---

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Along with our NATO partners, we believe that there is a clear programme of training up the Afghan national army, police and security forces so that they should be in the lead by 2014. That is our aim, and in addition I have said that by 2015 we should not be in a major combat role or there in major numbers. By then we will have been in Helmand province for longer than the entire second world war. We will have played our part, and I am confident that we are making good progress so that the 2014 calendar to which NATO is committed will go ahead. I do not accept that taking long-term, difficult decisions about the defence of our country makes us somehow anti-defence—the opposite is true. I am passionate about our armed forces, what they represent in our country and what they do on our behalf, but we do not serve them by putting off decisions for the future, making all sorts of airy-fairy promises and then not funding them.