Armed Forces

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his remarks, and I associate myself and, I am sure, all Members of the House with the comments he laterally made about remembrance. I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, to the Front Bench. She has a long and illustrious history on these subjects, and I remember her and her husband, the late Lord Garden, being great supporters of British defence and the issues surrounding it.

As the Minister said, it is the time of remembrance. We wear poppies with pride and with meaning. We show respect for lives lost and for survivors whose lives have been shattered by wounds. We remember sacrifices made and service delivered, and it is right to pay tribute to the courage, professionalism, dedication and commitment of those who serve in our Armed Forces. Out of the present turmoil in the Government’s business programme, we are in many ways lucky to have this opportunity at this time for this debate.

It is right and proper, and worth remembering, that today we speak in our own language, enjoy a parliamentary system of government, have a free press and the rule of an independent legal system because—in many ways, only because—of what was done in our country’s name in past conflicts. I once walked through the park at the bottom of Park Lane, where a number of war memorials are all too unnoticed because they lie on a roundabout, and it is therefore dangerous to get to them. However, there is a huge monument to the Royal Artillery, on which it is stated:

“They died with the faith that the future of mankind would benefit from their sacrifice”.

Some 49,000 men of the Royal Artillery died in the First World War, and 30,000 died in World War II, some 79,000 men who gave their lives in both wars in order that we would benefit; and there is no doubt that we have benefitted.

However, tributes to those who wear the Queen’s uniform, the civilians who support and back them up, and the way that they go about their dangerous and difficult business, lack one thing that is critical to them—full-blooded support for the missions that they have been sent to carry out. Wars such as the conflict in Afghanistan are not won or successful through military means alone. They are won when the enemy knows that you will not give in, when the enemy knows that your cause is mightier than theirs, and when those who fanatically want to impose a brutal, illiberal, theocratic and undemocratic regime on a population simply will not be allowed to prevail. We will succeed in Afghanistan when our troops know that they fight for a noble cause and that the enemy, in contrast, fights to enslave its own people. Our troops have a right to know that the people of this country and those of the other 49 countries in the NATO-led ISAF mission are behind it and those who risk their lives and limbs every day to deliver it. However, that requires leadership in our nation. It requires that the political leadership of the United Kingdom—all of it—asserts day and daily why that mission in Afghanistan is about our security here at home, and that its success or failures matter to the safety of our citizens in this country.

The great United States journalist, Edward Murrow, after the Second World War said the following of Winston Churchill:

“He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle”.

Churchill knew instinctively the power of rhetoric in order to get the people of Britain behind the war effort, of the need to build confidence at times such as in 1940, after Dunkirk, when we were militarily powerless and when his Cabinet was enfeebled by division. He rallied the British people, galvanised the troops and, much more importantly, he convinced Hitler that we would never give up and that he would be defeated. He used, in public and in private sessions, the platform of the House of Commons to deliver the message to the people and to the enemy that we were, irrespective of the facts on the ground, invincible. It worked. We know that and we benefited from it. That is why today we speak in English and in freedom in this House.

What would Churchill have made of the fact that, with 9,000 British troops committed to fight in an ongoing war in Afghanistan, the last time that our Prime Minister made a speech about Afghanistan in the House of Commons was on 4 July last year? It is nearly a year and a half since the Prime Minister made a speech about Afghanistan. It is difficult for any of us to put thoughts into the minds of the great Churchill, but he might have said, as I say now, “We seem to have lost the will to win”. Where is the mighty and necessary psychological assault on the Taliban today? Where are the stirring speeches designed to intimidate the insurgents in support of our mission to normalise a country that was brutalised by the medieval criminals who filled the vacuum left in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union left in 1990? Where are the arguments which should be put to the British people, the arguments that I used to make regularly in NATO, as have my successors and Ministers at the Ministry of Defence, about having to go to Afghanistan or Afghanistan will come to us?

We have an exit strategy that appears to be all exit and no strategy. It signals to the Taliban to wait two more years and then we will all be gone. It signals to our troops that, although they see progress on the ground, as they risk their lives to consolidate it, they get little backup or encouragement from the political leadership of this country. We admire and rightly value their guts and their professionalism but we say to them, “Just hang on because in a couple of years’ time this mission”, which is rarely spoken of here, “will be over and you will be back home”, in some cases, as the Minister has admitted, to redundancy notices instead of the thanks of a grateful nation. It signals to the British people that their weariness at the deaths and injuries and the Treasury cost are justified as it appears that no case is being made for why we went, why we stay and why it matters to people on British streets.

I recently heard a very senior American officer with responsibility for that area say that the closer he got to Afghanistan the more he saw progress but the closer he got to Washington, Brussels or London the more pessimistic he was about it. The picture in Afghanistan shows signs of success, hard and expensively achieved as it has been. Last week, Secretary General Rasmussen laid out the progress made: 80% of insurgent attacks take place in areas where only 20% of the Afghan population now live; and in Kabul and its immediate surrounding areas the number of enemy-instigated attacks declined 17% in the first eight months of this year.

In the first six months of 2012, Afghan troops led 80% of all operations. They do 85% of their own training. Afghan troops and police, trained in their thousands, now take the lead for security in areas where 75% of the population live. Schools are open. Women are being educated again. Even in Helmand province, street markets are being reopened. Many of us had the opportunity to talk to soldiers during the Olympic Games, where again they performed with professionalism. They can see, and will talk about, the progress that is being made. They are proud of their success and we, too, should be proud of it.

We all know why we went into Afghanistan. The move was popular because it was universally seen as necessary to rid Afghanistan of the medieval regime of the Taliban that had incubated the criminal terrorists responsible for the attacks of 9/11 and for many others before that. It was also about making sure that Afghanistan would be sufficiently normalised and assisted so that it would never again host the kind of criminal terrorism that we saw in the early part of 2000. However, the job is not over. Leon Trotsky said, about another war at another time: “You may not be interested in this war, but this war is interested in you”. The job in Afghanistan is not yet over, and if we leave with it only half done, the carnage that may follow will not stop at the mountains of the Hindu Kush or at the national boundaries of central Asia; it will come to us. The lesson of history remains that we should finish the job properly or we will face bleak prospects as a result of failure.