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4.25 pm
Mr. Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con): May I start by asking you, Mr. Speaker, whether you had a moment to read the first few lines of the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Robert Key), because many of us are going to be squeezed for time? I shall, thus, try to cut short what I was going to say in order to allow others to get in.
I wish to draw the House's memory back to July, when, in one horrendous day in Afghanistan, five members of 9 Platoon, C Company, 2nd Battalion The Rifles were killed. Many years before that, I commanded 9 Platoon, C Company, which was then in the 1st Battalion The Royal Green Jackets. July was a very intense time for me, so what must it have been like for the families of those who were wounded, the families of those who were killed and the general family of the regiment at that time? It must have been too awful to contemplate. It was deeply depressing at that time to hear Ministers say that those deaths and injuries were not caused by a shortage of helicopters. That is technically correct, but we all know, as does anyone who has been involved with the operations in this part of Afghanistan and as do their families, that if we had even a fraction more lift per head of people deployed, which is enjoyed by, for example, the United States forces, we would be able to have a much wider footprint in that area and we would be able to be unpredictable. Thus, we would be able to dominate the ground and limit the opportunities for the enemy to create this awful daisy-chain network of improvised explosive devices that has been so damaging to our young men.
I get the big picture of what we are doing in Afghanistan-I understand all the arguments made this afternoon by more eloquent people than I about the need to create stability in the region and the risks of getting this wrong. However, I have had to work pretty hard to get my head around it, and I am certain that many people outside this House do not understand what we are doing there. The Government have a major job to do to get the public to understand the importance of our mission there.
It was brought home to me more recently-just the week before last, when I went to the Selly Oak facility-how difficult it is to raise one's mind above what is happening to the young men and women whom we are sending to
serve in this part of the world. I join my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) in paying tribute to the Defence Medical Services. Particular praise should go to Brigadier Chris Parker, who has revolutionised Selly Oak, along with others before him-he certainly would not want me to label him as being the only saint, because there are a great many. It is a remarkable place to visit, and we must understand that he is fighting in that unit every bit as operationally as those right on the front line in Afghanistan.
I also visited Norton House, the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association-SSAFA-accommodation for families, and I pay tribute to its wonderful atmosphere and to the wonderful people who run it. Most of all, I pay tribute to the way in which DMS has embedded itself in the hospital trusts in Birmingham-we should understand that we are not only talking about Selly Oak hospital, but a range of facilities. Such embedding is entirely the right policy and it should have the universal support of everyone in this House. I also pay tribute to the support that now exists for the development of the Army recovery centres, and I speak as a trustee of Help for Heroes, to which some hon. Members have been kind enough to pay tribute today.
Such support offers a further opportunity to address some of the points made by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) and others: we must not only look after people when they are recovering from their wounds, but remember that we must give them lifelong protection, because the latent mental health repercussions of injuries might need to be revisited. I am full of admiration for the development of that new concept of care.
We have to understand that those who are serving in Afghanistan are having to dig pretty deep into the manual that they perhaps have not looked at since they were at Sandhurst, but that is part of their DNA. I think that it is called "Serve to Lead". They have to dig pretty deep in leadership terms at battalion level, company commander level, platoon level and even section commander level. They are having to think very hard about ways of motivating their men to do extremely dangerous work. It is remarkable what they can achieve. I heard, for example, of a platoon commander who had to buy a goat from tribesmen in order to ensure that his men had enough to eat. I am not criticising the Government-when one is on operations, one has to make do. I know that from experience. When re-supply does not happen, one has to think and to think fast. Some remarkable things-
Mr. Ellwood: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Benyon: My hon. Friend served in the same regiment as me, but I will not give way as there is simply not time.
These men have to continue patrols, checking and clearing compounds in extremely hazardous circumstances. All the time, their families are worrying about them. I cannot pay more tribute to any group of people than to those who man the rear parties of serving units. Rear parties are doing heroic work, and they have to do some of the most unpleasant work when informing families that people have been killed.
