Armed Forces

My Lords, my noble friend’s powerful and authoritative opening speech has come in a debate that is particularly well timed. As our involvement in Iraq draws to a close, that in Afghanistan appears to be expanding. It seems to me that the lesson from Iraq is that although military intervention may be necessary, military occupation should if at all possible be avoided, and certainly be ended as early as possible. It is at last being recognised that Afghanistan is now a part of a far bigger problem: the survival of Pakistan as a democratic and secular state. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a dangerous contradiction between the problem in Pakistan and the NATO military operations in Afghanistan. The NATO operations are clearly inciting the instabilities in Pakistan. I read and reread the Prime Minister’s UK policy Statement on Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday. I fear that I found it a rather woolly, disconnected melange of military, political and social suggestions. The repeated emphasis on Britain's aid contribution to both countries made me wonder whether he had his priorities right. As my right honourable friend David Cameron said after the Statement: ""We are not in the business of trying to create a new Switzerland in the Hindu Kush".—[Official Report, Commons, 29/4/09; col. 873.]" My right honourable friend cited President Obama’s strategy: ""to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future"." What a pity that we did not have such a crisp and clear statement from the Prime Minister. In trying to influence what happens in Pakistan, the West is taking on a task of immense scale. The population is 174 million: double that of Iran and five times that of Iraq. A comparison with the population of Afghanistan is difficult because the Americans and the British disagree on the basic figure. The CIA says that it has 34 million people; the FCO says that it has 29 million—17 per cent difference. Perhaps the Minister will tell us who is right. The deterioration in Afghanistan is epitomised by the recent agreement of President Karzai to introduce Sharia family law, with all its horrors for the treatment of women. Despite all the outrage from the West at that proposal, the best that the Prime Minister could report yesterday was to welcome Karzai’s "decision to review" that law. What sort of person are our troops being asked to lay down their lives for? The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that we are fighting in Afghanistan to defend Britain. He emphasised yesterday: ""Two thirds of the attacks or plots in Britain come from Pakistan".—[Official Report, Commons, 29/4/09; col. 875.]" The problem in Pakistan and Afghanistan is so vast in relation to our UK resources that I believe that we would defend ourselves more effectively if we focused more on the protection of our UK borders. We know that there are a very large number of persons of Pakistan origin living in the UK. Many of them have both British and Pakistan passports. They can therefore use their British passports to depart from and return to the UK and their Pakistan passports for travel outside the UK. The vast majority of these people are wholly loyal and are great contributors to our British community, but the fact is that we know that there are a few who are not, and it is extremely difficult to detect and monitor those few. There is much literature on the internal threat in Britain. One of the best books remains The Islamist by Ed Hussein—I recommend it to any of your Lordships who have not read it. Quillam, the new counter-extremism think tank, is a valuable, although chilling, source of information. The real danger is the spread of Islamist and jihadist teaching through the madrassas, to the extent that they now provide most of the education for Pakistan’s poor. That is not a recent development. Many of those madrassas have been funded by Saudi Arabia. An excellent book, Three Cups of Tea, by two Americans, Greg Morteson and David Relin, sets out the evidence. To cite one excerpt: ""By December 2001 one of four major Wahabit proselytising organisations, the Al Haramain foundation, had built 1,100 mosques, schools and Islamic centres in Pakistan and other Muslim countries"." Surely Saudi Arabia should be a key member of any alliance to combat the jihadist threats from inside Pakistan and Afghanistan. Much could be done to strengthen our borders. I hope a new Government may consider whether we need a Department of Homeland Security on the American pattern, which might help to focus our efforts—and, indirectly, contribute to the effectiveness with which we can use our very limited military resources. I would really like that to start now; we cannot necessarily wait until we get a new Government. I have two main complaints. First, despite new Labour's phrase "joined-up government", there has been a lamentable lack of integration of our defence, foreign and homeland policies when tackling the threat from Islamism. It is high time that the policies and operations of DfID were far more integrated into the FCO—indeed, I wonder whether the time may not be approaching when DfID should be put back into the FCO. We need more joined-up thinking. My second complaint is that our defence policy lacks the hard edge that enables our forces to be prepared for the real threats for which they are needed, rather than being allocated tasks on the basis of gesture politics. Nor am I sure that it is sensible to use special contingency reserves as the source of funding for special defence operations. That leads to huge inefficiencies, especially in procurement—referred to proudly by the Prime Minister yesterday when he spoke of the extra £1 billion that had been needed for emergency provision for vehicles in Afghanistan. In conclusion, I fear that I must say that although the present Defence Secretary is one of the most distinguished members of the Government, I do not have confidence in the political direction of our national defence by our present Prime Minister. I believe that he has shown little interest in or understanding of the real needs of our Armed Forces.