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Afghanistan Strategy

This links to an earlier point that my hon. Friend made. If we are critical of some of the Government's strategy, it is of the artificial timetable that has been imposed. Yes, we want to build capacity in regional governance. The Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development is a good ministry, where genuine capacity has been built. However, I remember meeting the head of police in Lashkar Gah, where suddenly UK funding was cut off on 1 April and he was told to seek funding from Kabul. There was not capacity in the system to allow that funding to come down. Rather than focus on artificial dates, we should focus on capacity and transfer funding only once mechanisms are in place.