Afghanistan
Debate between Lord Beamish and Mark Pritchard(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Jones
This is where the nonsense comes in—where the political line that was taken and the party politics of that line cause confusion. The problem we had was that there was disagreement between the service chiefs at the time on different strategies. If politicians ask the military whether it is possible to do something, there is an in-built response of “Yes, we can,” but I am saying that there has to be a grown-up relationship. When Ministers ask for advice, they must sometimes be told by the military, “No, that cannot be done.” [Interruption.] The hon. Gentlemanhas asked me to give an example. At the tail end of the last Government, certain senior generals acted completely outside their remit by being political, which was not a helpful stance and did not ensure that they were above the party political debate. That was unfortunate.
I return to Helmand and the deployment south, about which the hon. Member for Broadland raised an important issue. Corporate knowledge in an organisation is important, and, like the hon. Gentleman, I fear that we are losing a lot of that. In addition, in our approach to deployment we must not look solely at the military kinetic effects. We should consider, for example, employing anthropologists to inform the debate about what will happen when we deploy somewhere, to ensure that when people are deployed, they have the fullest possible knowledge about the situation.
I have to disagree with what the hon. Member for Reigate said about Iran. I accept his point about the Iranians being against the Taliban, although I think that that was mainly to do with the Taliban murdering Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998. It was a maligned force in Basra and, in the latter days, in Herat in Afghanistan, where it was used in the proxy war against the United States and ourselves. Should we actually engage with them in negotiations? Yes, I think we could.
Finally, one major strategic failing in Afghanistan was the issue of Pakistan. All the emphasis was on rebuilding, and on occasion we treated Afghanistan in isolation, but the real problem was related to Pakistan. When the history books are written, they will say that the Musharraf Government, by speaking both ways, made our job much more difficult in Afghanistan.
Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)
Order. I encourage the shadow Minister to bring his remarks to a close so that the Minister can respond.