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Afghanistan

I listened with great interest to all three speeches and agreed very much with what was in them. I have been to Afghanistan once. I must tell my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and Defence Ministers that after 1945, some 200 US congressional delegations visited Germany to talk to General Lucius Clay, who was, as it were, the commanding officer in charge of Germany on behalf of the allies in that period. As a result, there was strong support in the American Congress for the continuation of a policy that previously would have run against American views that, on the whole, one should not get involved in foreign entanglements. I have not found a great deal of enthusiasm and support from the Ministry of Defence or the Foreign Office for visits to Afghanistan, other than those, appropriately, for Select Committees. However, I think it would be helpful if many more Members of the House went there. When I went with a NATO delegation to visit Pakistan, I took the opportunity to go to Kabul to meet people and inform myself, but I had to pay for my own trip—more accurately, the Foreign Office paid for the £200 flight on a UN plane, then spent six months asking me for the money back. I am not sure whether that was a claimable expense, but I paid it from my own pocket. Therefore, please will the Foreign Secretary involve the House in the matter of Afghanistan, because every Wednesday since June 2003, the Prime Minister and the leaders of the Opposition parties have had to pay tribute to the men who have fallen in Iraq and now, increasingly, in Afghanistan? The tributes certainly represent what the House and the nation think of those brave sacrifices, but I sometimes question whether the nation will accept those sacrifices, year after year, from our rather small professional Army. The reasons we are in Afghanistan were set out eloquently by the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, and the nation needs to know those reasons. Visiting Afghanistan can help with that. We also need a sense of history. Afghanistan is presented as a zone of permanent turbulence and violence. In fact, for most of the last 200 years, Afghanistan has been at peace, although yes, it has been poor and underdeveloped. When I was a student at university, Afghanistan was where all the hippies went to buy their Afghan coats, among other things. In the early 1970s, a Marks & Spencer was opened in Kabul. Where Marks & Spencer operates, civilisation often follows. I am not suggesting that it should be a goal of foreign policy to get Marks & Spencer to reopen in Kabul and other Afghan cities, but we should acknowledge that the present conflict is the result of a particular confluence of political decisions emanating from outside Afghanistan. Those decisions include the desire to launch jihad, supported by the US and Great Britain, in the 1980s, and the provision of Stinger missiles, paid for by the Saudis and built by the Americans, to the jihadis. We created a monster and were then surprised that, after the Soviets had been driven out of Afghanistan, the monster did not quietly evaporate into thin air. We ignored Afghanistan after 1987 for many years, allowing it to become the incubator and supporter of the Taliban, with the consequence that they gave shelter to Osama bin Laden, which led to the planning of the 9/11 attack. After 9/11, the reasonable criticism can be made that we took our focus away from Afghanistan and walked down the road to Iraq. I shall not enter into that debate now, but we should be conscious that more British soldiers have died in what one might call President Obama's war in Afghanistan than in President George W. Bush's war in Iraq. The failure, twice in the last 20 years, to focus due political and strategic attention on Afghanistan has cost us dear. I would like to see some unity of command. I referred to General Lucius Clay earlier. He was an engineer and builder, not a fighting general, and he was the supreme governor of Germany in the immediate post-war period until German political institutions were able to get back on their feet. I have no idea who runs Afghanistan. I have no idea which Government department is in charge. Who can give orders to whom? When I was there, there were three different European Union offices—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) says that that is no surprise, but there are five or six British offices each thinking that they are doing the British Government's work, and I question the level of co-ordination. We know that efforts were made to engage the services of Lord Ashdown. I would have welcomed that, but it was rejected by President Karzai. Do we have efficient joined-up government in Afghanistan? Those on the Opposition Front Bench say that by creating a so-called war Cabinet they would focus attention on Afghanistan. I politely suggest that they should find a word other than "war" to use. We are winning battle after battle: when British troops take on the Taliban face to face, there is only one winner, despite the sad sacrifices that are made. But the notion that we will win a war in Afghanistan commands no serious support anywhere, even among those who support our presence there. If the Opposition create a war Cabinet, they may be asking it to achieve the unachievable. Surely we should be thinking more of containment than of confrontation—I think that the shadow Secretary of State made that point. We should see this in the context of what happened after the second world war, when there was a sense among some that we could confront, take on and roll back ideologies that were oppressive and opposed to our way of life, not to mention supporting military and violent action against western interests all over the world. But wiser heads prevailed, and we adopted a philosophy of containment rather than military destruction. I continually wonder why the British are taking more casualties—in proportion to the number of troops present—than any other nation save Canada, and incidentally I pay tribute to the Canadian troops too. I regret that the Conservative Canadian Government have set a deadline for pulling their troops out, but I doubt that if a Liberal Administration were to be elected next year, there would be any change in policy. I am not a military expert, but I wonder why it is necessary for so many British servicemen to fall in action or to come home with hideous and life-crippling wounds. We may have to ask our military whether they have got their strategy quite right. There has been much talk about Pakistan and the solution to Afghanistan. In part, I accept that Pakistan must be involved, but there will be no solution in Pakistan until India changes its strategic approach in the area. According to a report Le Monde on 8 January, The Times of India reported a secret conclave of the Indian general staff at Simla in December, at which they discussed the double-front strategy—an assault on both China and Pakistan. General Kapoor, the Indian chief of staff, has talked about a limited military attack on Pakistan, but it is beyond belief that a fellow Commonwealth country and nuclear-armed power—and a democracy to boot—can be talking about a military assault or invasion on Pakistan, when we need Pakistan to focus on Afghanistan.