Afghanistan

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

I have listed some of the geographical areas where the Afghan forces are taking on an increased role. The Afghan forces are building up in size. The army, for instance, was 134,000 strong this year—it is slightly larger now—and is meant to become 171,000 strong next year. The challenge now is to increase their specialist capabilities, particularly their intelligence capabilities, engineering, logistics and military police functions. Of course, those sorts of things are more difficult to build up, because they require a great deal more training and expertise than the training of what one might consider to be the pure infantry. That is an important part of the strategy going forward.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank the Foreign Secretary for his statement and for his commitment to report regularly to the House, which is extremely welcome. I was, however, very disappointed in his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick). President Gorbachev and his country suffered more than anyone else, apart from the Afghan people, because of the military activities of the red army in Afghanistan. He has called for a political solution and a withdrawal, and countered strongly against any Russian involvement. Is it not time that we faced up to the reality that after nine years in Afghanistan, with a lot of lives and billions of pounds lost, no solution, either immediately or in the long term, is in sight? Is it not time to pursue the political road, rather than the military road, rapidly?

[Mr Hague]

The important point to make is that the political and military roads, as the hon. Gentleman calls them, go necessarily together; there would not be much of a political road without the military pressure. He has called for a political solution and he can gather from everything I am saying that we want a political settlement in Afghanistan; we want a political process that leads to that. But we will get that only from an effective military campaign, from intensifying the pressure on the insurgency and from doing all the work that we are doing to build up the capacity of the Afghan Government. If we and our allies were to withdraw now, all that work would come to an end and there would be another round of great bloodshed, including among the civilian population, and not a political solution. I ask him to see those things as going necessarily together.