Afghanistan

Hugh Bayley Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Obviously, the whole process of sharing intelligence is a difficult vexed issue, and there are some difficult recent historical connotations. What I said in my statement is that there was a time when the lion’s share of plots that threatened people in UK came from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The number of such plots has come down significantly since then. Clearly, al-Qaeda has been absolutely hammered in Pakistan—it has lost a huge number of its senior leaders—and it has nothing like the presence in Afghanistan that it had when it was hosted by the Taliban in 2001. Our aim should be not just to exclude al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, but to ensure that the Afghans can go on ensuring that exclusion without the support of foreign troops. That is our real enduring aim.

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

I express my admiration for the service personnel, including the men and women of York’s 2 Signal Regiment, whom I met in Afghanistan when I went with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly three weeks ago. As our troops come home we will, thanks to the NATO training mission, leave behind very strong, and very well-trained and armed, Afghan national security forces. However, at the current rate of progress we will also leave behind fragmented politics. Given the history of military dictatorship and authoritarian states in the region, I believe that Afghanistan could go the same way. What are our Government doing to try to prevent that from being the medium-term outcome?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. The more mechanical task of training the Afghan army and police is now going very well. There were errors and mistakes in the early days, but I think that they have been ironed out. I was very struck by what General Petraeus and Lieutenant-General Rodriguez said about the quality of the Afghan army. Clearly, the long pole in the tent—as they like to call it—is how strong, sustainable and vigorous is the quality of Afghan governance and democracy. The moment there is a stand-off between the Executive on the one hand and the Parliament in the other, we must settle those issues.

As I said, I do not think that we will achieve perfection—Afghanistan is a country without a long-standing democratic history—but we must help to put in place basic democratic institutions and functioning government. The British effort is hugely geared towards that task.