NATO

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hugh Bayley]

There has been considerable disarmament and a big peace dividend on both sides of the former iron curtain since the collapse of the Berlin wall. An attempt was made to rebuild a different relationship in Europe in which the Assembly played a large part, working with the emerging democratic movements in central Europe and in the eastern European countries to help them establish the institutions that enabled them in the fullness of time to join both NATO and the European Union. The door remains open—to countries such as Georgia, for instance. Indeed, I have had heard Russian delegates—they attend the Assembly as a confidence-building measure and because we have a joint NATO-Russia parliamentary committee—ask whether if, at some future date, Russia were to want to form an association with or to join the alliance, it would be possible for it to do so. It is important not to build new barriers between parties in Europe or between Europe and other parts of the world but to seek to build co-operation where we can.

[Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

In connection with the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), does not my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) think that it is a bit peculiar that Croatia, a former Soviet bloc country, entered the European Union a few days ago whereas Turkey, which has been a staunch ally of European countries for many years and is a member of NATO, still finds considerable opposition to its membership of the EU from within the EU?

[Hugh Bayley]

I must say I strongly agree with my hon. Friend, but I do not want to turn the NATO debate into a debate about the future of the EU. Turkey plays and has played an important role ever since it joined the alliance in helping to defend our freedoms in Europe, and that ought to guide the views of other EU member states when decisions are made about Turkey’s accession to the EU.

I mentioned the history, but only to show that things have moved on. Despite our foreign policy differences with Russia on certain matters, such as Syria, we co-operate on many matters. Russia provides the land bridge to convey NATO’s non-military assets to Afghanistan and will help us remove many of our assets from Afghanistan as we bring our troops home.

The question that we must answer for Members of this House who do not share our views and for the public is, “If the cold war is history, why isn’t NATO?” It is not history because we still need international co-operation and solidarity with our allies and shared and permanent structures to plan to deal with the security risks we face, to deter those risks and, when things go wrong, to manage military action.

No single NATO state, with the possible exception of the United States, has sufficient military assets to protect itself from today’s risks without the help of colleagues. Actually, I do not think the United States should be excepted, because it needs and gains international legitimacy at the UN and elsewhere when it engages in military action that is supported by its allies.

Since the end of the cold war, we have needed NATO to end conflict in the heart of Europe—in Bosnia, for example; to respond to the threat of global terrorism, which had devastating effects on the streets of New York, London, Madrid and a number of cities in east Africa and elsewhere; and to protect human rights and stop ethnic cleansing, as in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya. We needed NATO to provide humanitarian assistance during the 2005 floods in Pakistan and, indeed, following Hurricane Katrina in the United States, when other NATO states sent humanitarian assets. We have needed NATO to counter the threat of piracy off the horn of Africa: the losses suffered at the hands of pirates now cost insurers and shipping companies many hundreds of millions of pounds less than they used to, thanks to NATO and EU coastal patrols. We also need to work collectively with our allies to deal with new and emerging threats—cyber-attack, transnational crime, people trafficking or the drugs trade. All are threats that affect the United Kingdom, but none is a threat to which we can successfully respond and against which we can protect ourselves on our own.

What does the NATO Parliamentary Assembly bring to the table? Where is our added value? After the fall of the Berlin wall, as I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), the Assembly sought to build bridges with democrats in the former Warsaw pact countries that wanted to move closer to the west. Indeed, the Assembly moved faster than NATO itself or the Governments of many member states to open a dialogue with those democrats.

At the end of last week, General Nick Carter, the UK soldier and deputy commander of the international security assistance force, said that peace and reconciliation talks with the Taliban should have started a decade ago, and he is right. There were people engaging with moderate leaders in the insurgency in the mid-2000s, and I met them during some of my visits to Afghanistan; but there were disputes at the time about who should do this—whether it should be the Government of Afghanistan, or perhaps the United States. I remember when two people who had been involved in talks with elements within the insurgency were expelled from Afghanistan.

Last week, lead responsibility for security passed from ISAF to the Afghan national security forces in every part of Afghanistan. As our role changes so that we no longer provide the security lead in that country, we need to learn lessons from NATO’s biggest, longest and costliest military operation. Our Parliamentary Assembly has visited Afghanistan 11 times in the past eight years, and when preparing for this debate I looked back at our reports.

In 2004, we argued that NATO, which at that time had a role in Kabul but not throughout the country, should expand its presence throughout Afghanistan. In reports in 2004, 2005 and 2006, we called for a unified command, encompassing both ISAF, the NATO mission, and the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom. Between 2005 and 2008, we published reports calling for better burden sharing between NATO member states and for caveats imposed by some of the national contributions to NATO to be lifted. As early as 2004—nine years ago—we highlighted the need to accelerate the build-up and strengthen the training of Afghan national security forces; we stressed that particularly strongly from 2006 onward.

Even in 2002—more than a decade ago—we were stressing the link between security and development assistance; and from 2006, in reports and resolutions we called for what is now described as the comprehensive approach: diplomacy, defence and development co-operation. Again as early as 2004, we identified that much aid was used inefficiently because it was not channelled through Afghan institutions, and now even 50% of US aid is channelled through the World Bank’s trust fund and the Government of Afghanistan. Interestingly, in 2006—seven years ago—we called for reconciliation talks with moderate elements in the insurgency. Since 2006, we have stressed the need to challenge the safe havens in Pakistan and we have been involving Pakistani MPs in meetings of our Assembly. I have visited Afghanistan five or six times during the period our forces have been in the country, and I have to say that many of the prescient ideas reflected in reports of our Assembly came from British commanders, British diplomats, DFID staff or British aid workers.

The Assembly is an effective forum for sharing good ideas and good practice and, where we identify good practice adopted by one country, we try to persuade others in the alliance to support similar approaches. Often, it is easier for legislators who do not have executive responsibilities to reach conclusions on these matters than it is for members of a Government. We are still, even now, debating defence budgets, following the reports we produced some years ago on burden sharing. As we know, Robert Gates, the former US Defence Secretary, in his outgoing statement, called on Europe to step up to the mark on defence spending, and it is clear to our Assembly that most countries in Europe do not spend enough on defence. Indeed, only two—Britain and Greece—spend the 2% of GDP that NATO recommends.

When I put that point to our Secretary of State, as I have a number of times, he says that, with the economic situation so fragile, now is not the right time to press Governments of other countries to increase their defence expenditure, but I believe it is necessary for security reasons, and that the way to get through the difficulty is to seek commitments that, as the economic situation improves and Governments receive a taxation dividend from growth, they will devote a proportion of it to greater defence expenditures. I do not think we have public opinion on our side for that proposition at the moment, which is another reason we need to do more to explain why we have the security structures we have in NATO and why it is necessary to maintain them and finance them properly. Both the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and NATO itself need to do more to get their case into the public domain, and I congratulate the Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen—