Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

We have heard some interesting speeches on Afghanistan. The hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) and the right hon. Member for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells) looked at the same facts and came to rather different conclusions. The problem I have with the right hon. Gentleman's analysis is that we cannot act unilaterally. We went in there with the United States, and we have to come out with them; we cannot conduct a unilateral withdrawal. The problem I have with the analysis of the hon. Member for Halton is that it does not acknowledge that it is our very presence that has focused, if not caused, the insurgency. That is a big factor. We have succeeded in uniting against us most of the Afghan insurgency, as we did in Iraq. I do not want to discuss Afghanistan, however, although I have a few words to say about it. Instead, I want to talk about the conduct of foreign policy over the last 12 years and how it will change if my party wins the next general election, because some serious and fundamental errors have been made. When Robin Cook became Foreign Secretary, he made a speech about setting out what he called an ethical foreign policy, as though, somehow, previous foreign policy had not been ethical. There was also talk about being a force for good in the world. I think this has led us into making some serious errors—unintentionally, and in many ways with the best intentions, it has led us into error. In many respects, this is a rerun of the old argument about whether one should promote one's interests or one's values in foreign policy. I think the answer is both, but values certainly seem to have taken the upper hand over the last 12 years. They have led to a series of errors. I want to comment on two of them, one of which is merely irritating, but the other one of which is dangerous. The irritating error is the predilection of the current Foreign Secretary and his predecessors for gratuitous moralising about what goes on in other countries where we have no influence and no interest. We get this the whole time; certain other countries get almost daily lectures from the Foreign Secretary about how they ought to conduct their affairs. He does it in an arrogant and patronising way, too. He has said,""we want to see…Russia on a different course"," and that he has have been talking to President Assad""for over 18 months…about his responsibilities in the region"." How does the Foreign Secretary think that sounds to those countries, and in what way does it possibly promote our interests? This reached its ridiculous conclusion in his comments on Sri Lanka. He criticised its Government—who were finally coming to grips with the Tamil terrorists and the insurgency—and then, when the Tamils expected some support, he gave them none and we ended up with a huge demonstration in Parliament square. We had no dog in that fight; we had no interest and absolutely no influence. What was the point of that gratuitous comment? That approach comes from people assuming they have somehow taken the moral high ground because they have asserted it, and they are therefore entitled to tell other people how they think they ought to conduct their affairs. I think foreign policy is about something different, however: if we have an interest we pursue it, and if we have the power to affect an outcome, we use it, but we do not make gratuitous comments, particularly from a moral point of view, about what other people do if we do not have either that interest or that power. How would we react if President Assad started making comments on our fiscal irresponsibility over the last few years, or the Chinese President criticised us over our rather weak financial regulation? We would be pretty unhappy about it, and I think the press and Members in all parts of this House would unite in opposition to such criticism. Such comment sounds arrogant, and if a first-world country directs it at a third-world country, it does not just sound arrogant, it sounds neo-imperialist as well. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) becomes Foreign Secretary—which I very much hope he will in a few months' time—I hope he will resist the temptation to comment, particularly from a moral point of view, on issues over which we have no influence and little, or no, interest. That is merely the irritating aspect of this so-called ethical foreign policy, however; the dangerous bit is the predilection for intervention. That has been a growing tendency, and it seems to me that no lessons have been learned from one such episode to the next. That is, of course, where ethical foreign policy, or a moral crusade, leads—military intervention. We had a little bit of success in Sierra Leone, and I think that whetted the appetite. That episode involved a gang of essentially armed robbers trying to take over a west African country, and that might be about the extent of what we can take care of by ourselves. We watched the United States' success in Bosnia, but there was a very specific objective—to get the Serbs to the negotiating table in Dayton—and force was used to achieve that. Our first adventure was therefore Kosovo. That war was probably illegal; there was certainly no United Nations Security Council cover for it—we did not even try to get it, because we knew we could not. I think we were very lucky in Kosovo. We were on the verge of having to invade—of having to send our Army in—and I do not know what the result would have been. One day, I would love to know what Martti Ahtisaari and Viktor Chernomyrdin said to Milosevic that made him back down over Kosovo, but I think we ought to thank God that they did what they did, because otherwise we would have ended up in the kind of mess that we have ended up in in other places where we have intervened. It is so easy to start these things, and so difficult to see where they will go. We then went into Iraq, which exposed the dubious legality of our actions—by implication there was the need to revive a previous UN Security Council resolution. We also then found that the grounds for the war—the weapons of mass destruction—not only did not exist, but the method by which the Government had come to their conclusions was cruelly exposed to the light of day by the Foreign Affairs Committee, on which I served at the time, and subsequently by other inquiries. We were, at best, misled, and intelligence was manipulated to political ends that seemed