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NATO Summit

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Ashdown is right. We have long said that the solution to the conflict in Afghanistan is not military. There has to be more to it, combining politics within Afghanistan itself with the support of aid, trade and all the other things that make up creating and building up a country in the modern world. I would not read it as such a difference between our own objectives and those of the United States. In fact, our objectives are not far away from those of NATO and, this weekend, there is an aspirational target for NATO to have achieved the end of conflict by 2014. The fact that we have taken this position on 2015 will not be missed by other countries, which will be asking their own leaders whether it is appropriate that they too should set a similar target.