First World War (Commemoration)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

I want to associate myself with the tributes that have been paid by Members in all parts of the House to the millions of people, of all nationalities, who lost their lives during the first world war. I must admit, however, that I have been somewhat uncomfortable with the way in which debates surrounding the commemorations of the “great war” have been framed in recent months.

At the end of October 2012, my hon. Friend the Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) and I tabled an early-day motion criticising the Government’s decision to spend £50 million on plans to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of the war, in an attempt, as the Prime Minister put it, to replicate the national “spirit” that marked the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations. We argued then that, in view of the fact that an estimated 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians had lost their lives and 20 million had been seriously wounded, any attempt to observe the centenary in a jubilant manner would be deeply insensitive. With that in mind, I have been greatly heartened by the themes that have featured in today’s debate.

This should not be, as some have argued, an opportunity to celebrate the “best of British” spirit. It should not be used as an excuse to redraft the national curriculum so that schoolchildren, in England at least, are taught a skewed, victorious version of history. The first world war should rather be remembered as the unnecessary massacre that it was. It was, after all, the first industrialised war of its kind, and marked the first occasion on which chemical gas, machine guns and tanks had been used on such a scale.

Men and boys rushed to enlist, thinking that it would “all be over by Christmas”. The military leaders who led them into battle were utterly unprepared for how long the conflict would last, and for the horrors that trench warfare would bring about. The fate that awaited them, as Wilfred Owen had it, was that they would “die as cattle”. The sheer numbers of the dead meant that the Army was forced to review the way in which dead soldiers were buried. Rather than there being mass burials and unmarked graves, each soldier’s name was recorded and then engraved on one of the war memorials that are to be found in villages and towns throughout Europe.

In another of Owen’s celebrated poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, the poet exposes “the old lie” that it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country. However, quite apart from the horrendous ways in which the young men died—which was, of course, what the poet was referring to in his closing couplet—this was not a war that sprung from noble causes. On the contrary, it was inspired by competing imperial foreign policies. Speaking at an event in Bosnia and Herzegovina earlier this month, the Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Maguire argued that

“The shot fired in Sarajevo a century ago set off, like a starting pistol, a race for power, two global wars, a Cold War, a century of immense, rapid explosion of death and destruction.”

The worst lie of all was the claim that this would be the war to end all wars. In hindsight, we see that the end of the conflict in 1918 only marked the prelude to mass unemployment, depression and, eventually, a second world war.

During a period of convalescence in July 1917, the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote a letter to his commanding officer renouncing the war effort. Copies of the letter were printed in newspapers under the title “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration”, and Sassoon’s words were quoted during a debate in this place by Hastings Lees-Smith, MP. In his letter, Sassoon lamented the fact that the war

“on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.”

He further added:

“I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”

He only escaped a court martial by being diagnosed with shell shock and declared unfit for service.

A year later, the Army officer Charles Carrington said:

“England was beastly in 1918…Envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, fear and cruelty born of fear seemed the dominant passions of the leaders of nations in those days.”

A recent editorial in The Irish Times summarises the political capital of the debate rather well. The piece, published on 18 June this year, points out that commemorations of the first world war have

“been a battle for the control of memory as much as it has been about remembering those who were killed.”

It also argues:

“Today, the fight to control history continues, since the war is seen though the prism of the growing debate about the need to define and assert ‘British values’ in a changing cultural landscape.”

That is perhaps what Jeremy Paxman had in mind when he commented recently:

“The events now are so built upon by writers and attitudinisers and propaganda that the actual events seem submerged.”

It is fitting, of course, that part of the commemorations will include the reopening of the Imperial War museum. The museum fulfils a highly important role in educating generations about the realities of war, and it should be commended on the work that it does, but we should not forget that when the museum first opened on 9 June 1920, its chairman, the right hon. Sir Alfred Mond MP, said:

“The museum was not conceived as a monument to military glory, but rather as a record of toil and sacrifice.”

Those in public life today would do well to keep that in mind.