to me to justify decisions that had already been taken. Both we and the Americans had initial military success in Iraq. We were welcomed as liberators, but it was not long before we were being targeted as insurgents by nationalist groups of one sort or another. I believe that the entire mission conducted by us and the Americans in Iraq acted as both a recruiting sergeant and a training ground for al-Qaeda and its terrorists. They were not in Iraq before, and it certainly gave them a lot of practice. It also gave them something by which to recruit people to its cause—the idea that a western army was on Islamic soil. We should have learned the lessons from that before we went into Afghanistan again in 2006. Whatever success we had in Iraq—the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) set that out—has to be set against the fact that we have left the region less stable than it was, and that the big winner is Iran, which now does not have a stable, strong country on its western border to act as its counterweight. We are now dealing, at least in part, with the consequences of that, in a much more assertive and much stronger Iran, because it knows that there is nobody in the region who can take it on and stop it. After Iraq, we went to phase two in Afghanistan. We had cleared the Taliban out in 2001-02, but in 2006 we went back in. Almost as an afterthought, we went into Helmand, and the then Defence Secretary said it was to protect the provincial reconstruction teams. We sent in 3,000 troops and he rather optimistically hoped they would come out without a shot being fired; that is obviously what he thought would happen, too, although he now says that is not so. The reason given for that action was to protect the provincial reconstruction teams, but the Prime Minister said that a large part of our mission was to stop the heroin trade—the hon. Member for Halton also referred to that. In answer to a question from me, the deputy leader of the Labour party, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), said recently that girls' education was a crucial ingredient in our mission. The Prime Minister has talked about building a democratic state. This is not mission creep; it is mission gallop. We went in there to protect an aid effort; we have ended up trying to build a democratic state. I now see that our objectives have reduced to training up the Afghan security forces so they can support the Government. The decision to reduce our objectives is, I suppose, one way of getting our capabilities and objectives into line. However, we never had a clear objective, and our presence there has fuelled the insurgency; I have just made that point. It is our very presence as foreigners that has united the various forces in the Afghan opposition against us. They do not like foreigners on their soil, and I dare say we would not like them very much on ours. We should have cleared the Taliban out and then pursued a different strategy. We are there now and it is not that easy just to leave, but we should recognise that our presence produces and fuels the insurgency. The biggest and most misleading of all the reasons given for our being in Afghanistan is that it makes the streets of Britain safe—it palpably does not. There were serious bombings here in 2005, most of which originated either here or in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan. The idea that al-Qaeda has no place to go aside from Pakistan is nonsense, because there are masses of failed or semi-failed states around, some of which have been mentioned. Those that have not are in the Islamic part of north Africa—in Mail, in Mauritania and in the southern bits of some of the other countries there, which are not really under the control of their Governments. Al-Qaeda is already operating in those places and it has plenty of places to go to if we deny it Afghanistan. If we want to stop al-Qaeda bombing people on the streets of Britain, we have to do so with our own security and intelligence forces, not by fighting foreign wars, which are as likely to stir al-Qaeda up as deter it. In no way do I intend to detract from the fantastic performance that our Army and military have put in. One could not read "A Million Bullets", as I have done, without being incredibly impressed at what these people have been doing. However, one had to ask at the end: what has been achieved by all that incredible bravery and loss of life? It was difficult to see that much had been sustained. What has been lacking is a clear political objective. If we had had one, we might have been able to put behind it the clear political support for which the hon. Member for Halton was calling. In times of economic hardship, it is also worth reflecting on how much this has cost. It has cost £12 billion and it is costing £3.5 billion a year, but the cost is not just the treasure—it is also the blood. Every Wednesday, we are reminded of the cost of this action in human life. I am glad that President Obama is giving serious thought to what our mission should be and what resources we need to accomplish it, but I hope that those two things are matched up. I say that because one of the things that flows out of all these interventions is that they increase instability; we become the target by being in these places and we fuel terror and al-Qaeda, acting as a recruiting sergeant while these places act as a training ground for it. This is a bad precedent to set. We may think that it is good for us, but when Chinese marines invade the Philippines or—dare I say this—the Gulf, in pursuit of what they see as a humanitarian mission, we will regret inventing it I hope that we will see an end to gratuitous moralising in the conduct of foreign policy in the next few years—I hope that will start at some point this spring. I hope that we will see intervention only when it can be quick and successful or where it is clearly and essentially in our national interest. I hope that we will stop seeing foreign policy, as we have so often seen it with Labour Foreign Secretaries, as some sort of reality TV show in which the Foreign Secretary of the day has to give his view on everything, irrespective of whether it is our business, and struts his stuff on the world stage, looking good and lecturing others. Foreign policy is about the long-term protection and enhancement of the United Kingdom's interests. Sometimes that will involve the promotion of democracy, but more often it will, and should be, about achieving stability.