Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

As the right hon. Gentleman says, this is not an easy strategy—we have never claimed that it is. However, we know that it has worked in Iraq in the recent past and that members of the American and British forces are seeking to do the same, and we know from what has been said by Taliban experts that there is a history of conflicts being won and solved in Afghanistan in this way. When the Taliban won in 1998, they did so not because they had a huge army but because they persuaded lots of other people to join them. We must learn from the way in which they won, so that we can be the victors in the present important conflict. The only surprising aspect of this apparently new approach to counter-insurgency—which we hope President Obama will confirm soon—is that it has not been tried more robustly before in Afghanistan. It seems that the Americans, at least during the Bush and Rumsfeld era, were reluctant to do so. Indeed, they did exactly the reverse. When Taliban commanders came over wanting to defect, they did not reintegrate them, but sent them off to Guantanamo Bay. That is hardly a recipe for encouraging splits in the rest of the Taliban. Even now, it seems that efforts to win defectors from the Taliban have been unstructured, under-resourced, and permitted only at individual level. If the approach to reconciliation and defectors is really to change, and if that change is to be coupled with the other strategy changes that I mentioned earlier, the Liberal Democrats see some prospect of success in Afghanistan. If Obama's new strategy is one we can support, we will play our part in trying to explain to the public why the conflict in Afghanistan is so important. Part of that must involve ensuring that the new strategy is properly implemented and robustly assessed. We will be looking for the metrics indicating the progress and success of the new strategy to which others have referred. While not yet pressing for definitive timetables for withdrawal—for, as the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) has said, there are dangers in that—the House should be seeking to identify the steps on the path to main force withdrawal, perhaps in the lifetime of the next Parliament. One of the main reasons why our party supported the mission in Afghanistan but opposed the attack on Iraq is our commitment to multilateralism and international law, and that is why we welcome the support in the Queen's Speech for the Government's efforts on nuclear non-proliferation. The all-important non-proliferation treaty review conference will take place next year, and I have been impressed by the FCO's efforts to prepare for it. Not all the keys to the success of the conference lie in the Government's hands. Two critical questions will be whether the United States and Russia can ratify the successor to the strategic arms reduction treaty—which will include substantial reductions in missiles—and, of course, whether the United States Senate is of a mind to pass the treaty for a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Given the multiple pressures on Obama, I am not sure whether he will be able to pull that off, but he has shown a lead that I only wish others, including Britain, could emulate. In his willingness to drop President Bush's idea of a ballistic missile defence system based in Poland and the Czech Republic, he has not only helped the thawing of relations with Russia but shown an ability to reassess accepted wisdom on nuclear strategy. We believe that it is time for the Government to reassess their approach to the replacement of Trident, and to do so ahead of the NPT review conference. The stakes are high, and not just in regard to reform of the NPT or the next stages of multilateral nuclear disarmament. The signal that such moves and progress would send to Iran and North Korea, among others, would be extremely strong—perhaps not strong enough to resolve the specific nuclear confrontations, but perhaps strong enough to address the current impasse in both cases.