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Afghanistan

I was very interested in what the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) had to say. He made some interesting and important points, some of which were somewhat disjointed, if I may say so, and some of which were slightly rambling. May I pick him up on one point, on which I disagree with him? He accuses the Conservatives of being in some way perverse in wanting to have a War Cabinet, but he must ask himself what on earth is happening to young men in Afghanistan. They are in firefights the like of which have not been seen by the British Army for 50 years. As a former soldier, I would say that it is a war, and I think that most of those young men would also say that it is a war. I welcome the debate. I am sorry that we are having it on a very quiet Thursday when people are rushing to get back to their snow-covered constituencies, and I hope that we will have more debates on this issue, because there is, as has been said, a terrible lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding about what is happening in Afghanistan, both here in the House of Commons and throughout the country. That is particularly worrying. I have no special insight into what is happening in Afghanistan, and I am certainly not an expert. Both Ministers and fellow Conservatives will be pleased to know that I am not going to put forward some absolutely fundamental, clever plan to solve the whole Afghanistan issue, because I do not have that insight. However, I do know the area a little. I have been to Afghanistan often, and I have spent a couple of very enjoyable holidays trekking on the Afghan border in the most beautiful countryside imaginable, with charming people. I remember seeing, some 25 years ago, Massoud's mujaheddin streaming across border passes from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and some coming back on mules having had their legs blown off by Soviet butterfly mines. I have some slight understanding of the area, but that is all. I also went there last year on a whistle-stop tour, and I thank the Ministry of Defence for laying that on, contrary to what the right hon. Member for Rotherham said. It was far too short a visit and we did not get out to the forward operating bases, but I came back with a clear view, not just from the briefing, of the medical evacuation plans that we had in place in Kandahar and in Bastion. It was valuable, albeit rather too short for my liking. We also had a good briefing yesterday, again laid on by the MOD. I am grateful to the Secretary of State and others for that, because they are certainly trying to keep people abreast of what is happening. I am not sure that they are being entirely successful, but I cannot blame them entirely for that. Those of us who know some history of the first and second Afghan wars know the traps that we allowed ourselves to be led into. The history of Afghanistan is not one of a united country. The right hon. Member for Rotherham referred to Afghanistan in the 1970s, when I, too, was young.