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Afghanistan

I welcome the chance to respond and I thank the Secretary of State for his update and for advance sight of it. This is the first opportunity I have had to put on record my thanks and those of the leader of my party and the shadow Foreign Secretary to all who facilitated our recent visit to Afghanistan. The Secretary of State is right to say that as we go about our proceedings, more than 10,000 fellow Britons go about the business of making the UK more safe by making Afghanistan more stable. As I have reflected before, the courage of our forces is surpassed only by their modesty. I also put on record our appreciation of the efforts of our diplomatic and development staff in Kabul and throughout Afghanistan, many of whom we met. Theirs is a tough job and they combine professionalism with more than a little bravery. We remain committed to a cross-party approach to a cross-government strategy. The Secretary of State should know that our default position is to support the Government's efforts in Afghanistan. The Secretary of State is right to pay tribute to those who died earlier today and those who have died in recent times. No words said in this House can halt the suffering in the family homes of those who have been lost, but those families will know that across the country, there is immeasurable respect for them. They remain in all our thoughts and many of our personal prayers. The House will be grateful for the right hon. Gentleman's update on the security situation and it will be glad to hear about the progress being made. I wish to ask him two sets of questions: the first about security and the second about diplomacy. On security, he rightly said that violence is concentrated in the south, but there are also concerning reports that violence is increasing in previously peaceful areas, most notably in the north of the country, where the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is said to be operating and strengthening the Taliban's ability to attack. How is the coalition, and in particular nations other than the UK and the US, responding to those worrying developments? The ability of Afghan forces to take ever greater responsibility for their own country will be an incremental process towards 2014, with the most significant recent development, alongside the US military surge, being an Afghan surge of locally recruited forces. In that context, I am pleased to hear the Secretary of State's comments about the Afghan national police being on track to meet its final recruitment targets this year. We had the opportunity to visit the excellent police training centre in Helmand involving British police forces, which is so important to the literacy and numeracy that the Secretary of State spoke about. He will be as concerned as I am, however, about the assimilation of national police within local communities. A recent UN report showed that in the south, the popularity of the police has dropped over the past year. It strikes me as unsustainable to have a national police force that is only 3% southern Pashtun. How are recruitment practices being modified to ensure that the police force is more reflective of the areas that it is charged with securing? Will the Secretary of State undertake to keep the House informed on a regular basis of the Afghan national security forces' ability to operate independently of ISAF? Turning to the political process, it is increasingly acknowledged that there will not be a military-only solution in Afghanistan. Although there have been, and will continue to be, military successes, we also need a diplomatic surge to match the military surge. As we moved to the agreed withdrawal date of 2015, a political settlement is not a prerequisite for our withdrawal, but it is undoubtedly a condition for lasting peace. Many people make comparisons with the peace process in Northern Ireland, including some of the Afghans whom we met in Kabul. Although I believe the similarities are limited, one thing that Northern Ireland teaches us is that the process can be painstaking, even though there were fewer domestic and international actors there and a clearer sense of central authority—conditions that we do not currently have in our favour in Afghanistan. Will the Secretary of State share with the House how he foresees diplomatic efforts within Afghanistan and with her neighbours progressing over the forthcoming year? What are the benchmarks by which the House will be able to judge short-term success? There are many other major issues that it will be important for Afghanistan to overcome to enjoy lasting peace. There are innumerable financial challenges, with rising unemployment and high levels of poverty fuelling recruitment to the poppy trade and the Taliban. There are rising numbers of internally displaced people, and corruption remains a real problem. I therefore ask the Secretary of State to confirm to the House that he will raise those matters at the Bonn conference, particularly a plan for further support for the Afghan economy. Will he provide an update on negotiations between the Afghan Government and the International Monetary Fund on the Afghan support fund? On returning from Afghanistan, it struck me that over the past year or so, there had been a shift from a collective feeling of reluctant international pessimism to a sense of cautious optimism. Nothing in the Secretary of State's statement today led me to change my opinion. On behalf of Labour Members, I continue to look to work with him on a bipartisan basis on this most important of issues.