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Afghanistan

I cannot for a moment question the wisdom and experience behind that either, except to say that one talks about winning and then, as we learnt in Iraq, one needs to talk about how the win is secured. As the former President Bush found in his famous observations, to win in the short term is something that can apparently be done on the surface. However, a win in the long term means that as we are, we hope, a civilised 21st-century globe, the nations within it— including our own—cannot afford to have a poisoning influence at the centre of things. Whether we like it or not, while we must be as forceful as possible in the military suppression of the violence and extremism, there will, in the end, have to be a state created in which those who may have been involved with or even inclined to support the violence and rebellion of insurgents in the first place have to start playing their role as proper citizens. They will have to be included, so I half accept what the noble Viscount says, but the obvious strategy is to press ahead with what we are doing. We are confident that we are making progress. Beyond that progress lies the possibility of politics and of social, civic and economic development. Then we will have a world in which Afghanistan will no longer be the appalling headache that it is now.