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"momentous implications for UK foreign and defence policy. We would need to reinvent ourselves diplomatically and militarily. Treaties and international agreements would have to be renegotiated. In particular, relationships with our Nato partners, especially with the Americans-our most trusted and valued allies-would alter fundamentally."
Is he seriously suggesting that he wants to recommend that series of events to the House and the country? It would be a massive betrayal of our allies in the middle of a war if the United Kingdom were simply to withdraw.
The right hon. Gentleman used an unfortunate phrase in the next paragraph of his article, when he said that we should be aware that our service personnel are being
"killed or wounded in support of difficult outcomes and flawed regimes in"
"faraway countries."
He may recall that the last person who spoke of faraway countries of which we know little was Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s, in circumstances that proved to be very serious indeed. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will reflect on some of the arguments he has used.
There is a lot of interest at the moment in whether there should be a surge, and what decision President Obama will come to in that regard. I will not criticise the President for the time he is taking to reach a decision; I would rather that he spent eight weeks and made the right decision than eight days and made the wrong one. Indeed, I recall that a former President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, said:
"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four hours sharpening the axe."
That is appropriate. Given that the decisions President Obama has to take are profound, and given that he is getting conflicting advice on the issue, I think we can give him the right to take his time in reaching a correct judgment.
What would be the significance of an additional 30,000 or 40,000 troops? I am under no illusions; I do not believe that that, by itself, would mean that we would win the war and defeat the Taliban. However, the House should appreciate that decisions to withdraw or increase troops have not just a military impact, important though that impact is, but can have a profound political and psychological impact on allies and, more importantly, the enemy.
If we were to announce even the beginnings of a withdrawal, the Taliban would be entitled to say, "Why should we contemplate a political solution? Why should we contemplate any compromise in our aspirations? NATO and the west are about to withdraw anyway, so we can proceed on that assumption." When a very large increase in American forces is proclaimed, as I suspect it will be, it will bring military advantages in a number of parts of the theatre of operations. It will also send an unmistakable signal to the Taliban that the political will of the international community has not been lost-that we are prepared to see the matter out and reach a
proper solution. That will dramatically increase the prospects of the Taliban-not necessarily its leadership, but major elements of that organisation-being willing to seek a route of political compromise. If they are willing to do that, we, too, can welcome such an outcome.
I now turn to the strategy of the international community. I keep repeating the phrase "international community", because we are part of an intervention that is endorsed by the UN Security Council.
Jeremy Corbyn: I have listened carefully to everything that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has said. British, American and other troops have been in Afghanistan for eight years. How much longer will they stay there, and what would he call a victory? Will those troops just go on to some other country to which it is perceived that the Taliban may have fled?
Sir Malcolm Rifkind: Let me answer the hon. Gentleman by making the following point. We did not go to Afghanistan to deal with the poppy trade, corruption or women's rights, important though all those are. We went to stop al-Qaeda being able to operate from within that country. We have already achieved that aim, which was the primary reason we went there. Effectively, al-Qaeda has been emasculated within Afghanistan. The mischief that it can get up to from the caves in the mountains is of very little consequence, in terms of its Afghan operation. The question is how we prevent that situation from being reversed, and how we sustain it. That means that we cannot simply pull out and create a vacuum; that would give the Taliban free run of at least half the country, if not the whole.
The strategy has to have three components to it. First, as has been announced, there must be major training and enlargement of the Afghan national army, so that it can take over responsibility for security in due course. I hope that that can be done sooner rather than later, but that is not entirely within our control.
When that has been achieved, it will allow the gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan of our combat forces on the ground-perhaps all of them-but there should be a continuation thereafter of NATO air support to the Afghan Government. That is a crucial part of the strategy that has to be endorsed. We should remember that when the Taliban were ousted in the first place, we did not have NATO ground forces involved; it was NATO air support, primarily from the United States, combined with Afghan anti-Taliban forces, that drove the Taliban out of power. The Taliban had no air power, and there is no prospect of their having any air power. They cannot conquer Afghanistan simply by having people on the ground if NATO, even after withdrawing its ground forces in three or four years' time, continues to give air support to the Afghan Government as and when required. That is the second component.
The third component has to be that we recognise that, even at that stage, the Afghan Government will not have full control over large parts of the country, particularly in the south. Therefore I hope the international community will reach a treaty agreement with the Afghan Government that even thereafter, if there is evidence of al-Qaeda or other terrorist activity going on in any of the areas of Afghanistan that the Afghan Government
still do not control, we will have a treaty entitlement to send in special forces or military operations to eliminate that terrorist presence and thereby ensure the safety of the world and of our own international interests.
That is the practical way in which we can anticipate the gradual withdrawal of our combat forces on the ground, which will have major benefits in terms of reducing loss of life, but not surrender our obligations to the Afghan Government and our even more important obligations to the battle against international terrorism.