During debates on the Imperial War Museum Act 1920, Lieutenant Commander Joseph Kenworthy MP said:

“We should forbid our children to have anything to do with the pomp and glamour and the bestiality of the late War, which has led to the death of millions of men. I refuse to vote a penny of public money to commemorate such suicidal madness of civilisation as that which was shown in the late War.”—[Official Report, 12 April 1920; Vol. 127, c. 1465.]

A distinction should be made, of course, between celebrating the pomp, glamour and bestiality of war, and commemorating those who died. I am a firm supporter of the campaign to erect a Welsh memorial in Flanders, which has already raised over £100,000 of its £150,000 target. I understand that the Welsh Government have also pledged money to the project.

The memorial, which will be made from stone donated by Craig yr Hesg quarry in Pontypridd, will be unveiled during a ceremony on 16 August this year. In May, my colleague and right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) hosted a reception in this place to raise awareness of the campaign in Parliament. I was glad to lend my support then and do so again now, because it is only right that a memorial of this kind should be in place. Tens of thousands of Welshmen died during the war, and every village in Wales was left in mourning. Over 4,000 Welshmen died in Mametz wood alone in July 1916, most from Monmouthshire and Breconshire. Indeed, it is bitterly ironic that some of those killed had survived the mining disaster in Senghennydd in 1913. Owen Sheers has written a poem about Mametz, which is now on the GCSE curriculum, and his play, “Mametz”, is being staged by National Theatre Wales this week in Usk.

It is pertinent, though, that the new memorial will be in Flanders, where the majority of Welshmen lost their lives—including our celebrated poet, Hedd Wyn. That was the pen name of Ellis Humphrey Evans, who was awarded the prestigious chair prize in the Eisteddfod of 1917 for his winning awdl, “Yr Arwr”, or “The Hero”. Evans was killed during the battle of Pilckem ridge on 31 July 1917. During the chairing ceremony the following September, when his poem was declared the winner, it was also announced that he had died in battle, and the chair was draped in a black cloak. Ever since, Evans has been referred to as “Bardd y Gadair Ddu”—the bard of the black chair. In a moving poem of that name, R. Williams Parry imagines that the arms of the chair itself are reaching

“mewn hedd hir am un ni ddaw”,

which translates as

“in everlasting peace, for one who will never come”.

I should note that the English meaning of “Hedd Wyn” is white, or blessed, peace.

I would, of course, wish to associate myself with the tributes made to those who died, and I believe that it is only right that their sacrifice should be commemorated, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Arfon and I argued in our early-day motion, it would surely be more appropriate to commemorate the end of the war in 2018, rather than its beginning.

In “Goodbye to All That” in 1929, Robert Graves said of the Armistice:

“The news sent me out walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan…cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.”

Even peace, for some, served only to emphasise the futility of the war and the senselessness of so many dead.

This year’s commemorations should provide an opportunity for sombre reflection, for pausing and for remembering those who died, but we should not forget the pity of war and the pointlessness of the conflict that began in 1914. As history has shown, it was far from being the war to end all wars.

I would like to end by quoting an englyn by William Ambrose:

“Celfyddyd o hyd mewn hedd—aed yn uwch

O dan nawdd tangnefedd;

Segurdod yw clod y cledd,

A’i rwd yw ei anrhydedd.”

The closing couplet translates as:

“Idleness is the glory of the sword

And rust is its distinction”.

Army Basing Plan

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Some additional money has been provided by the Chancellor in, I think, the last Budget, and a refurbishment programme is continuing with that finance. The £1 billion is in addition to the baseline programme of Defence Infrastructure Organisation maintenance and upgrading, which has a two-year pause partly ameliorated by the Chancellor’s additional contribution. Those two programmes will run in parallel.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the Secretary of State confirm that of the 165 Army units listed in the basing review, only one will be located in Wales? How much of the £1.8 billion MOD relocation fund will be spent in Wales?

[Mr Hammond]

I do not think that is right; I am conferring with my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces. I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman to confirm to him, as set out in the document, exactly what the lay-down will be in Wales after the completion of this move.

