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EUC Report: EU Afghan Police Mission

I thank all those who have contributed to this valuable debate. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for his very constructive speech. I welcome this valuable and critical report. We all recognise that it contains a number of lessons to be taken on board by the British Government and all those other Governments within the European Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has rightly said, the report raises questions in case after case with which we will have to grapple in the coming years. After all, this is one of several civilian missions taking place under CSDP. It is the second largest after Kosovo but there are a number of other missions dealing with conflict prevention, state reconstruction and the promotion of law and order—and there will be more. There will have to be bilateral and multinational efforts for the foreseeable future. Her Majesty’s Government are working on a new building security overseas strategy that will expand the conflict pool funds, and will do their best to provide the resources and experience to be able to play a wider role in this effort of rebuilding good governance and the rule of law in weak and failed states. We all understand that that will constitute a lot of what British, European and other foreign policies are going to have to be about. One of my colleagues said to me yesterday that the one thing he did not accept in Robert Gates’s speech criticising the Europeans in NATO was its assumption that in future what we need most of all is greater military capacity. Actually what we need, as the noble Lord, Liddle, remarked, is an increased mixture of civilian and military capacities. Moving from the military to the civilian, which is what we are trying to do in Afghanistan, is part of how one begins to rebuild state capacity and, even more importantly, civilian confidence in state capacity and in the fairness and equity of the state. However, a number of contributors to this debate have recognised that this is a very long-term process and that timescales of state building and building the whole concept of civilian police—that took a long time to develop in this country—do not fit very easily with timescales of military withdrawal after an intervention. We hope that we have done enough to build the basic framework for a civilian police force and to establish links with a half-decent judicial system—that also takes a great deal of time to build—as the military withdrawal takes place. We will be able to provide continuing support for those institutions over the coming years. I am very grateful for the critical comment. I accept that the report points to a number of things that are wrong in the way in which Europeans have reacted to this set of enormous problems. However, lessons have been learnt and there are more lessons to learn. One of the things that are not indicated in the report, which I should at least admit since I cover the Home Office as well as the Foreign Office, is that Britain has particular difficulties in seconding people to foreign countries on this sort of service because we do not have our own gendarmerie. We have a local structure of police and police expect to serve in Britain within their county, region or community. They do not move very much. Looking at the figures, the French, for example—