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Afghanistan

Good progress has been made on the number of Afghan national police, but to be frank with the hon. Lady that is not really my concern. My concern is the quality of the recruits to the Afghan national police, and what we need to do is not to have them recruited and then trained, but trained and then put in place. That is a vital mission for the whole of the international coalition. The issue was widely discussed at the NATO ministerial meeting at a number of different levels, and I think there is growing acceptance that providing policing and law and order, not at a Supreme Court level but in terms of dispute resolution and effective policing at the very lowest level, is one of the ways to deny the political and social space that the Taliban will otherwise occupy.