Combat Troop Withdrawal (Afghanistan)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Wednesday 7th November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jones]

Perhaps it does not, but that is the fact of the matter. The hon. Lady mentioned the fact that there are occasions when missions are aborted if harm is going to be brought elsewhere, but there are strict protocols about the way in which the UK Government target sites in Afghanistan, as in Iraq.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Aberporth is one of the areas where the drones are being tested. The northern part of my constituency, between Aberporth and Epynt, is on the flight path for such tests. The psychological impact on the people of Pakistan where the drones are being used is huge. The drones are buzzing around all the time, and people do not know when weapons are going to be fired. Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that the problem is not just the hits from the drones, but the impact on the population of the drones flying around all the time? It affects my constituents and they are not being bombed.

[Mr Jones]

I find that difficult to believe. The fact of the matter is that they are put in some places as a deterrent, without firing at anything, because the sight of them apparently discourages insurgents. Harrier jets and Apache helicopters have been used in Afghanistan without firing their weapons; just their presence seems to stop action. It is wrong to suggest that there is no law governing the use of these drones or that somehow there is some trigger-happy pilot sitting in a base in Nevada. In certain cases—I know this for a fact—high-profile attacks require ministerial approval as well. The hon. Lady needs to have confidence that there is a process in place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robathan]

I am coming to that.

[Jonathan Edwards]

Just out of interest, how long do the Government and the MOD expect the Karzai regime to stay in place once western troops are removed?

[Mr Robathan]

I am afraid that is something on which neither I nor any other Minister will speculate. Of course, as we understand it President Karzai will be standing down next year before the presidential elections.

In the first six months of this year, the ANSF led 80% of conventional operations in Afghanistan. ANSF troops are deploying in formed units, carrying out their own operations and planning complex security arrangements. They are also carrying out 85% of their own training, and in the areas covered by all three tranches of transition there has been a year-to-date decrease of enemy-initiated attacks.

As transition progresses, the campaign shifts from an ISAF-led counter-insurgency mission to an Afghan one. For ISAF, this means that the mission is gradually evolving from one primarily focused on combat to one based on the concepts of training, advising and assisting. The security force assistance model is the mechanism that oversees this process. It has been implemented this year and will be fully operational by mid-2013, when we expect the final Afghan districts to enter the transition process. That will mark a point of huge significance, when the Afghans will be in the security lead across the country.

Nuclear-powered Submarines

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

My hon. Friend is well aware of the plans for Devonport dockyard, and nothing that I have said today changes the previously announced policy of relocating our submarine capability to the naval base at the Clyde.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Has the Secretary of State given any thought to where Trident will be located following Scottish independence in 2014? May I assure him that there will not be a welcome in the hillside if he is thinking about a Welsh port?

[Mr Hammond]

The Government do not expect that the people of Scotland will opt for independence in a referendum in 2014. We are quite confident that, on mature consideration, they will see the advantages of remaining within a United Kingdom and enjoying the benefit of the security afforded by the United Kingdom’s nuclear umbrella.

Afghanistan (Troop Levels)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The strategic threats are acknowledged in, and form a core part of, ISAF’s thinking. I do not know whether my hon. Friend had a particular aspect in mind, but it is clear to us that building a sustainable and reliable relationship with Pakistan and ensuring the security of the border with Pakistan will be fundamental to the future of Afghanistan.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

The UN assistance mission in Afghanistan recently confirmed that there were 3,000 civilian deaths in 2010, that 25% of Afghan children die before they are five and that 70% of people live in poverty. Is not that the real legacy of a decade of war?

[Mr Hammond]

No, it absolutely is not. The number of civilian casualties is of course a matter of extreme regret, but more than 76% of civilian casualties are caused by Taliban activity, not by ISAF or ANSF activity. Health care, literacy and poverty have all taken great strides forward since 2006. The Taliban banned girls from schools. There were no girls in school—

Defence Spending (Wales)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[John Glen]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. No doubt the Minister will want to deal with the point about the logic of the Government when they made the decision.

