Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

I am aware of it, and I will come to Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb in a second. Given my welcome of the Queen's Speech proposal for a Bill to strengthen the law against bribery, I should explain my mention of the word "bribes". In the context of peacekeeping, and perhaps in that context alone, bribes are acceptable. The Americans used exactly that approach to persuade 100,000 Sunni militia to switch sides in Iraq, paying them each $300 a month, at a total cost of $30 million a month—a minor cost, given the costs of war, especially as it produced a massive reduction in the violence almost overnight. In their article, Christia and Semple calculate that $30 million a month would get us 250,000 Afghan insurgents for about $120 a month each—the current salary of a soldier in the Afghan national army. That would make a real impact. I am sure that Ministers cannot be as frank with the House about such counter-insurgency tactics as Opposition Members can be. As the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) has reminded us, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal appointed this August the British Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb to mastermind a programme of reconciliation. That approach can be common ground among all those who have been critical of previous strategies.