Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

It is a privilege to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), as ever. He is right to focus on my proposal that we should reinvent ourselves diplomatically. I sense that in the country there is increasing unease about the way in which we use our armed forces and why they are deployed. I am glad to see that over the past fortnight a debate on Afghanistan has emerged, which was sorely lacking previously. I hope it continues. As for the right hon. and learned Gentleman's suggestion that I am advocating that we betray our allies, I have to say that I certainly do not advocate that. We must take a lead, however. As some of my hon. Friends and his right hon. and hon. Friends have said, we have been there for eight years now, and eight years is a long time. One of our most distinguished diplomats said that it may take 30 years. It may, in his historical perspective. Let us try explaining, back in the constituencies that produce the soldiers and those who fly our planes and sail our ships, that we will be sacrificing lives for the next 30 years—it is not an easy thing to do. It is probably also very bad politics and it is not the way to conduct a campaign such as this one. I have heard all sorts of things this afternoon about how it might be possible to persuade the Taliban to come in, and so on. I will try to deal with that. I say this to the right hon. and learned Gentleman: I suspect that, like me, most serving and former Ministers are praying for an Afghan miracle, hoping that President Karzai will turn out to be a variation on Nelson Mandela and that, instead of risking their lives fighting the Taliban, British soldiers will be able to concentrate on what is portrayed—doubtfully, in my opinion—as the much safer task of training a new Afghan army. We can pray as much as we like; it is not going to happen. I have no doubt that training will increase, because the Prime Minister has told us for the first time that our forces will be able to leave Afghanistan when we have helped to create an efficient, well equipped Afghan army capable of defending the remit of the Kabul Government against the Taliban. But right now, in the early winter of 2009, the American and British military commanders want combat troops. Trainers are very much their second priority. Without significantly increased combat capacity, ISAF will be capable of doing little more than protecting major towns and highways and, presumably, army training camps from serious Taliban damage. At first glance, the training target may appear reasonable. After all, we used a similar ploy to extricate ourselves last year from southern Iraq. But southern Afghanistan is not southern Iraq: our troops confront a very different enemy, in the poorest and most backward of countries. Iraq, if it chooses, can develop its vast oilfields to help to pay for its new security forces; Afghanistan has nothing comparable. Iraq has endured notoriously dominant, centralised government for decades; Afghanistan has endured provinces run by warlords, drug barons and mullahs, where there is little evidence of anything resembling the effective influence of a centralised Administration. Afghanistan, as we have heard, shares an impossibly lawless border with Pakistan, one of the most problematic countries on the planet: a nuclear-armed state whose very existence is threatened by violent religious fundamentalism, secessionist terror and institutionalised corruption. Since 2002, the Pakistani city of Quetta has provided a congenial home for the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, the shura, which continues to plot its Afghan operations while the Pakistani intelligence service looks the other way. To the north of Quetta, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, along with Baluchi separatists, cross and re-cross the border, but our soldiers, hunting the Taliban, cannot move with the same facility. The American and British forces cannot invade Pakistan as Afghanistan was invaded. It is true that these days the Pakistani Government, desperate for any discreet military help they can get, may turn a blind eye to the movement of American drones and special operations, if those movements succeed in killing prominent Taliban and al-Qaeda members. The Pakistanis know, however, that their fragile credibility would literally be shot to pieces if infidel armies were invited into the country to tackle jihadist terrorism. As my right hon. Friends wait, along with the rest of us, for President Obama's decision on whether to deploy more troops to Afghanistan, they repeat the mantra claiming that winning the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan aids immeasurably the prevention of Islamic terrorism inside our borders. They are convinced that we must continue to disrupt, through armed intervention, the links between the terrorists in Pakistan and those in the United Kingdom. The argument for fighting terrorism in Afghanistan rather than in Britain was heard more often, from people such as me, after the murder by Islamic terrorists of 52 innocent citizens in London in July 2005, but we ought to remember that by 2005 few of the terrorists' links can have remained in Afghanistan. The combined operations by American, Canadian and British forces over the previous three years had driven the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships out of Afghanistan, so that they were forced to find refuge in other ungoverned places. Chief among those was Pakistan, and they remain there, as the current wave of suicide bombings bears witness. No doubt some will also have moved on to Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel—that huge ungoverned space that stretches across northern Africa. Others will have integrated themselves in cities such as Mumbai and Mombasa, and in locations closer to European targets. Some of those being trained as bombers and assassins in Afghanistan and Pakistan will have returned to their native countries. Some have moved back into Afghanistan, where currently they are killing our soldiers. I cannot believe that any politician, in this or any other country, assumes that the act of killing Afghan Taliban in large numbers will reduce the threat posed by an international terrorist organisation capable of adapting and regrouping as al-Qaeda has.