What is confusing to me, as someone who has taken an interest in defence matters, is the extent of the investment at St Athan. Let us say that three services are coming together and, for example, work is being done on ship engines. How reasonable and cost-effective will it be to get engines from Portsmouth to St Athan? Is that the right option? To what extent will all that work be cost-effective? Presumably it would be helpful to have a driving range for tanks if people wanted to test the tanks on whose engineering they had been working.

How does the Minister reconcile the fact that, as the hon. Member for Swansea East (Mrs James) said, Wales receives the second lowest “investment” from the MOD with the arguably bigger imperative to achieve value for money for the MOD as a whole and for UK defence as a whole? Looking to the future, I am clear that defence training needs to be harmonised. That issue needs to be considered on two levels. Where would be the best place to site such a college from a UK defence perspective? In addition, such a decision should not be wholly based on relative under-investment in one region of the country or another.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Glen]

No, I shall make a little more progress and come back to the hon. Gentleman in a minute.

If the best place is St Athan, there is a need to bring certainty to the decision and clarity on the time scale and scope of the project. However, I do not believe that money should be spent in Wales just because it needs the investment. That is just one part of the decision. It is critical to ensure that any consolidated training college addresses the broadest possible needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Diolch, Mr Gray; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Swansea East (Mrs James) on achieving this very important debate about defence spending in Wales. The reality is that the trajectory of Government policy in recent years has seen a reduction in defence spending in Wales, and it is very important that we have a discussion about that. Hon. Members are here largely to express their concerns about the ending of the Metrix proposal for the defence training college at St Athan, about which the hon. Member for Swansea East spoke eloquently. It was cancelled in October by the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government in Westminster.

As with other areas of defence, such as the £10.5 billion contract with AirTanker Ltd, the Public Accounts Committee has pointed to the flaws in defence procurement and the difficulties in keeping a lid on projects paid for under private finance initiatives. Indeed, the estimated budget for St Athan, even before work really commenced, had increased substantially, from an original estimate of £12 billion to £14 billion, and that at a time when the recession hit and the necessary capital from land sales was not becoming available as expected.

We shall see in the spring whether St Athan will be successful again, depending on the new criterion being announced for defence training by the UK Government, which will of course have changed in the light of the strategic defence and security review and the downsizing of the number of UK troops who will require those training facilities. However, we can be sure of one thing: the scheme will not go ahead as previously envisaged.

While I am on the subject of St Athan, I need hardly remind everybody that the number of staff working at the site is falling, with 339 job losses having been announced this time last year. Further to that, a response to a parliamentary question a fortnight ago from the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns), whom I notice is not here today, concluded that no further work would be done using the super-hangar to maintain and repair RAF aircraft at the base after 2010. Make of that what you will.

However, the topic of today’s debate is defence spending in Wales, and it is good that we can have a debate about that, because those figures have been made available to us. Thanks to the “UK Defence Statistics” annual publication for 2010, published on the Defence Analytical Services Agency website, we can see that the number of jobs as a result of defence spending in Wales under the last Government fell from 8,990 in 1997 to 4,900 today—a drop of 42%. In terms of service personnel, that is a drop of 13% from 3,300 in 1997 to 2,930 this year. In England, the figure has risen by 3%. For civilian personnel, it is a far more substantial drop of 62%, from 5,100 in 1997 to 1,970 today. In England, the figure has fallen by only 30%, which is less than half the fall that happened in Wales. The south-east of England has the largest number of service personnel, with almost 45,000, or, in other terms, 15 times the number of service personnel based in Wales. In percentage terms, those figures might be more striking. Although Wales has 5% of the UK population, only 1.7% of service personnel are stationed there and only 2.8% of civilian Ministry of Defence jobs are in Wales. Meanwhile, of course, almost 20,000 service personnel remain in Germany—seven times as many as in Wales—and there are almost as many service personnel stationed in Cyprus as in our country.

Unfortunately, this year’s figures do not include those for the estimated UK regional direct employment that is dependent on MOD expenditure, which were included in previous editions, such as, “UK Defence Statistics 2009”. In the past, those figures were provided through the MOD by DASA according to country, so that we could see what was taking place—a concentration of defence spending in England, away from Wales, Scotland and the other Celtic nations. The figures in last year’s statistics show that 92% of MOD employment is in England, which has 84% of the UK population, and that 1% of the employment is in Wales. There has been growing centralisation, with that figure rising from 89% of employment in England in 2003-04.

