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Afghanistan and Pakistan

My Lords, does the Minister agree that one of the things that have not been going so well in recent months is what you might call the communications strategy? All the participants in the NATO operations in Afghanistan, lamentably, are finding that support for the military action is on the whole swinging a bit in the wrong direction, although not very far. First, is it not rather important that in the period ahead, perhaps with the London conference as a focus, the alliance manages to put together a more effective communications strategy than it has had in the past, one that gives an overall picture of what is going on in Afghanistan, not just of what is going on in the particular bit of Afghanistan that one country’s troops are engaged in? You might think from reading the British press that we were fighting a war in a country called Helmand, while if you read the German press you might think that they were fighting in a country called Kunduz. This is not the way to get across the wider picture of what is going on and to get an understanding of how things are gong. Secondly, could the London conference not be the occasion when the regional dimension was firmed up a bit into a situation where Afghanistan’s neighbours were employed more systematically and in a more structured way in co-operating to deal with the insurgency in that country?