Afghanistan
Julian Lewis Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend remember that when General Sir David Richards took over as Chief of the General Staff only last year he predicted that the current strategy would take 30 or 40 years to work? Given that prediction, with which I broadly concur, what will we do if we still find ourselves in what my right hon. Friend describes as an “extremely challenging” situation in three or four years’ time? Will we still be committed to withdrawing militarily and operationally before the next general election?
Mr Hague
To be fair to General Richards, I think he was talking about the efforts that will be required to sustain reconstruction, economic progress and regional stability in Afghanistan. I do not think he was talking about a large British military presence or involvement in combat operations for 30 or 40 years. Again, I know that there are legitimate alternative points of view, but we consider it to be right and best to make clear our position that we will draw down from combat operations by 2015. That means that the Afghan Government know that, and it goes alongside our determination to build up rapidly the capabilities of the Afghan national security forces. It also leaves our allies in no doubt about our position. It should be remembered that if we are still there by 2015, we will have been involved in Helmand for much longer than the second world war lasted. British troops will have made an immense contribution therefore, and, in line with the goals for the Afghan forces by 2014, we should be able to speak confidently about 2015.
Kabul Conference
Julian Lewis Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Hague
I agree with much of the thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s question, but I am sure that he will agree that the military pressure on the Taliban—the work that our armed forces do in fighting the Taliban and making areas secure—is an important part of putting them under the necessary pressure so that they will want to enter into a political agreement. That is an indispensable part of looking for a political settlement in Afghanistan. I also differ from the hon. Gentleman when he says “however unpalatable”. Yes, we want a political settlement in Afghanistan, but we want one under which al-Qaeda cannot return, and under which a constitution is respected and a legitimate Government can be in office and take the necessary decisions. So I think it would be going too far to say that we want an agreement, however unpalatable it might be.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend, and indeed with the Deputy Prime Minister, that counter-insurgency campaigns always end in a political settlement. Will he accept, however, that those political settlements can vary from even-handed ones to ones that are little different from a negotiated surrender by one side? By setting a definite date for combat disengagement, he is helpfully putting pressure on the Afghan Government, but no pressure at all on the Taliban. For that reason, will he bear in mind an alternative—namely, the creation of a sovereign base bridgehead area, which would ensure that pressure could be put on both sides so that a compromise might actually be reached?
Mr Hague
I am not going to redefine our objectives. My hon. Friend will understand what the Prime Minister and I, and other Ministers, have said about 2015. Yes, it is true that our announcement puts pressure on the Government of Afghanistan to live up to the commitments that they have made, and it puts pressure on all those involved to ensure that the Afghan national security forces are expanded and trained according to the schedule that has been set out. It also recognises that, by then, we will have been in Helmand for nine years. It is important in any such operation that we achieve our objectives in that time scale. I understand the point that my hon. Friend is making, but I do not want to define our objectives for 2015 any more tightly.
Oral Answers to Questions
Julian Lewis Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Hague
That pressure comes from the whole European Union. We discussed the position in Cuba at the Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 14 June, so the message that we seek the release of political prisoners in Cuba if we are to start improving relations with Cuba in other ways goes out unequivocally from the whole European Union.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
T2. Does the Foreign Secretary accept that it is not satisfactory for estimates of how long it will take us to secure our strategic interests in Afghanistan to vary from 40 years in 2009 to four years in 2010? Does he accept that if this circle is to be squared, we will need to have fresh thinking about an alternative strategy that could actually secure our important strategic interests in the area?
Mr Hague
It is very important that we ensure that the current strategy succeeds. As my hon. Friend knows, this strategy involves 46 nations in Afghanistan and the United Kingdom is strongly committed to it. It goes alongside building up the capacity of the Afghan state, and I shall be going to the Kabul conference in a couple of weeks’ time to make our contribution to that. As he will know, the Prime Minister is very clear that there will not be British troops in a combat role or in significant numbers in Afghanistan in five years’ time, but we believe that that is part of an internationally agreed objective. The G8 meeting in Canada in June sent a collective signal that we want Afghan security forces to assume increasing responsibility for security within five years.