The figures are true for both equipment expenditure and non-equipment expenditure. However, our ability to be aware of those figures and scrutinise them is under threat. Instead of the Government’s being accountable for changes in policy, manpower and spending in different parts of the UK, they will simply no longer publish the statistics relating to them, and, indeed, they have already stopped doing so. That was the subject of a Westminster Hall debate in July secured by my friend, the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), after the Minister for the Armed Forces initially said on the Floor of the House that such country and region statistics would continue, only for a later note to confirm that he had misspoken and the series of statistics would, in fact, be discontinued. This is a matter of freedom of information, as much as anything else. In the United States, such statistics are available to state level, and in Canada, a Commonwealth country with a similar military and parliamentary system to our own, the Department of National Defence produces similar statistics, down to provincial and even constituency level. The simple fact is that we must have open books.

The coalition agreement says

“technological innovation has—with astonishing speed—developed the opportunity to spread information and decentralise power in a way we have never seen before. So we will extend transparency to every area of public life.

The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account.”

There are two specific commitments in the deal, first:

“We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.”

and, secondly,

“We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.”

It seems almost self-evident that that transparency and openness necessitates continuing the series of national and regional data in the defence industry, so that we can easily see and scrutinise the amount of spending in the defence sector, inside and outside the UK. If we cannot see the effect on our countries of UK defence spending, how can we, as Members of Parliament, be effective judges of it? I hope the Minister will confirm that the UK Government intend to maintain the series of statistics in accordance with the spirit of their coalition deal. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes]

When the Foreign Affairs Committee visited Pakistan last year, we were in Islamabad when the Pakistani Taliban got to within 80 miles of Islamabad. At that point, the Pakistani Government got out of denial and started a very difficult process of taking on the insurgents from the FATA, or federally administered tribal areas, and other areas. They pushed up the Pakistani Taliban towards the Afghan border. There is an area on that border, on both sides, where the insurgents can regroup, hide and get training. If the Pakistani state is faced with a failure by us or the Afghan forces to press on the other side, there will be an easy way for the insurgents to work on both sides of that border without having sustained pressure from both sides. That is a fundamental dilemma for the Pakistani Government and I do not think that we appreciate quite how many Pakistanis have died in recent years and the great sacrifice that Pakistani people have made because of terrorism, because of outrages within their society such as those in Islamabad, Karachi and other parts of Pakistan, and because of the potential threat to the state imposed by Islamist radicalism and extremism.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Mike Gapes]

No, I cannot take any more interventions; I have to conclude my remarks.

I am conscious that we are dealing with a very difficult issue. There is a global struggle within Islam between a whole spectrum of points of view. There is conflict between Sunnis and Shias and there is conflict within Sunni Islam. That conflict is being fought out within Pakistan and Afghanistan at the moment. It is sometimes attractive for people to think that we can somehow step back, be neutral and avoid being involved in all this because it is nothing to do with us. Some people have a tendency to think that, but more than 1 million British citizens have family connections with that region—with Pakistan. Islam is part of our European culture and our modern world. Given the globalisation of economics and politics, we cannot be neutral in this struggle. We all have to try to assist the moderates and internationalists in this process, and to combat jihadism wherever it is. That does not mean that we must always fight it militarily: we must also fight it intelligently and politically.

It might well be that because of the deadlines set by our Government and the US Administration, because of the lack of wider international support and because of the growing public fear that we have been in this for so long that we have to get out quickly, we will have to accept a very difficult and messy compromise in Afghanistan that will involve some kind of return of Taliban influence or Taliban groups in at least part of the country. However, let us not forget that the wider struggle will still require us to be involved in supporting the democrats, the internationalists and the anti-jihadists in Pakistani society as well as those in Afghanistan. For that reason, I support the motion.

