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Defence Policy

No, I will not. I am sorry. Time is against me, and I wish to go a little wider than the question of the Afghanistan campaign, central though it is to our considerations. I wish to revert very briefly to another point touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury: the unpredictability of future conflicts. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have been involved in counter-insurgency campaigns in the past. We were involved in a long counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya which lasted from 1948 to 1960, but that did not lead us to believe that because we were involved in fighting a counter-insurgency then, we would always be involved in counter-insurgency campaigning in the future. We remained fully committed to NATO and fully engaged in the cold war. Important as the campaign in Afghanistan is, it would be a strategic mistake to say "We do not need aircraft carriers; we do not need Trident; we do not need conventional forces." We need a range of capabilities to deal with the range of threats that might rise up against us in 10, 20, 30 and 40 years' time. Some people say that we are making a mistake because we are reckoning to fight the wars of 10, 15 or 20 years ago. I say that we are planning to deter and protect against the wars of 10, 15 and 20 years in the future, and if we judge those just by what we are doing today we are making the same mistake as when we judge what we are doing today by what we were doing 15, 20 or 25 years ago. We must have the full range of military capability that we can afford. That is the issue the strategic defence review, which the Conservatives were the first party to demand, will decide. It will be a difficult and tough task, but it is an absolutely essential one.