UK Policy on the Middle East
Julian Lewis Excerpts(14 years, 6 months ago)
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Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)
May I begin by saying that it is nice to see you in your new place, Mr Deputy Speaker?
The Minister and his Labour shadow made wide-ranging speeches about the nature of the various problems in the middle east. I want to confine my remarks to the situation in Palestine, and particularly in Gaza, as did the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman). That is not just because of the events that we all witnessed on our TV screens a couple of weekends ago, and which were discussed by colleagues at a Liberal International meeting in Berlin this weekend. My speech has also been informed by my visit to Gaza in March as part of a cross-party delegation led by my noble Friend, Lord David Steel. The hon. Members for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) and for Westminster North (Ms Buck) were also part of the delegation. For me, that visit to Gaza was one of those life-transforming experiences that crystallised the issues in my head and made me see them more clearly than I had done before.
In Gaza, 1.5 million people are being held under siege conditions. First, they are blockaded on land. We saw the wall and, more pertinently, we had to be careful not to get too close to it because of the snipers who patrol it. The people are also blockaded by air, as well as by sea, the tragic result of which we saw a couple of weekends ago. To set this in the context of my own constituency, that is the equivalent of the whole of greater Bristol, Bath and all of Wiltshire being blockaded off from the rest of the United Kingdom and denied access to the most basic goods. This is a humanitarian violation on a quite staggering scale.
There are limited crossing points along the well-policed border. The Rafah crossing from Egypt, which we had to use, is only for foot passengers. No goods are allowed to pass through it. All the crossing points through which goods may be transmitted are controlled by the Israeli army. As we saw, only a limited variety of items are allowed to be transferred across, and the list, which seems quite arbitrary, changes from week to week. When we were there in early March, only 70 items were allowed across the border. If we go into our local corner shop—never mind the supermarket—we can see the thousands of products, including hundreds of different kinds of biscuits and confectionery alone, that are available to us. Imagine being limited to only 70 items in total out of the full range of goods and services that we, as 21st-century citizens, expect to have access to. However, only 70 items were allowed into Gaza in that particular week. This is not just the denial of humanitarian aid; it is the denial, and complete obstruction and destruction, of a fully functioning market economy.
Desperately needed reconstruction materials are not allowed to be transferred across the border either, and in Gaza we saw, of course, the bombed-out schools, the bombed university and hospital, and the housing shortages. It is absurd and outrageous that cement and other construction materials are not allowed across the border.
All of that leads to those 1.5 million people effectively being utterly dependent on a shadow, black-market economy supplied with goods through tunnels dug through the sand from Egypt and controlled by local criminals and Hamas. People with sufficient money and wherewithal can access those goods, whereas the rest are dependent on local patronage or the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
What we saw in Gaza is effectively a parallel society. Ironically, people who can prove their status as a descendant of a 1948 refugee are in a slightly better position than those who have lived in the Gaza strip for generations, because they might get access to UNRWA food parcels. We saw that at a food distribution centre, where families came from all over the Gaza strip and took away their very limited supplies of cooking oil and other cooking materials by donkey cart. It was a mediaeval scene, and what is happening in Gaza is mediaeval, too: mediaeval siege tactics are being used that would have been appropriate at the time of Richard the Lionheart or Saladin but are completely outrageous and unacceptable in the second decade of the 21st century.
My remarks so far have provided an outline of the problem as I saw it for myself just a few months ago, but what can we do about it? The UK Government should use our membership of the European Union to be more active in putting pressure on the state of Israel, and also on Egypt. The objective should be to lift the siege, and not only for humanitarian aid; indeed, I am a little worried about the frequent references to humanitarian aid. The full range of goods and services that we take for granted in our society should be allowed in. That is needed in Gaza to allow people to rebuild a fully functioning market economy.
The EU is in a good position to apply leverage on the state of Israel through our trade agreements with it. The EU can also potentially play an important role in enabling access to goods and services for Gaza. While travelling into Westminster on the train today, I was intrigued by an article in The Times by the EU’s foreign affairs High Representative, Cathy Ashton, whom I believe is at this very moment chairing a meeting of all EU Foreign Ministers. The article said that the EU could perhaps be the agency that facilitates and polices the transfer of goods and services into the Gaza strip, and that instead of Israel banning all goods and services, we should have a list that prohibits only those few of them that would be prejudicial to Israel’s security, and that the presumption should be that all other goods should be allowed in.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and may I also say what a pleasure it is to see an alumnus of Dynevor grammar school, Swansea, occupying the Speaker’s Chair today?