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[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

Like other right hon. and hon. Members, I have taken great offence over the past week at comments by Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Manning of US Marine battalion command in Afghanistan. He claimed the British did not pursue the Taliban and said, “We’ll go after them,” implying that our troops had stayed safely hidden in their bases. Not content with traducing the bravery and commitment of our British soldiers, Colonel Manning went on to criticise British reconstruction efforts by the Department for International Development. That is dangerous talk at a time when the British public are wearied by the mounting death toll, mounting financial costs and the perceived lack of progress in the war. I therefore welcome today’s debate, because it is time to put the record straight. It is time to take stock of why we are still in Afghanistan nine years later, and to look at what has gone wrong, how we move forward and what we need to get right before we can leave.

We need to remember that in the beginning it was US finances that helped Pakistan to create the Taliban, along with other Islamic fundamentalist groups, which were developed as a tool to fight against India in Kashmir and the Russians in Afghanistan. It was the Taliban who welcomed and supported al-Qaeda. When war was declared in Afghanistan, the US continued to fund the Pakistan military, which in turn continued to fund the Taliban, providing a safe haven for both them and al-Qaeda. America has been fighting a war against al-Qaeda. Destroying al-Qaeda has been its priority, not freeing and reconstructing Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military has been fighting an ongoing war against India, using its fundamentalist forces to maintain instability in Kashmir and using the Taliban to ensure a pliable neighbour, not a democratically independent Afghanistan.

The Bush regime made the Defence Department, not the State Department, responsible for the major decisions made in Afghanistan, including in reconstruction. The failure, right from the start, to put in the great amounts of money, effort and commitment needed to reconstruct a strong central state in Afghanistan was a major factor in allowing the Taliban to regroup. Too many decisions were based on hunting for al-Qaeda, rather than on reconstructing and improving ordinary people’s lives, and rebuilding the state. That, followed by the change of military and financial focus to Iraq, allowed the Taliban to regroup, occupy the south and build the heroin trade, ready for the new offensive.

When British troops moved into southern Afghanistan, they encountered problems because there had been virtually no US intelligence or satellite monitoring in the south. The Taliban had been allowed to grow, to develop their drugs trade, and to use that trade to fund their insurgency. We are still there because Afghanistan has been a proxy setting for other wars. Money poured into the hands of war lords and their militias, not into building a viable state, into focusing on reconstruction, or into building a police and justice system and an independent army. British troops have also been fighting against the loss of moral authority of western forces following the US promotion of torture, rendition, disappearance and secret jails, all of which have aided the growth of Islamic extremism.

We sent troops into Afghanistan to fight terrorism and a vicious fundamentalist regime, and we have ended up fighting terrorism funded by drugs. This brings me to a grave concern about the future direction of the war. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, has said that we must apply our learning in Colombia to places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is not the path to take. I spent a week in Colombia taking evidence from people whose family members had been assassinated by the state. I saw how the military in Colombia had been used to “disappear” people in an attempt to create an impression that the drugs lords were being tackled. We do not want to go down that route in Afghanistan. We do not want to find mass graves that have been created by the Afghan army in the fight against drugs. To avoid going down that route, we must not hand power over to paramilitaries or to local defence forces in our desire to leave Afghanistan. It is the Afghan national army and the Afghan national police force that must take on those roles.

Reconstruction and redevelopment must be better organised and targeted. Aid must be controlled by the Department for International Development, by civilian groups and by non-governmental organisations. The military must be there to provide the security, but it is the civil society that must build the civil structure of the future Afghanistan.

[Jonathan Edwards]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Moon]

No, I do not have enough time.

Cornel West has said that

“peace is the presence of justice”.

The absence of justice has become one of the primary recruiting tools for the Taliban. That is why I believe that building an effective police and justice system is essential for the future Afghanistan. An article in September’s Prospect magazine states:

“The repression of women and the assault on certain freedoms was a small price to pay”

if the rise of the Taliban stopped the wholesale rape and slaughter in Afghanistan. I do not see a world in which women have their noses cut off for running away from violent and abusive husbands, in which they are denied education and the right to medical help, and in which they are stoned to death for alleged infidelity as a “small price to pay”.

