ISIL in Syria

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, for initiating this debate, and I am pleased to follow my noble friend Lady Falkner and the noble Lord, Lord Williams. I am slightly nervous about following such expertise, but I must confess that I am even more nervous about speaking in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Powell of Bayswater. I have known him for 33 years, ever since I was a school friend of his son Nick and rather foolishly and precociously decided to provoke an argument with him about the then Conservative Government’s Budget. It is fair to say that he fairly comprehensively defeated me in that argument. Given that his expertise on foreign affairs is even greater than his expertise on economic affairs, it is nerve-wracking indeed to speak opposite him.

Last year, the Prime Minister set out the Government’s strategy to defeat IS, or Daesh. I have to say that I was not terribly convinced about it then and am not much more convinced now, but I will listen with interest to the Minister’s answers in the hope that I can be reassured. It is not clear to me how it is possible to defeat Daesh without credible forces on the ground, and the 70,000 so-called moderate forces seem to me neither a credible number nor a credible description. Those who have spent time on the ground in Syria are clear that the dominance of extreme Sunni groups in the armed opposition is almost total.

In Iraq, where the RAF has been operating for some time, there are ground forces with whom we can co-operate—both the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. That is why the coalition decided that it should focus its efforts on Iraq rather than Syria: there was a coherent strategy in Iraq and an absence of one in Syria.

For understandable reasons, post-Paris, the Government felt they had to act. I understand that sentiment but to act without a credible strategy is a dangerous thing to do. To act when one cannot answer the question “And then what?” as we did in Libya can have horrific consequences directly impacting on our country.

Even if we have a credible strategy to defeat Daesh, that is not enough. We will have gained little if another violent extremist group takes its place. That is why we have to have a strategy to fill the vacuum and to bring peace and order back to Syria. More than that, we need a much wider strategy to tackle violent extremism around the world because, of course, it is not just Syria and Iraq that are afflicted by this curse, but Libya, Yemen, the Sinai peninsula, Afghanistan and Nigeria. The attacks recently in Ouagadougou and Jakarta also highlight the global phenomena that we are facing. If we do not develop a comprehensive strategy to tackle this problem, we will find that even if we are successful in Iraq and Syria the problem will emerge elsewhere, whether it is called Daesh, al-Qaeda or whatever new formulation emerges, and it will threaten and menace us still.

As we go forward, we must learn from our mistakes. I know that Governments and countries are not always good at doing this, but given the menace we face it is critical that we get better at it. The first lesson we need to learn is that formenting regime change has proved comprehensively disastrous for us in this region, whether in Iran in the 1950s with the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh, the invasion of Iraq overthrowing Saddam Hussein, or Libya more recently. We have to learn that we do not have sufficient understanding of the complexities of these societies or of the consequences that flow from our actions to keep blundering in, in the way we have done in the past.

Moreover as Libya shows, we lack the attention span or the resolve to tackle the problems arising from our interventions. Our insistence on the removal of Bashar al-Assad was foolish. It was foolish because we had no way of effecting it, foolish because personalising the issue on Assad showed our lack of understanding of the regime and foolish because it helped scupper any chance that the original peace talks might succeed.

We must not let it scupper the next round of peace talks. As the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, pointed out in her speech when we debated Syria last year, to bring peace in the former Yugoslavia, people had to make peace with Milosevic. No one liked that; he was responsible for terrible brutality but that was the price for peace and it was one that was worth paying.

Indeed the best way to get rid of Assad, as was the best way to get rid of Milosevic is to end the war, particularly as there are many people in minority communities who, as long as the war continues, see Assad as the best of a lot of bad options. If we make Assad going a precondition we will simply ensure that the war continues and Assad remains, and as a consequence many more people will die. Everyone, including the Prime Minister, has accepted that we cannot ultimately defeat Daesh until there is a political settlement. On 26 November, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons:

“We are now seeing Iran and Saudi Arabia sitting around the same table as America and Russia, as well as France, Turkey and Britain. All of us are working toward the transition to a new Government in Syria”.—[Official Report, Commons; 26/11/15, col 1492.]

The difficulty is that so many of these parties want such different things. I hope the Minister can update us on progress towards convening the all-party talks proposed for 25 January. Can he tell us whether he sees any prospect of such talks taking place this month, as planned? It has been widely reported that in briefing the Security Council on 18 January the UN special envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, expressed his frustration about the many obstacles being placed in the way of his ability to convene a broad representation of opposition groups at the talks. As my noble friend Lady Falkner has already suggested, in particular Saudi Arabia may be playing an unhelpful role in that respect. It is reported that Turkey is blocking the attendance of the Kurdish YPG and the Democratic Union Party, that Russia is blocking attendance of Saudi-backed groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam, and that Saudi Arabia is insisting that the Riyadh-based and Saudi-aligned high negotiations committee is exclusively to be given the status of the opposition delegation.

Can the Minister assure us that the UK gives its full support to the UN special envoy in dealing with these issues? Can he give us some indication of the role that the UK Government are playing in ensuring that the talks take place as soon as possible? Finally, can he tell us what progress the International Syria Support Group has made towards securing a ceasefire among non-Daesh and ANF forces, which it agreed as a priority in October? Given the central role of the political track in the ultimate defeat of Daesh, it is concerning that we hear so much about the military effort and so little about the diplomatic track. I hope that the Minister will put that right this afternoon.

We must hope and pray that the peace talks bring some results, and that we can get to a position where coalition air forces can work with a reformed Government and reformed Syrian army to finally defeat Daesh and bring peace and order back to the Syrian people. I fear that that happy day may be some way off but, even when we achieve it, we will not have resolved the threat of extremist violence around the world. To do that, we need to look much more carefully at our strategy and how we adopt it across the region, instead of adopting a piecemeal approach. The establishment of the National Security Council by the Prime Minister under the coalition Government was a hopeful step forward, but I regret very much that it did not take a much more strategic view of issues, as we had hoped, and that there were few strategic discussions on areas such as the Middle East. We need a comprehensive approach.

I understand the difficulty that Governments face in tackling as complex a threat as Daesh, and how much easier it is to be critical when you are outside government. However, I hope that the Government will work as hard on the diplomatic track as on the military track. When peace is finally restored to Syria, I hope that the UK Government will not allow their interest and attention to wane, as they did so tragically in Libya.