Why does the hon. Gentleman think that Israel is imposing such an extreme blockade if the solution is, in fact, as simple as he sets out?
Stephen Williams
I am certainly not going to deny that part of what is taking place is self-inflicted. Obviously, the rocket attacks on villages in the south of Israel are outrageous, and we made it clear in the meetings we had with various political representatives in Gaza that there had been wrong on both sides, but the state of Israel has an army at its disposal, whereas the inhabitants of Gaza are 1.5 million people who are at the mercy of a superpower on their doorstep, and those superpowers, whether Israel or Egypt—or the states that, perhaps, control and influence their foreign policy from much further afield—are, effectively, playing with the destinies of men, women and children, as the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton mentioned. That is not the way to build peace and understanding for the future, and I think we have a right to expect rather more from the democratic state of Israel than it has shown so far. That leads me to my final point.
Foreign Affairs and Defence
Julian Lewis Excerpts(14 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who has shown great consistency over the years, both in participating in these debates and in successfully fulfilling his responsibilities as Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. I am sure that he will be leaving that post with a pang.
I must say that it was slightly unexpected to find myself speaking on defence from the Back Benches, after so many years speaking from the Front Bench on the subject. Nevertheless, all conflicts have casualties, and some of us must accept the fact that those in my position are what the military historians would describe as “collateral damage”. Collateral damage should always be minimised, but sometimes it cannot be avoided entirely.
When I used to sit on the Opposition Front Bench, people used to ask me how I managed to retain my air of imperturbability and cheerfulness, after so many years as a shadow Armed Forces Minister. I shall now share with the House a slight confession. The confession is that I discovered something that Opposition Members are only just about to discover, which is that if they sit on the Opposition Front Bench just by the Dispatch Box and look to their left, every time the door into the Chamber opens they will see pointing at them, perfectly framed in an aperture, the great statue of Margaret Thatcher. I found that desperately inspiring. Whether they will have the same reaction, as they sit thinking about what they are going to do against this great new coalition Government, may be open to doubt.
I wish to say a few words about nuclear weapons, but not many; I wish to say rather more words about Afghanistan. The few words that I wish to say about nuclear weapons relate to something that the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) mentioned, when he raised the possibility of perhaps having a nuclear deterrent based on cruise missiles carried on Astute class submarines. I have to tell him—or I would tell him, were he still in his place—that that really is a non-runner. Cruise missiles have a single warhead and a limited range. Cruise missiles have not even been designed yet with a warhead that could be fired from Astute class submarines.
What would happen if we had cruise missiles on Astute class submarines as our nuclear deterrent? First, the submarine would have to become a much closer inshore weapon, because cruise missiles do not have the range, so the submarine would be more vulnerable. Secondly, we would have to have many more cruise missiles, because there is only a single warhead on a cruise missile. That would be much more expensive, not only because we would need more cruise missiles, but because we would need more submarines, in order to deploy enough cruise missile warheads. Thirdly, there is a slight problem when a cruise missile is fired, in that whoever it is being fired at cannot tell whether it has a nuclear warhead or a conventional warhead. So, to put an end to this facile nonsense, let me just say—
Dr Lewis
I am on the Back Benches; I am not bound by this stuff. Cruise missiles are more expensive and less effective, put the submarines at risk and could start world war three by accident—but apart from that, it is a really great idea.
I am about to break a rule that I have never broken before and which I hope never to have to break again. I am going to quote from one of my own speeches—not much; just a little bit—but there is a special reason why I have to do so. I am going to quote from the last speech that I made as a shadow Defence Minister from the Front Bench, in the debate on defence policy on 15 October last year. I was responding to an hon. Friend who had pointed out that the anti-opium campaign was failing in Afghanistan, that the promotion of women’s rights was failing, that democracy was failing and that corruption was rife. I said that that was to suggest that the objectives of our presence in Afghanistan were to get rid of the opium trade, assert the rights of women, create a democracy and root out corruption. I pointed out that those were worthy and desirable aims, but that they were not the reason why we were there. The reason why we were there was, of course, that an attack had been launched by al-Qaeda militants against American cities. Our response was to ensure, once and for all, that that could never happen again from Afghanistan.
