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Iraq Inquiry

The right hon. Lady is actually making my point for me. Whose responsibility is it to make peace? Is it the military's? The military provide the security on top of the hill. Something else has to happen in the village below, however, to ensure that the reconstruction takes place, that the schools are built and that the electricity is turned on—all the things that are involved in nation building. That is not the role of the military, although I would like it to be; rather, it was the responsibility of DFID. The right hon. Lady admitted to sending a diktat to the directors in her Department saying, "Do nothing. We're not even sure that this war is legal." I admire her consistency in the matter, but it does not help anybody in military uniform being sent over the start line by this Government then to realise that once the war fighting has stopped, we do not have a plan to keep the peace. That is where things went so pear-shaped. By 2004, the number of civilian deaths had risen to 20,000 a year and the number of UK military deaths had risen to 800 a year. By 2007, the situation had deteriorated so much that we had become part of the problem. We went from liberators to occupiers. A personal friend of mine who was leading 2nd Battalion the Rifles was made to leave Basra palace with his tail between his legs because he had become part of the problem. He had to return to the comfort of the air base, never to participate in proper patrolling again. Why? Because we did not have the plan for peace. That is the big lesson to be learned by the Government, but we do not need an inquiry to learn it. That is the point that I am stressing. I am afraid that we are making exactly the same mistakes in Afghanistan. It should not be that we spend three weeks war fighting and six years engaged in failed stabilisation. We must look at the type of warfare in which we are now involved. It is not called warfare anymore; it is counter-insurgency, and we must recognise that we are not very good at it. General Petraeus has said that it is no longer good enough simply to defeat the enemy; we have to go further and enable the local. Until we get that into our heads, we will continue to fail as we are doing. I stress that we cannot expect the military to do that work: they are not trained to do it, nor are they are equipped. We need a different type of equipment to do post-conflict stabilisation operations. As we have heard, DFID does not do that either. DFID does what it says on the tin: it tackles poverty. There is therefore a huge void that needs to be filled if we want not only to win wars, but to win the peace as well. At the moment, we are winning wars but losing the peacekeeping. Those are the lessons that we can learn without the need for an inquiry. I hope that the inquiry looks into what Whitehall did. I would like a huge overhaul of the way in which we approach post-conflict operations. It is no good trying to get soldiers to maintain a level of security when they see the demise of the infrastructure around them, with nobody willing to step forward and do the job. It is in that fragile window of opportunity—those few weeks to months after the war fighting has finished when the dust settles—that we want to win hearts and minds.