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Defence Policy

Mr. Deputy Speaker, I am very aware from your previous record of how your gentle hints are firm instructions to the Front Bench. Once again, let me echo the Secretary of State's comments about the sacrifices made in life and limb by our armed forces, particularly in Afghanistan. As a country, we are indeed fortunate that we have those in our society willing to volunteer to risk their own safety for our safety and security; and as a country, sometimes we would be wiser to count our blessings more often than we do. Three events dominate today's defence debate. The first is Afghanistan, which we all agree must be the priority that I imagine most hon. Members will want to focus on. Secondly, there is the Gray report, which we should not be spending time on in this particular debate because hon. Members have not had a chance to read its 296 pages. In fairness to the Secretary of State, it is fairly well known in Whitehall that the MOD wanted to publish that report but No. 10 very much did not want to do so; anyone who has had a glance at it can quickly see why. We need a separate statement on that. Following its somewhat disastrous appearance in the public domain, I note that the Defence Board minutes of 9 July say that""the Department needed a good communication strategy to manage the eventual release of the report into the public domain."" Well done on that one! The third issue is the TA and the severe, utterly inexplicable cuts to regular training, and what that tells us about the Government's priorities. Over the past three years, the Conservative party has called on the Government to accept our proposals for regular quarterly reports to Parliament on our objectives in Afghanistan, the benchmarks by which progress is measured, and the success or otherwise in meeting those objectives and benchmarks. We still do not have that. Nevertheless we welcomed yesterday's statement by the Prime Minister on Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, many questions remain unanswered, even after the Secretary of State's speech. The first concerns conditionality. My understanding, and I think that of the House yesterday, was that there were essentially three reasons why we were sending a greater force to Helmand: to augment and support the mission; to increase the protection and safety of our forces; and to increase the speed of training of the Afghan national army. If all those are necessary in themselves, why apply the conditions that the Government have set out? If commanders say that they need these troops now, but the Government's conditions are not met for several weeks to come, are not the Government, even by their own arguments, putting our troops in increased danger by failing to supply them with what they want? We must be must clearer about what the conditions are and how long the Government would wait for them to be fulfilled. That was not clear from the Secretary of State's remarks; I hope that the Minister of State can make it clearer when he winds up. Perhaps he can also clarify, because we do not yet have this information before us, exactly where the extra 500 troops are coming from and what their mission will be in Helmand. Will it be mainly combat ops, training the Afghan national security forces, counter-IED operations, or a combination of those? We need clarity, because there are still too many uncertainties. In December 2008, the Prime Minister announced "a temporary, until August" increase from 8,000 to 8,300 troops to Afghanistan. Those troops were sent from the theatre reserve in Cyprus. Are they still in Afghanistan? In April this year, as the Secretary of State said, the Prime Minister announced a further increase from 8,300 to 9,000 troops "until the autumn" to increase the security of the Afghan presidential elections. Yesterday, the Prime Minister justified this slightly differently when he said that we had""decided to raise the number of troops from 8,100 to 9,000 until we could see what was happening with the American review of strategy".—[Official Report, 14 October 2009; Vol. 497, c. 307.]" These are not the same things. We need to have absolute clarity on the Government's thinking. Are the extra 1,000 troops sent since last December going to be made part of the permanent establishment figure? Finally on troop numbers, the Prime Minister alluded to the fact that 500 troops normally based in Kandahar as an RC-South reserve force will be permanently shifted to Helmand province. While that would be welcomed in Helmand, who is replacing the reserve capability in Kandahar? Will a coalition partner fill this role or will it be left unfilled? The House will expect an answer from the Minister of State. We all know that we are waiting for the outcome of President Obama's decision on how the way ahead for strategy in Afghanistan will be affected by General McChrystal's review. Regardless of the outcome, General McChrystal deserves credit for producing a rich and vibrant debate about Afghanistan policy in recent times. Anyone who was fortunate enough to hear his speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies will know what a rare treat that was; if only politicians could speak with similar clarity on most occasions. His assessment comprised a very telling document, but one of its most important sentences went largely unreported:""Inadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced."" We can talk about more troops, more helicopters and more armoured vehicles, but without a new strategy additional troops and resources will have only a short-term and localised effect. They can win the tactical battle, and they can buy politicians' time, but ultimately unless something fills the gap they have created, their sacrifices and efforts risk being in vain. The surge worked in Iraq because it was fundamentally more than just an increase in troops. It was part of a bigger solution, designed to suit conditions on the ground and built around a revitalised political process that included the re-engagement of the Sunni minority. To secure this result, we will need a sound political plan moving alongside any military plan, because a sound political strategy will help to undermine the insurgency. We await the decision by President Obama. It is vital that we maintain the public's understanding and trust if we are to have the will and resilience to see through the mission in Afghanistan. We must set realistic goals and expectations to avoid disappointment at home and abroad. A comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan must include clear, tightly drawn, realistic objectives that are regularly reviewed; more rapid development of the Afghan security forces, as the Secretary of State said; and ensuring that the gains won by our forces on the battlefield are swiftly followed by reconstruction, which is all too often far too tardy, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) mentioned. In the early days after 9/11, there were two main objectives in Afghanistan: to deny al-Qaeda safe haven to plan, train and launch terrorist attacks on a global scale, and to remove the Taliban regime from power as punishment for not co-operating with the international community and for harbouring terrorism. Both were accomplished with relative speed, but the subsequent picture has been much less successful. There have been vague notions of state building and reconstruction built on UN millennium goals, and a plethora of