, for AQ—" al-Qaeda—""the 'main effort' is information; for us, information is a 'supporting effort'…Thus, to combat"—" al-Qaeda—""propaganda, we need a capacity for strategic information warfare—an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say, and what we do, to send strategic messages that support our overall policy.""