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Armed Forces: Future Defence Policy

My Lords, we have heard many thoughtful and wise contributions in the House today. I truly expected nothing less, given the expertise on defence that there is in the House. I will be taking noble Lords’ ideas and recommendations back with me to the Ministry of Defence, and I will ensure that the MoD reflects carefully on them. I will read Hansard and ensure that all noble Lords’ questions are answered fully if I do not answer them today. The support that our Armed Forces receive in this House is abundantly clear today. The respect and esteem in which they are held is also clear. In summing up this debate, I reprise my opening position. The national security strategy provides the wider strategic policy and the context in the short to medium term. However, defence capabilities take far longer to build. As my noble friend Lord Soley said, these matters are complex and long-term. If we make judgments based only on a short-term view, we are bound to make changes that would not only be wrong but difficult to reverse further down the line. That is why I set out our current thinking on what strategic challenges this country is likely to face over the next 30 years. However, I accept, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, and others have said, that the conduct of the operations in Afghanistan is uppermost in the public’s mind. That is rightly so. Our people are putting their lives on the line. These are men and women who are committed to the fight. A number of noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord King and Lord Lee, among them—have made the point that we are at war. We are. Afghanistan must be our top priority and it is. The post-Strategic Defence Review funding of defence has been raised by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, and others. At the heart of this debate is the question of balancing ends and means. I have noted that several noble Lords have called for an increase in the defence budget. It is important for the public to know what the Conservative and Liberal Democrat policies on the defence budget are as we go into the general election. I think the noble Lord, Lord Lee, asked about the reserve and the funding of operations. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, also asked specific questions. I can confirm that for this financial year the MoD has made a claim of £3.5 billion total DEL for Afghanistan and of approximately £1 billion for Iraq. This will bring the total provided by the reserve from 2001 to the end of 2008-09 to £18 billion. I said in opening that our conclusion from the strategic review is that Afghanistan gives us a hard insight into the nature of the future operations that our Armed Forces will have to contend with. It is also important that our society understands counterinsurgency operations to the same extent as it understands conventional warfare. Only by achieving that understanding will we get the full support of the general public for what our Armed Forces have to do. As my noble friends Lord Foulkes and Lord Soley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady D’Souza and Lady Falkner, have said, these operations are vital to our national security. Three-quarters of the most serious terror plots against the UK have roots in the border and mountain areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have a clear and focused objective: to prevent al-Qaeda launching attacks on our streets and threatening legitimate Governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To do that, we need to build the capability of the forces in Afghanistan and the capacity to deal with terrorism and extremism among the people themselves. The Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan threatens that capacity and the Afghan Government alone are not strong enough to maintain its security. A peaceful and stable Afghanistan would be a strategic failure for al-Qaeda. Conversely, failure in Afghanistan would be a boost for terrorists and violent extremists in every part of the world. The bottom line is that success in Afghanistan is achievable, by which I mean Afghans themselves holding on to ground won from the insurgency and achieving lasting stability. No matter the difficulties involved in building the capacity of the Afghan security forces—and this week’s atrocity has brutally highlighted the risks involved—we cannot be diverted. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, described what were incorrect pre-reports of what the Prime Minister said in his speech this morning. If the House will allow me, I shall repeat what he actually said: ""It is well known that President Obama is considering his response to General McChrystal’s report. It is clear that he sees that the response must come from the international coalition as a whole. For as we consider the nature of the threat we face, it is not just the US that is being tested in Afghanistan, nor is it just Britain; it is the whole international community. We entered together, more than forty nations, eight years ago. We must persist together; in our different ways we must all contribute. In the end, we will succeed or fail together, and we will succeed"."