A friend of mine's son arrived back in Camp Bastion yesterday after six gruelling months in one of the forward
operating bases. Of his battle group, 22 members have been killed and 80 have been aero medevaced back to the UK. Let us contemplate what it must be like for the parents, girlfriends and wives of the 9,000 people we have serving in Afghanistan at any one time. By rough calculation, I think that that is about 50,000 people, but it probably rises to about 100,000 when we take in siblings and close friends. That cohort rolls over every six months as we deploy more people, and so more and more people must go through that awful experience. We have to understand their concerns. I pay tribute to the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox): the Government have a great responsibility to articulate what our men and women are doing there. It is a major educational role, a public relations role and a moral role to explain to a sceptical public why this is important and what these young men and women are doing.
For that group and for the wider group who are concerned about the issue, we need to consider the tactics that are being employed. General McChrystal, like General Petraeus and others before him, comes to us as an intellectual and thoughtful person who needs to be listened to. When he says that ISAF is poorly configured for counter-insurgency operations, we need to listen to him. I think that we are listening and I hope that the President of the United States is, too.
Can we reassure a sceptical public that the ink spots that we are all told about can be joined up and, once they are joined up, can stay as one large ink spot rather than being fragmented? Have we not learned from the Boer war that single strong points do not secure the ground? Securing the ground is about DFID getting out there and building not only roads but mosques, schools and hospitals. We all know what that means in terms of counter-insurgency.
Counter-insurgency is hard pounding. I know a little about it-I did it for two years as part of a counter-insurgency operation that took 30 years and which had nothing like as high an attrition rate as the current operation. When parents come to my surgery and say, as one did recently, "My son is in a forward operating base doing exactly what his brother was doing in that forward operating base two years before. We are not getting anywhere," I have to say, "Counter-insurgency is like that. We have to work hard, but we must work harder and have a bigger footprint." I understand the frustration, and the determination.
I was a Green Jacket and I was therefore weaned on a book called "Gangs and Counter-Gangs", written by General Frank Kitson in 1960. When my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring talked about the need to get defectors as our first priority, he could not have been speaking more readily than to someone who understands it from that precise point of view.
I shall finish by quoting the Kiplingesque words that Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thompson used in his description of the July day I referred to at the beginning of my remarks. He said:
"We turned to our right, saluted the fallen and the wounded, picked up our rifles and returned to the ramparts.
I sensed each rifleman tragically killed in action today standing behind us as we returned to our posts and we all knew that each one of those riflemen would have wanted us to 'crack on'."
At the heart of all our debates about the Government of Afghanistan, the work done by our wonderful forces and the tactics that we seek to get them to employ is the staggering courage shown by our young men to "crack on" as they step over the blood of their comrades.
4.35pm
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con): I cannot pay my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon) enough of a tribute for the remarkable speech that he has just made.
Mr. Brazier: In fact, we have had several outstanding speeches, including the one by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames).
The bulk of the debate has focused, rightly, on Afghanistan, and I want to put on record how incredibly proud the men and women of Canterbury are of the 5th Battalion the Royal Scottish Regiment (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders), who were recently given the freedom of the city, and of our own Territorial Army unit, the 3rd Battalion Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. In recent deployments, the Argylls had one killed and several wounded, while one Territorial was severely wounded.
Many years ago, when I was slimmer and fitter, I was privileged to serve in the Territorial Army for 13 years. Before the debate, I looked for my regimental tie in my palatial second home-over the Elephant and Castle public house-but I seem to have lost it. Nevertheless, I want to focus on the crisis facing the TA as a result of the deeply unwelcome decision that has been made by the Government.
At one point during the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, reservists-most of them Territorials-accounted for one fifth of the force in Iraq and for one eighth of the force in Afghanistan. Given that our reserves are very small-they make up only one fifth of our total manpower-and that they are people with civilian jobs, that is truly astonishing. A total of 15 Territorials and one air reservist have been killed in the operations.
