UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I start by declaring my interest as a member of the reserve forces. I commend the Government for their attempts to clarify the mission in Afghanistan. It is very important to articulate the geopolitical significance of this conflict if it is to command the support of the general public. I genuinely regret that the previous Administration signally failed to do that. Had they done so, the acceptance of what we are trying to achieve in Afghanistan now would be far more general. I support the motion, and I believe that the men and women of our armed forces will expect us to do so in this House today.

It is worth bearing in mind that the price of our involvement in Helmand and Kandahar is paid by the men and women of our armed forces. I am pleased to note that their welfare is mentioned in the three amendments tabled to the motion today. I want to talk a little about the duty that we owe them—a duty summed up at the start of Operation Enduring Freedom as the military covenant. The military covenant is a somewhat elegant turn of phrase written into British Army doctrine by a now retired senior officer who was no doubt sweating away in the Ministry of Defence in 2001—that is, the old Ministry of Defence, before the previous Administration turned it into a princely palace for mandarins at great public expense.

We must go back a bit to understand the provenance of the covenant. The first expression of the duty that the state owed to those who fought on its behalf is the Act for the Necessary Relief of Soldiers and Mariners. It was drawn up in 1601, following what were described as

“Her Majesty’s just and honourable defensive wars”,

just as today’s interest in the covenant has been encouraged by Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 1601 reference to “defensive wars” is important. Most of the conflicts in which this country has been engaged have been defensive, involving society at large and not just an expeditionary military. Although we can debate the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan—I supported the latter, incidentally, but opposed the former—the conflicts of the 21st century have been discretionary as opposed to the total war of the sort marked this week in the 70th anniversary of the blitz and the battle of Britain, which involved defensive warfare writ large.

What implication does participation in discretionary warfare have for our duty under the military covenant? The public are quite clear. Citizens have shown themselves perfectly capable of separating their strong support for the men and women of our armed forces, as has already been mentioned, from their ambivalence, at best, about the mission in Afghanistan. That support must be reflected formally by Government, in my opinion. I would argue that the Government owe a special duty to those who have served in discretionary warfare, because such conflicts cut to the quick of what it is to serve in the military. It is a commitment without limitation and, in the absence of an existential threat of the sort marked this week in the capital and by the RAF, it may be emulated but not matched by any other group in society.

I argued two years ago, at the time that we set up the military covenant commission under Frederick Forsyth, that there are three identifiable parties to the military covenant: the men and women of our armed forces, the Government and the people. However, there might be a fourth: the chain of command. Its attitudes are informed by, but distinct from, the political leadership. The command has been crucial in tackling ingrained attitudes towards, for example, mental health. It has driven TRiM—trauma risk management—pioneered in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Royal Marines, but at other times in our history, the contribution of the top brass, like that of the Government and the people, to the well-being of the rank and file has been less obvious.

It is also necessary to consider within any fourth pillar the attitudes of officials. One wonders about the mindset of a senior civil servant who is prepared to commit to paper his observation that injured soldiers with “a significant media profile” would “require careful handling” in the context of a perfectly proper attempt by the MOD to ensure that our armed forces are fit for purpose.

My right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary is quite right to insist that our need to optimise the fighting fitness of our units does not compromise our duty to those who have sacrificed much in the service of their country.

[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

I very much agree that we need to appreciate the contribution of our armed forces. In view of what the hon. Gentleman has said, does he now regret some of the comments that were made in the early years of the decade commencing in 2000 about the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in Birmingham? Members who are now sitting on the Government Benches made political capital out of the exceptionally good medical services provided to our armed forces. Will he pay tribute to the Birmingham hospital now?

[Dr Murrison]

I will certainly pay tribute to the men and women of our Defence Medical Services, that is for sure. One thing I would say about the previous Government is that they promised a great deal to the Defence Medical Services, but in Selly Oak they failed to deliver what was necessary in a timely fashion. I am pleased that now, belatedly, we have seen the opening of the new hospital in Birmingham—precisely what the DMS was led to expect to believe that it was getting from the outset.

On a perhaps more light-hearted note, I am bound to observe that our greatest naval hero managed to command the fleet decisively on 21 October 1805 without the benefit of an arm and a leg—I am doing the man a disservice, I mean an arm and an eye; I am supposed to be speaking at a Trafalgar night dinner next month, and I had better get that right. The man was chronically sick for most of his career. I point that out simply as a cautionary note and to say in all candour that it is perfectly possible to be disabled and yet to participate in active service.

