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Defence Policy

I agree that any party that aspires to be in government should follow all the recommendations on the need to have a strategic defence review. Such a review should take into account precisely the sort of things that the hon. Gentleman mentions. I am sure that he has his press release by now and does not need any further quotations from this debate—[Interruption.] I return to the theme of Afghanistan. I share the approach of the Secretary of State and of my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), who made an outstanding speech, to Pakistan and to Afghanistan. The Select Committee on Defence was in the United States last week. We were a bit depressed by the quality of the debate there about General McChrystal's report, because it seemed to be about whether the discussion should have been held in public or in private, as opposed to being about whether the points that his report had raised were intrinsically right or wrong. I thought that the points that General McChrystal made had great strength and that he was right. Yesterday, this House of Commons welcomed the 22 Light Dragoons. I was told by a young major—nowadays all majors seem to be young—that he thought we ought to concentrate far more than we are doing on the comprehensive building of capacity within Afghanistan; on building an understanding of the culture of the Afghan people and their economic needs, rather than the needs that we think they might have; on building an understanding of their power structures; and on building genuine friendships between this country and that country and these people and those people. Although General McChrystal's report suggests that we need more resources, we must recognise that they do not necessarily need to be entirely military resources.