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Defence Policy

My hon. Friend served in the same regiment as me, but I will not give way as there is simply not time. These men have to continue patrols, checking and clearing compounds in extremely hazardous circumstances. All the time, their families are worrying about them. I cannot pay more tribute to any group of people than to those who man the rear parties of serving units. Rear parties are doing heroic work, and they have to do some of the most unpleasant work when informing families that people have been killed. A friend of mine's son arrived back in Camp Bastion yesterday after six gruelling months in one of the forward operating bases. Of his battle group, 22 members have been killed and 80 have been aero medevaced back to the UK. Let us contemplate what it must be like for the parents, girlfriends and wives of the 9,000 people we have serving in Afghanistan at any one time. By rough calculation, I think that that is about 50,000 people, but it probably rises to about 100,000 when we take in siblings and close friends. That cohort rolls over every six months as we deploy more people, and so more and more people must go through that awful experience. We have to understand their concerns. I pay tribute to the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox): the Government have a great responsibility to articulate what our men and women are doing there. It is a major educational role, a public relations role and a moral role to explain to a sceptical public why this is important and what these young men and women are doing. For that group and for the wider group who are concerned about the issue, we need to consider the tactics that are being employed. General McChrystal, like General Petraeus and others before him, comes to us as an intellectual and thoughtful person who needs to be listened to. When he says that ISAF is poorly configured for counter-insurgency operations, we need to listen to him. I think that we are listening and I hope that the President of the United States is, too. Can we reassure a sceptical public that the ink spots that we are all told about can be joined up and, once they are joined up, can stay as one large ink spot rather than being fragmented? Have we not learned from the Boer war that single strong points do not secure the ground? Securing the ground is about DFID getting out there and building not only roads but mosques, schools and hospitals. We all know what that means in terms of counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency is hard pounding. I know a little about it—I did it for two years as part of a counter-insurgency operation that took 30 years and which had nothing like as high an attrition rate as the current operation. When parents come to my surgery and say, as one did recently, "My son is in a forward operating base doing exactly what his brother was doing in that forward operating base two years before. We are not getting anywhere," I have to say, "Counter-insurgency is like that. We have to work hard, but we must work harder and have a bigger footprint." I understand the frustration, and the determination. I was a Green Jacket and I was therefore weaned on a book called "Gangs and Counter-Gangs", written by General Frank Kitson in 1960. When my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring talked about the need to get defectors as our first priority, he could not have been speaking more readily than to someone who understands it from that precise point of view. I shall finish by quoting the Kiplingesque words that Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thompson used in his description of the July day I referred to at the beginning of my remarks. He said:""We turned to our right, saluted the fallen and the wounded, picked up our rifles and returned to the ramparts.""I sensed each rifleman tragically killed in action today standing behind us as we returned to our posts and we all knew that each one of those riflemen would have wanted us to 'crack on'."" At the heart of all our debates about the Government of Afghanistan, the work done by our wonderful forces and the tactics that we seek to get them to employ is the staggering courage shown by our young men to "crack on" as they step over the blood of their comrades.