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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, the noble Viscount has opened a fascinating debate which I hope will be continued, if not today then in the future. If I might begin with Afghanistan, our casualties there and the tragedies of every family that has suffered remain uppermost in our minds. Coalition forces, especially the British, US and Canadian soldiers in Helmand, have felt exponential losses this year; many people, me included, want to see at least a partial withdrawal from the front line and a rethink of our present strategy. We must put our own losses in perspective too. The Afghan people have suffered; their soldiers and police have borne increasing casualties, and we should remember that the number of civilians killed has also risen sharply. Most of these civilians die from suicide or roadside bombings but, according to UNAMA, two out of five were killed by coalition and Afghan forces last year. I return to the reasons for our invasion in 2001. The Government constantly emphasise terrorism and homeland security, but I also remember the genuine public sympathy for the victims of the Taliban and the determination to rebuild what it had destroyed. Under the Bonn agreement of 2001, we solemnly pledged billions of pounds to reconstruct the country. We have done a lot of it: cities, transport and infrastructure have been rebuilt. Critics of the war and the recent elections tend to downplay the achievements of the Karzai Government and aid agencies in restoring power, water, food supplies, health centres and schools where there were none. The vast majority of Afghans, however dissatisfied with progress and however difficult it has been to restore good governance and the rule of law, recognise that the international community is there to help them. The mistakes we have made, in my view, were to attempt to rebuild a centralised state and to focus democracy on an elected central Government. How did our political leaders think that they could reinvent one nation so quickly from so many different loyalties? In Britain, we tend to think back to King John and the Barons, but it is not a question of a few Barons. There are warlords over every mountain in Afghanistan. Terrorism itself is highly localised and subcontracted. Only a complex system of alliances and financial inducements, such as we have tried in Helmand, would reap rewards—and then only on a temporary basis. The coalition plainly does not have, and should not have, the capacity for this, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, mentioned. It is not a country simply to be taxed and governed in the European sense. It is a maze of districts and local councils to be empowered over time by a mixture of aid, civil society and devolved authority. Central and provincial governments can only rule and resolve conflicts by means of this subtle network of checks and balances. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, rightly mentioned the importance of the regional neighbours. The loya jirgas and the shuras have ruled Afghanistan for centuries and we should respect and use these as the principal channels of decision-making. The Foreign Secretary finally said as much two days ago, when outlining the new exit strategy. It is, in fact, the only way out. The war in Afghanistan is not being won, nor is it being lost. However, the propaganda war is being lost, both in the UK and on the disputed borders where foreign forces will always be seen as the enemy. The perception on our TV screens is rather like that of a Beau Geste desert war that we can never win. What we never see in news bulletins is a national "hearts and minds" campaign in which Afghans are seen as our friends, although this is apparently part of our Government’s new strategy. With the help of NGOs and others, we can still succeed in that "hearts and minds" campaign. DfID is supporting a range of initiatives, such as business links, microfinance and other employment schemes. What is it doing to publicise these? The National Solidarity Programme, created by the Afghan Government in 2003, is a major success story which has achieved results, through thousands of local councils, in road building, education and reconstruction of all kinds. Hardly anyone in the UK has heard of it. Why do we not make more of this achievement with the help of the media? It has had problems, like many projects. The new-style community development councils, as channels of funding, have sometimes confused the shuras with imposed western values, but this is inevitable. The NSP is learning from its mistakes and will emerge well from a World Bank evaluation. On international development and climate change, I welcome the Government's renewed commitment. It is encouraging to see the UK rising in the charts of official development assistance. Within the EU, which provides two-thirds of all aid, the UK is now ahead of France and Germany in aid per capita, although still well behind Scandinavian countries. I also welcome this Government's increased emphasis on aid effectiveness through the non-governmental organisations. However, the latest World Food Summit has pointed to a recent increase in the numbers of the malnourished, to around 1 billion. This is more than there were at the first summit in the mid 1970s, and close to one in five of the world's population. The scandal of these figures is not explained by the available food or distribution, or even by biofuels—which have presented a new problem—but by the drastic fall in OECD investment in agriculture. Can the Minister say whether the UK, at least, is pulling its weight in this sector and urging other countries to do the same? The UK is now the leader among EU states in global health spending. This is significant when climate change is likely to have such a negative impact on world health. Seen more positively, the urgency of measures to combat climate change will provide a much-needed catalyst for the millennium development goals that are looming up for 2015. It is imperative that the poorest countries are helped now to prepare for the effects of climate change. Insidious temperature rises over the coming decades will bring increases in such diseases as malaria, encephalitis and dengue fever if nothing is done. Higher temperatures, while only inconvenient and even beneficial to temperate climates, can mean much more severe floods and droughts, food and water shortages in tropical regions, as well as a lack of shelter and sanitation, all leading to higher mortality rates. Can the Minister spell out how the climate change budget allocated to developing countries will mean actual changes on the ground, meeting more millennium development targets, and will not all be swallowed up by their Governments' energy-saving and low carbon schemes, essential though those are in industrial zones? Small farmers in arid lands are highly efficient, as has been said, because they have to be, both in land use and in conserving precious soil and water. Our climate change campaign would seem to be almost irrelevant to them, as they are doing it all the time. We need to pay much more attention to Africa and how it copes with climate change. While its farmers’ carbon footprint is generally light, its foresters and scavengers cause perhaps one-third of the world's deforestation, much of it timber for export. Rich countries can earn carbon credits through forestry projects under the clean development mechanism and the reduced emissions schemes. However, according to one leading expert, Camilla Toulmin of the International Institute of Environment and Development, there is hardly any take-up of these projects. Again, I hope that the Minister can provide an answer, at least in relation to the UK's performances in this critical arena of climate change.