We need to be in Afghanistan to build and create a better society, and we must be aware that to fail would be to risk instability throughout the region. Our troops will be fighting wars for many years to come if we do not stay and fight until the end.

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[Rory Stewart]

I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for his intervention, because it leads beautifully on to the second part of my speech. What can we do about the problem? Neither he, I, nor anyone in the Chamber doubts that there is a problem, but what can we do?

The answer has been gone over again and again, and General McChrystal has an answer in his report. What have we done? Broadly speaking, over the past nine years we have had successes in health, education, counter-terrorism, rural development and urban regeneration. We have had a series of other things, which we like to describe as challenges—in counter-narcotics, as the hon. Gentleman said, in counter-insurgency when fighting the Taliban, in the rule of law, in governance, in anti-corruption and in state building. And we have come to the conclusion that we have a talisman, a way of dealing with Afghanistan and a new solution, which is in that report and is called counter-insurgency warfare strategy.

We must wish the surge all our best. We have embarked on it and are committed to it, and that is where we are going. So let us hope that it works—however, there is a very real reason to believe that it may not, within the time frame that General McChrystal anticipated or predicted. In other words, when at the end of this year General Petraeus reviews the strategy, and when in the middle of next year President Obama begins the draw-down of troops, it is unlikely that we will have achieved McChrystal’s two main conditions: sufficient pain inflicted on the Taliban for them to wish to go to the negotiating table; and, on the other hand, the creation of a stable, effective and legitimate state.

It is not the place of this House to talk about why those things are not possible, and we do not have time to talk about why we did not succeed. The central element is nothing to do with the British or American troops; it is to do with the Afghan Government. General McChrystal has said from the beginning that the only way we will win in Afghanistan is with a stable, effective, legitimate Afghan state. Without that, we are not going to win, and such a state is not emerging. Does that mean we can do nothing in that country? No—we can do an enormous amount, but we cannot crush the Taliban and create a stable, effective, legitimate Afghan state.

[Jonathan Edwards]

Is not another way forward to create a new constitution for Afghanistan that decentralises power to the ethnic groups in different regions instead of centralising power in the hands of one President who is very corrupt?

[Rory Stewart]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Of course, Afghans must be allowed to do their own politics, and whether they have a decentralised or a centralised state or recognise ethnic boundaries is up to them. Our role is to accept the limits of our power and accept that there are things we cannot do. There are things we can do, but they have nothing to do with troop surges or counter-insurgency. We must find a moment—this is why the 2015 deadline is absolutely correct—at which we say about the current strategy, “Enough, no more. We’ve done enough.”

What then will we do after 2015? I suggest that with the end of UK combat operations in Afghanistan, we concentrate on three things: continuing limited counter-terrorism operations; continuing to support development projects, probably in the centre and the north of the country; and continuing to try to ensure a political solution, or, to put it another way, to decrease the likelihood of a civil war and increase the likelihood of a political solution by gaining leverage over the Taliban.

Is this as scary as we believe? Is this really the nightmare we have conjured? No. The Taliban are unlikely to be able to take over Afghanistan, because this is not the mid-1990s. This is not groundhog day—we are not repeating 1996. In 1996, when the Taliban came swarming into Kabul, mujaheddin were shelling each other in the centre of the city, the Afghan people were appalled by years of corrupt, abusive government, and the Taliban were untested—and there were no foreign troops on the ground.

Today we are in a completely different situation. The Taliban are discredited from the time when they were in government. There is much more coherence between the central and northern groups. There is very little likelihood of the Taliban being able to present a conventional threat. If they try to roll artillery or tanks up the main streets, as they did then, we can deal with that. That does not mean that they are not going to increase their presence in the south and east of the country—they almost certainly will. But even if they do, it is extremely unlikely that they will invite back al-Qaeda in the way that they did in 2001. From their point of view, that was their No. 1 mistake. If they had not invited in al-Qaeda, they would still be in power. Even if they do invite back al-Qaeda, it is something that we can manage. We have the willpower, the technology and the public support to deal with it in a way that we did not in the 1990s.