Equally, well-meaning commanding officers who offer reassurances at the bedsides of casualties with appalling injuries that will always be with them need to be very careful about promising them that they will always have a place in the battalion—to use the usual turn of phrase—when it is clearly not necessarily in the interests of that person, who might otherwise be retrained, I hope with a quality package, for life in civilian street, which might ultimately be more fulfilling and rewarding. Our language is very important.

We owe it to the injured to ensure that through the evolving Army recovery capability and personnel recovery centres and through a revamped medical boarding procedure that we balance our paramount need for fighting forces that are fit with the obligation to do what is right by those who have paid a heavy price for their service.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

I am grateful for this debate in Back-Bench time, and I shall be brief. To follow on from the comments of the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), there is only one thing worse than setting a firm date for withdrawal, which is to set one and then pretend not to have done so, ending up with the worst of both worlds. That is where we are at the moment.

My first observation is personal and constituency-based. When I go back to my constituency, I see helicopters coming in from Birmingham International airport to land at Queen Elizabeth hospital, bringing back severely injured soldiers, so I take no lessons from anyone on what the public’s perception is. It is that we are engaged in a good fight, but that the Government could have done a better job of explaining why we are there. The troops certainly do not want to be seen as victims. They say, “We are a professional force and we want to have our job recognised.”

I wish to mention three matters that have been forgotten in today’s debate. The first is our role in the world. The United Kingdom is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a nuclear force, and we have a record of intervention. Intervention has had a bit of a bad name recently, but I have not heard anybody saying that we should not have gone into Kosovo, which we did without a UN mandate and succeeded, and nobody has challenged what happened in Sierra Leone. We do intervene, and that is why we have an Army—we have a role to play in the world. We can debate what that role should be, but we should not lose sight of the fact that we have an international responsibility, with which come certain commitments.

Secondly, people keep talking as though this were our war with Afghanistan. I remind everybody that we are there at the invitation of the Afghan Government. We are there not to conquer Afghanistan but as part of an international effort represented by ISAF. It is an out-of-territory NATO operation. If we cannot collectively make it work, it will affect not just Britain and Afghanistan but the future of NATO and how we see our collective responsibility. That seems to have been completely forgotten.

Thirdly, we must consider what is success. I have heard a number of definitions, and I wish to draw attention to a report recently published by the Henry Jackson Society, “Succeeding in Afghanistan”. I declare an interest: I am a trustee of the society. The report reminds us that there is good news out there, but also asks how good things can get in Afghanistan.

People have drawn analogies between Afghanistan and Germany in 1945, but that is completely off the wall. When we were dealing with the enemy in Germany in 1945, it was a functioning nation state that had completely lost its way for a brief period in its history, so it was a question of restoring structures. In Afghanistan, the structures were never there in the first place, so the governance structures and election process will not be as we would have them here in the west. If we can start to deal with corruption and intimidation and set up functioning civil structures, that will be success.

[Rory Stewart]

But how exactly can we deal with corruption and civil structures? We have been trying for eight and a half years and made no progress. We all agree that it is important, but we have proved that we lack the capacity to do it. There is no point in saying that it would be a good thing to do unless we have a plan.

[Ms Stuart]

It is an extremely valid observation to say that we had some plans that did not work. However, when the aid organisations went in and we started reconstruction in Helmand, when Hugh Powell was our special representative, we started to pull together security, structures and military rebuilding. It will not be perfect, and in the end Afghans themselves will have to deal with the situation, but having gone to Afghanistan, and being a member of the permanent five, we have a responsibility to ourselves and a collective responsibility to NATO and ISAF.

We need to start talking about the successes and start learning from them, and stop talking the situation down. In the debate this evening, we have heard a lot about all that has gone wrong, but nobody has focused on what has gone right. I can see hon. Members raising their eyebrows at that, but on balance, we have heard more about the former than the latter. I keep coming back to the fact that the operation is not a UK operation but a collective, NATO, ISAF operation, and a lot of other countries could step up to the plate a little more than they do before we beat ourselves up. Collectively, we must get to a position in which we have structures that can be held accountable in Afghanistan. If anyone thinks that having a date by which we withdraw is the way forward, they are deeply misguided. There is an aspiration to withdraw honourably, leaving a good structure in Afghanistan, but the minute we set the date, we might as well leave immediately.