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Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan

As the proud son of a soldier who was grievously injured on a battlefield and later cheated out of his pension by an ungrateful Government, giving him a sense of grievance and injustice that he took to his early grave at the age of 43, I do not need any instructions on the need for a military covenant from the Government. However, I believe that the military covenant should have as its first sentence the obligations of the Government, and it should read that they guarantee never to send our armed forces into conflict for causes that are avoidable or vainglorious. Earlier, I was accused of being a pacifist for suggesting that, but I point out that I have supported with my vote or voice all the conflicts and military interventions in which we have been involved over the past 24 years, except for two. Those were the ones that conflicted with what I hope will be the first line of the covenant: the second Iraq war and our intervention in Helmand province in 2006. In the case of the Iraq war, Labour Members were bribed, bullied and bamboozled with a three-line Whip into voting for the war. To the great credit of 139 of us, we resisted that. In the case of Helmand, in March 2006 the total number of British soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, after five years there, was seven, only two of whom had died in conflict. It was said that to go into Helmand was to stir up a hornet's nest, and it was compared with the futility of the charge of the Light Brigade. We have now lost not two but 365 of our brave soldiers, and I believe we have achieved very little for that. We are perhaps coming to consider why we went in there. I wish to mention some points that give reason for optimism. On a point of order last Thursday I mentioned a story in The Daily Telegraph that gave us some hope, and I raised it again with the Foreign Secretary this afternoon. It stated that a decision was going to be taken within a matter of days that would bring 450 of our troops home from Afghanistan. As a result of that point of order, I had a stream of messages from wives, grandfathers and other relatives of soldiers out there saying, ““For goodness' sake, keep asking this question. Keep putting pressure on.”” The character of the conflict in Afghanistan at the moment is such that they do not feel that the risk that their loved ones are taking is justified. There is good reason for that. Will the Government please learn the lesson? We have never asked the Taliban why they are killing our soldiers. It is always easier to go on repeating the old lies than to reveal the new truth. We need to know why they are killing our soldiers—is it because, when they have killed them all, they want to come over to London and Newport to blow up people on our streets? Or is it because we are there as the ferengi, the foreigners, and it is their sacred religious duty to kill our troops in the same way that their fathers did the Russians, and as their great-grandfathers and all the previous generations have done? The great lesson of the recent actions is that the number of deaths that we have suffered has gone down greatly, not because the Taliban are slightly less wicked than they were, but because we are not in the north of Helmand. The sooner we make our exit, the better. Another serious point is that as the rate of deaths has gone down, an increasing proportion of them have been among the immensely brave people who dismantle improvised explosive devices. The justification for taking the great risk of dismantling them rather than blowing them up, which would of course be perfectly safe, is to capture the members of the Taliban who constructed the IEDs. Details can be found such as fingerprints and so on, so that the Taliban who made them can be captured and put in prison. We know what happened recently—500 prisoners escaped. Those who risked their lives to ensure that those Taliban bomb makers were put in prison will now question whether their sacrifice was necessary. I urge the Government to re-examine their tactic and, instead of risking more lives by dangerously dismantling IEDs to capture Taliban who are detained for a very short time, to consider blowing up the IEDs. I am hoping that there is a truth in what the Foreign Secretary expressed today, and that President Obama and the Prime Minister make a statement on making a start on the only sensible thing that we can do: bringing our people home. The question by which the Government should be haunted is the one that troubled Senator Kerry in Vietnam in 1971: who will be the last soldier I will order to die for a mistake?