Let me make one final point. The Prime Minister has mentioned that he wants to offer London as the site for an international conference on Afghanistan early in the new year. That may be a very good idea, but I understand that the Foreign Office has not yet decided even who it would like to invite to that conference. I would suggest that included in the guest list need to be not just the members of ISAF, not just the Afghans and the Pakistanis, but the countries that are close to and border Afghanistan and have a crucial interest in its future-Russia, China, India, perhaps even Iran, Saudi Arabia, and some of the other Arab states.
I say that for two reasons, the first being that those countries have a strategic interest, just as we do, in preventing Islamic-inspired terrorism in the international community. In Russia, China, India and a number of other countries in the region, that is a strong preoccupation. The second reason is that it will be a way of reminding the wider public, including our own public opinion, of the point that I made when I started my remarks-that this is not just an American operation or a western operation, as Iraq undoubtedly was, but an international operation blessed by the Security Council of the United Nations. So the presence of Russia and China, not to provide troops, but to provide diplomatic and political support and in other practical ways, would demonstrate that the international community has a common will to ensure that terrorism cannot operate from within Afghanistan in the future. That will allow us not only to see a resolution of the problem, but to hold our heads high while we do so.
5.22 pm
Dr. Kim Howells (Pontypridd) (Lab): 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.
Andrew Mackinlay: The significance of what my right hon. Friend wrote and is saying derives not from the fact that he was a distinguished Foreign Office Minister-although he was-but that he is Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. That means either that he knows what he is talking about because he has seen the intelligence, or, if he has not seen it, that he should have done.
Dr. Howells: I am certainly not making this speech or writing anything on behalf of the Intelligence and Security Committee; I can tell my hon. Friend that for a kick-off.
There are significant differences between the aims of the Afghan Taliban and their brother organisation in Pakistan, and al-Qaeda. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are fighting to take control of their respective countries, while al-Qaeda's objectives remain much more global. Al-Qaeda wants to destroy America and its western allies, as well as the Governments of the middle eastern states that it considers to be too pro-western. It has little love for Shi'a Islam or any other variation of its Wahhabi and Deobandi Sunni orthodoxies.
The differences between the aims of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, however, do not mean that they can easily be prised apart. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) looks as if he has had enough of this, but I want him to listen. I believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are simply different faces of a common ideology-what one observer has defined as an
"obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam."
That has manifested itself in the form of murder and mutilation, from New York, through Madrid and London, to Mumbai and Bali. Osama bin Laden is but the best known of these obdurate non-compromisers; he and his
disciples have a record of moving on, and they will continue to do so. As I said, al-Qaeda's response to the superb professionalism of the British armed forces and those of our allies has been to seek to re-establish for itself sanctuaries in fragile, troubled territories such as northern Yemen and war-torn south-central Somalia, as well as Pakistan. I do not believe that we or any other NATO member intend to deploy large numbers of our soldiers to fight in Yemen and Somalia, despite the possibility that al-Qaeda will use those places, as it used Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, to train its bombers and assassins.
If we accept that al-Qaeda continues to pose a deadly threat to the United Kingdom and if we know that it is capable of changing the locations of its bases and modifying its attack plans, we must also accept that we have a duty to question the wisdom of prioritising, in Government spending on counter-terrorism, the deployment of our forces to Afghanistan. I am arguing once again that it is time to ask whether the fight against those intent on murdering British citizens might be served better by diverting into the work of the UK Border Agency and our police and intelligence services much of the additional finance and resources swallowed up by the costs of maintaining British forces in Afghanistan.
General Dutton, the deputy commander of ISAF, says that it would be impossible to deny al-Qaeda the advantage of having training camps in a future Taliban-controlled Afghanistan without there being substantial US, NATO and Afghan Government troops on the ground for many years to come. I was interested to hear what the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea said about this issue; I very much agree with him. General Dutton argues that it will be impossible to destroy training camps-the potential springboards for terrorist attacks-simply by patrolling from the skies. In other words, the use of airborne firepower will have to be supplemented by very large numbers of ground troops.
If previous conflicts are anything to go by, General Dutton is probably right. However, I am not convinced that life for al-Qaeda camp dwellers could not be made extremely dangerous and uncomfortable as a consequence of the attentions of unmanned Predator aircraft, attack helicopters, guided missiles and so on. The current wisdom is that NATO and ISAF should continue to build up troops, including British troops. General Dutton said recently that the ideal number of troops required to turn the tide in a country such as Afghanistan, with its 28 million people, is around half a million. Currently, many fewer than half that number of foreign and Afghan troops are available to him. General McChrystal has complained about that and wants more troops. Recent attacks in Kabul and other centres suggest that the current balance of territorial control is at best likely to remain, or more likely to shift, in favour of the Taliban.
I hope that a Government will emerge in Kabul who are capable of convincing the Afghan people that they have a society worth protecting from the misogynistic, mediaeval cruelty and backwardness of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but I sense that the vast majority of the British public share my pessimism and believe that it will be a very long time before that happens.
I also sense that the British public, for better or worse but increasingly, will become less tolerant of Governments placing at risk the lives of our armed forces by deploying them to such conflicts in support of outcomes that are complex and confusing. In other words, I believe that we have no choice but to seek different ways of ensuring this country's security, ways not only that the public find more acceptable but that will be more successful.
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