I also pointed out something else. I said that we needed to wage a campaign in Afghanistan
“in which we do not take levels of casualties that the public are not prepared to bear,”
and that that, above all,
“is the single reason that people in this country are dissatisfied with the campaign in Afghanistan. It is not a question of a lack of patience, or of not spending enough money,”
but
“The country will not put up with a disproportionate cost in lives for a campaign that shows no sign of ending.”
I also ventured to suggest—I was a little worried when I made this remark—that
“if our enemies in Afghanistan focused on a strategic objective of ensuring that they killed two or three British service personnel every week, keeping that up for a sufficient length of time would be enough to harden opposition to the continuance of the campaign.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2009; Vol. 497, c. 534-35.]
Why have I broken my rule and quoted from my own speech? The reason is very simple: because I am going to develop that theme in the short time available, and I do not want anyone to say that I am saying what I am about to say only because I am speaking from the Back Benches and that I never said it when I spoke from the Front Bench. We have got a dilemma in Afghanistan, and nobody knows which of two courses to take. My argument is that there is a third course.
The first of the two courses being put forward says that we need to get out of there as soon as we reasonably can. The other one says that winning a counter-insurgency campaign means that we have to go on for the long haul. Those words were used on the Front Bench by the Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey), in his capacity as Liberal Democrat shadow defence spokesman. We also have to reform the society so that it will be self-sustaining.
We are not going to turn Afghanistan into a self-sustaining society that will be able to reach a deal with the reconcilable elements of the Taliban if we simultaneously say, as President Obama has, that we will start withdrawing our troops from the middle of next year. We cannot have it both ways.
The trouble is that that is to assume that the only way to be present in Afghanistan is to micromanage the country as though it were our job to rebuild that society and hold it in place. That is why we are engaged in the folly of sending our troops out from forward-operating bases. I have friends in those bases: they go out day after day and week after week, over highly predictable routes and wearing uniforms that say, “Here we are. We’re a target. Snipe us, blow us up.” That is insane. We are fighting on the one ground where our enemies are able to defeat us by inflicting on us a level of casualties that our society will no longer be willing to bear. The answer is not to follow the policy of micromanagement in Afghanistan, which has been followed up until now.
Mr Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West) (Lab/Co-op)
The former shadow Minister is speaking in a fascinating way about Afghanistan. However, now that he has the freedom of the Back Benches—and I congratulate him on being prepared to lay down his official position for his allies—may I ask whether he still has the same view of aircraft carriers as he had before?
Dr Julian Lewis
I much admire the hon. Gentleman, but I am wearing today the crest of HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy’s next aircraft carrier, just as I did when I was a shadow Minister, because I retain precisely the view that aircraft carriers are essential for the Royal Navy in the future. However, that will have to be for another debate.
I have a minute and a half left, unless someone else chooses to intervene, and I wish to explain what we are doing wrong and what we can do right. That is a bit of a tall order, but I may have a fuller opportunity to explain in the future. What we are doing wrong is that we are following a policy of micromanagement: what we should do is follow a policy of minimal intervention. We are putting pressure on Karzai by saying that we will pull out in a certain period of time. We are not putting any pressure on the Taliban to reach a deal with him.
What we should be saying is, “We will withdraw from being involved in Afghan society in a certain amount of time, but we will retain a strategic presence. You won’t see it. It will be a sovereign base area somewhere near the Afghan-Pakistan border. We will let the water find its own level, as it were, in Afghan society, but we will not withdraw completely because if we did that the country would revert to what it was before. On the other hand, we will not allow it to revert to what it was before if there is any sign of hostile terrorism or of organisational arrangements being made to revive what there was before.”
I have 10 seconds left. The House should remember that it heard it here first: strategic base bridgehead area. That is the solution, but we are not in sight of it at the moment.