Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews); as usual, he has made his points with great clarity and what he has said has been of great interest. I am afraid that I am going to return to the issue of Afghanistan. That will come as no surprise to the Secretary of State for Defence or anyone on these Benches. The focus of my concern is a speech that I heard on Remembrance day in my constituency. It was made by a member of the Royal British Legion, an elderly gentleman who had fought in the second world war. He was wearing the Africa Star and the Italy Star. He spoke with great pride about the amount of money that the Royal British Legion had raised in the previous few weeks, but went on to say how bitterly opposed he was to the war in Afghanistan. He did not understand the cause behind it or the reason for our troops dying there. I spoke to him afterwards. I said that he had fought tyranny—he had the medals to prove it—and that he had been content to stand against a dictator and risk his life. He said, "Yes, but that was a just war. It was a proper, real war. This is a waste of life." I challenged him and asked him to explain. He said that he had heard no proper reasons why our men and women were dying in Afghanistan. That is the point that I make to the Secretary of State for Defence. A refreshing amount of understanding has been displayed tonight and Pakistan has been mentioned by almost everyone who has spoken, with one or two notable exceptions. However, the Government have made a particularly poor job of explaining why our men and women are fighting in Afghanistan. There are some cracking arguments that, if made articulately, properly and frequently, might make my friend from the Royal British Legion change his views. First and foremost, my friend, like many in the Chamber, advocates withdrawal. But we are where we are, whether we agree with the intervention in 2001 or the expedition to Helmand. Those things are not the point; we are where we are. If we were to withdraw now, what would be the consequences? First and foremost, the United States would simply carry on with the heavy lifting and continue the fight. We paid a price for our behaviour when the Spanish withdrew from Najaf, Iraq, in 2005. We agreed, although not very obviously or publicly, to plug the so-called "Spanish gap" of 3,000 men, but we never did. We did not honour the agreement. The United States forces had to do it and they finally had to pull the fat out of the fire in Basra. We cannot carry on letting down our allies; that would be quite wrong for a number of reasons. First, there is our moral duty. Secondly, it would fracture an alliance. Thirdly, after what I consider to be the Prime Minister's ill thought-through statement that we would adopt a timetable for our withdrawal from Afghanistan—not a series of goals or achievements, or a graduated response, but a timetable—within half an hour al-Qaeda was on the wires with its statement claiming that this was the beginning of the end. It said that the second major partner in the alliance, Britain, had signalled the fact that it would no longer support the US and that, to all intents and purposes, it was defeated. We cannot do that. The Government's arguments for the most part—although not tonight, because we have heard some excellent speeches from Labour Members—have been made very badly. For instance, several different reasons have been manifested for why we are in Afghanistan. The most recent is that conventional military operations there are designed to keep the streets of Great Britain clear of terrorism and terrorists. The Secretary of State knows that I am the Chairman of the Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee, so I know that that is an argument, but I do not believe that it is the prime linchpin of the Government's reasons for our conventional operations in Afghanistan. Of course we must prevent that country and others falling back into a state of disrepair and becoming a failed state where terrorism can prosper, but the attacks on 7/7 and the failed attacks on 21/7 were not led by Afghans or by men trained in Afghanistan. The former were led by Yorkshire men, trained in the Lake district and Pakistan, and the latter by a man of north African origin living in north London who had also been trained in Pakistan and this country. The several dozen arrests carried out after the aircraft plot of August 2006 were all of British nationals, with two exceptions. They had not trained in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. That surely is the point. I fail to understand why the BBC so often presents two different pieces of news, the first about Afghanistan, usually bad news, then—several items down the news—something on Pakistan. But it is the same issue, the same war being fought against the same, albeit slightly different enemies and albeit on two different fronts. Would my constituent who fought in the second world war distinguish Anzio and Normandy? Of course he would not—it was the same war against a common enemy on different fronts. The Government must start to make the argument much more coherently that the reason that our troops are in Afghanistan is not just to support the Government of that country or just to bring it back to some form of rationality, but to carry on, on a second front, the war that threatens to engulf the whole region, from the borders of Russia to the borders of Iran. We know that Russia is nuclear-tipped and we believe Iran to be also. Pakistan also has a nuclear arsenal that, should it fall into the hands of our enemies, however likely or unlikely that is, would—as even the meanest intelligence must comprehend—threaten to increase the sad, but relatively modest number of injured and dead from terrorism in this country. Plunging that region into nuclear-tipped chaos would create a problem with which we could not live.