These people did not come from nowhere. They did not walk off the street. Most were people with busy civilian jobs, but they chose to spend their evenings and weekends in draughty drill halls and on exercises to prepare for deployment. Often, that choice compromised their civilian careers and their family lives, and the same can be said for the many people involved in training them who did not themselves get the opportunity to deploy. I cannot stress enough how much the TA will be devastated if it really turns out that, for five and a half months, there is no training for anyone apart from those due to go on operations.
The essence of any voluntary organisation-be it a charity, a football club, a political party or part of the volunteer forces-is that it has to be led by high-quality people willing to make the sacrifice year in and year out. The Government's proposal sends an appalling message.
I have a huge regard for the hon. Member for Harlow (Bill Rammell), who is Minister of State, and for the Secretary of State. They have been generous to my
all-party group and given us privileged access. We are just negotiating a date for the Minister to come and address us. For that reason, I very much hope that he will be able to take the edge off that appalling proposal.
Earlier, I was one of the people who pointed out that Sir David Richards was a regular. I have never been privileged to meet him, but I know quite a number of people who know him well. Every one of them believes him to be a really outstanding soldier. His command of the operation in Sierra Leone-one of the comparatively few wars that we have participated in to have been swift, successful and extraordinarily well handled-was a model.
The fact remains, however, that generals advise, Ministers decide. In 1921, Sir Henry Wilson was an extraordinarily distinguished predecessor of Sir David Richards. He had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff since the final year of the first world war. As Secretary of State for War, Sir Winston Churchill, who then suffered under the considerable disadvantage that he was deeply unpopular because he had been blamed for the Dardanelles campaign, faced down Sir Henry Wilson when he proposed disbanding the Territory Army and flatly told him that he was wrong.
Much more recently, we have had two very clear indications of the absolute inability of the Regular Army to handle the TA-one was the catastrophic shambles of the way in which the mobilisation for the Balkans campaign was handled. Just after the decision was taken to make a huge cut in TA numbers, vast numbers of Territorials received the most disorganised call-out notices. Unbelievably, the same thing was repeated in the first stage of the Iraq conflict. That was why the Government took the very wise decision to have a two-star officer who was a Territorial with a civilian job to advise them, so that they got advice directly from the horse's mouth. The Duke of Westminster was the first holder of the post.
I should like to make a wider point, although I am conscious of the time. Again and again, we have failed to understand where the next threat will come from. In 1914, the Commons and the country were gripped with a sense of crisis because Ireland seemed to be sliding into war, with arms being raced into both Protestant and Catholic communities. Only at the very last moment, we realised that the real threat to the country came from the continent. A week before the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, most people in this country had no idea that we even had a garrison there. Three months before Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq, we heard restated that there was no question of sending armoured forces out of area. On 10 September 2001, anyone who had said that we would go to war in Afghanistan would have been thought out of his mind.
The truth is that we must keep capabilities alive that are not needed on current operations-that is absolutely fundamental-and when we face desperate pressures on the defence budget, reserve forces are the best way of doing so. There is no reason why the Navy's mine- clearing capability is all manned by regular naval personnel. Historically, the vast majority of them were reservists. There is no reason why we should not have one or two armoured brigades in the Territorial Army. Do we really believe that we will deploy Regular Army air defence units in the near future against an opponent with a superior air force? We need all those capabilities
and they could be provided much more cheaply in the reserve forces, but they need the opportunity to train at evenings and weekends and be paid to do so.
I should like to make one last point. Time and again, we hear about the shortage of helicopters-it is one of the most pervading themes of every discussion on Afghanistan-and often it appears that it is mostly about a shortage of pilots and technicians, rather than machines. It is not just astonishing; it is scandalous that we are trying to man our helicopter force almost entirely with regular pilots, when the Americans provide nearly half their air capabilities from reservists. We have a vast number of ex-regular helicopter pilots from all three services in the civilian community, most of whom continue to earn their living by flying helicopters. It is time that Ministers brought their regular advisers to book on that and told them that they must introduce a plan, and if they do not, they should bring in Americans to advise them on how to do it. The fact that one pilot-astonishingly, a RNR officer-is in Afghanistan, manning an Apache, which is far more removed from civilian capabilities than medium-lift helicopters, shows that it can be done in principle. It is time that it was done.