strategies. People often say that there was no real strategy in Afghanistan, but the problem is that there have been too many. We have had an EU strategy, an American strategy, a UK strategy, an Afghan strategy, a NATO strategy, a World Bank strategy and multiple non-governmental organisation strategies, none of which were exactly the same. That is why we now require great clarity in what the President of the United States is soon to announce. Because of all that, our inability to produce tangible and achievable results after eight years has disappointed public opinion at home and frustrated those in Afghanistan who are finding it difficult to build on the ground. Public disillusionment with the mission in Afghanistan is exacerbated by the Government's repeated failure clearly to define our objectives in national security terms, and by the widespread belief that our forces have not been fully resourced. The Government have too often failed to explain what Afghanistan means in a broader geopolitical context, and I was pleased that the Secretary of State started to do that more clearly today. The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are relatively easy to elucidate. First, were we to leave Afghanistan prematurely, by which I mean on a timetable not of our own choosing, it would be a shot in the arm for every jihadist around the world. It would send out a signal that we did not have the moral fortitude to see through what we believe to be an essential matter of our own national security. The impact would be felt beyond the Hindu Kush and the Durand line, extending across the region into the middle east and north Africa in one direction and south-east Asia in the other. We in this country should be under no illusions that were we to fail on those terms, it would also fuel latent fundamentalist sentiment within our own borders and in other European countries, imposing even greater burdens on our domestic intelligence and security forces. The public need to understand what the cost of failure would be, so that they are willing to invest in the price of victory. Secondly, failure in Afghanistan would suggest that NATO, in its first major challenge overseas to combat terrorism, did not have what it takes to see a difficult challenge through. Again, we should be under no illusions that that would be deeply damaging, if not catastrophic, for NATO's cohesion and credibility. The Secretary of State alluded to the reduced and sometimes falling contribution of some of our European partners. The European members of NATO that are failing to engage in proper burden-sharing in Afghanistan might like to reflect on what the collapse of NATO might ultimately mean for their own regional and global security. If we can clearly describe failure, can we describe success? Describing to the British public what we mean by winning in Afghanistan will be crucial in maintaining public support. Success in Afghanistan will be achieved when we have a stable enough Afghanistan, exercising its own sovereignty and able to manage its own internal and external security to a degree that stops interference from outside powers and allows the country to resist the establishment of the terror bases and terror camps that went before. We should not try to apply Jeffersonian principles to what was effectively a broken, 15th-century state. There are noble ideas for development, human rights and democracy, but they are complementary to our military mission, not the same as it. We must not try to justify one by the other. To achieve the objective of security in Afghanistan today, as General McChrystal set out, we need a counter-insurgency strategy to prevent the future need for a counter-terrorism strategy. It has to begin with the security and safety of the people in Afghanistan itself. Some 80 per cent. of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan are a direct result of Taliban activity. We need to build the trust and support of the people of Afghanistan by giving them the protection that we promised them but which the coalition has as yet failed to deliver. Only when we have their trust can we get the military success that we seek. As has been said on many occasions, in a counter-insurgency a defection is better than a surrender, a surrender is better than a capture, and a capture is better than a kill. That is why General McChrystal's assessment is so accurate. Any strategy in Afghanistan needs to include renewed and serious focus on reconciliation and reintegration with certain elements of the insurgency. The Taliban are not a homogenous group, and we have to understand the subtleties of what we are dealing with in Afghanistan. As has been pointed out, and as the Secretary of State alluded to, part of the political process of improving governance will be to deal with those in what we call the Taliban who are reconcilable to the aims of the Afghan Government and the international community, even those who have fought against us in the past. However, we must not put on rose-tinted spectacles, and we have to recognise that some will remain irreconcilable, and the only way to deal with them will be in military terms and by military means. There will be no easy answer for those who are irreconcilable to who we are, what we stand for and the value system that we represent. As General Sir Graeme Lamb, who is now working as an adviser to General McChrystal, said recently:""We need to take a good look at the people we consider to be our enemies…They have anger and grievances which have not been addressed. The better life they expected has not materialised; these are the people we must talk to, but we must make sure we have something to offer them."" We also need to explore the idea of using auxiliary forces in Helmand province in support of our counter-insurgency operations. Since security is the definition of success, the sooner we get the Afghan security forces trained and on the front line, the faster we can bring our own troops home. That is why it is such a sensible investment to increase the number of British troops, to speed up the training of the Afghan national army. However, we need to remember that the ANA is a national, not provincial, army. It is recruited from across Afghanistan and from all ethnic groups. We need to make it clear that more British troops for training the ANA does not automatically translate into more ANA troops being sent to Helmand to fight alongside British troops, as they will have national responsibilities to carry out. Consequently, when, where and if possible, we need in Helmand seriously to start exploring ways of forming and utilising local auxiliary forces. Auxiliary forces bring local knowledge and ownership to local security, which foreign troops will never be able to do. As Ministers know, there is already a pilot programme in Wardak province. If possible, a similar programme in Helmand might be worth exploring. It would have to take into account local customs, tribal structures, the views of the provincial and national Governments and of course legitimacy in the eyes of locals, but one would be hard-pressed to give an example of a counter-insurgency campaign that has been successful without using local auxiliary forces in some way. If we do not mobilise the locals, the Taliban will, and if we are serious about winning that is one matter that we need to look into further. I would be grateful if the Minister of State could say whether such an approach forms part of the Government's wider thinking.