I want to leave room for other colleagues. However, I will say that all of us are proud of what is happening in Afghanistan, but we must never lose sight of the need to keep other capabilities going, and we need our reserve forces for that, too.
4.44 pm
Mr. Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con): I join others in paying tribute to all those who have lost their lives recently in Afghanistan, not least Guardsman Jamie Janes of 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, in which I served, who died tragically on 5 October in Nad Ali district in Helmand province while on foot patrol. Our thoughts are with their families and regiments.
Nobody who wishes to do anything other than understand what is happening in Afghanistan could do any better than read the quite excellent speech that General McChrystal gave recently to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in which he attempts to give a comprehensive view of the situation and dispels many of what he calls the "bumper sticker" truths about Afghanistan.
Those of us who were in Helmand province during Operation Panther's Claw will realise how important boots on the ground are and how welcome the announcement of 500 extra troops is, despite it being some way off the number for which the service chiefs asked. That pales into insignificance against the awaited decision from President Obama about whether he will have a further surge to provide far more manpower in Afghanistan.
With the Canadians due to pull out and many of our coalition partners refusing to undertake what I would call active service, there is a concern that the burden of operational duties will continue to fall disproportionately on the UK, the Americans and some of our other allies. We need to watch that situation very closely.
The Secretary of State's announcement that Merlins are shortly to be dispatched-finally-to Afghanistan is nothing other than welcome. The great enemy of our troops, the IEDs, continue to cause a real problem, and it would be interesting to know whether the amount of
fatalities and wounded that we have had from IEDs is due to our troops going out to the forward operating bases, which they should most properly do by helicopter, or, as the Government would maintain, their going out from the FOBs on foot patrol.
There has been some misunderstanding during the discussions about vehicles in Afghanistan. Of course we need new and different vehicles, but we need also a range of different vehicles to suit different terrain and operational duties. A heavily armoured American vehicle might be all very well for going down the road, and would offer better protection against an IED, but it most likely would not be able to go off that road if, as a result of an ambush, it needed to.
The surge in growing the Afghan national army must be the right way forward, although the figures are ambitious and the training will take longer than we expect. We were lucky to see some of the Afghan national army training while we were out in Helmand, and I ask the Secretary of State whether there is any plan to bring some of the officers or the most promising potential officers to the UK to give them accelerated courses from which they might benefit.
The Afghan police, as important in so many ways as an Afghan national army, present problems of their own. I said yesterday that we need to create a genuinely national Afghan police, but many refuse to serve outside their local communities, and when they become police in such communities it is tempting for them to become involved in corruption or extortion, or their extended families benefit. That is a real problem for a general, national Afghan police force.
When I was in Camp Bastion, the first-class medical facilities that we saw at the hospital impressed me almost more than anything else. Unfortunately, we were there when several of our troops were "casevaced" back to camp. We were shown around by an excellent Royal Navy surgeon commander, who told us how many specialists one would have if one arrived at his hospital-far more, he said, than anywhere in the private sector or the NHS. I suggested that the reason why we might find so many specialists on duty there was that there were no golf courses nearby, which is where one finds most specialists in the United Kingdom when one needs one. However, they were all incredibly well trained, the hospital was immaculately clean and, I should point out, a good proportion of them were reservists. I say again to the Secretary of State and Ministers: please do not underestimate the importance of reservists in the Territorial Army. Of course, when invited to make cuts of one sort or another, the generals and those in the higher echelons of the regular armed forces will try to make cuts to the TA. That is only natural, but it is to be resisted. In my part of the world, in Lympstone, there is a commando training camp at which reservist Royal Marines are trained up to slot into positions vacated by the regulars. In the field, no distinction is made between a regular and a reservist, and that seems to be an increasing pattern in many of the other sectors of the armed forces.
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