NATO

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hugh Bayley]

If we go back to the time of the cold war, we can see why it was relatively easy to explain why we needed collective security.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I do not wish to delay my hon. Friend, but I thought it important to intervene following the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) to point out that one of the sub-committees of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will visit Greenland in September, which shows NATO’s interest. British Members of this House, including me, will participate in that visit.

[Hugh Bayley]

I am glad that my hon. Friend will be on that visit, discussing the matter with colleagues from other NATO countries. I look forward to hearing from him when he reports back.

During the cold war, it was fairly easy to explain why we had NATO and why we needed to work jointly with allies to defend ourselves. Europe was divided by an iron curtain. We in democratic states to the west wanted to preserve our freedom, our human rights, trade union rights, property rights, freedom of speech and freedom to protest while the states in the east—the USSR and its fellow travellers in satellite states—did not share those values. The Soviet Union was well armed with conventional and nuclear weapons and demonstrated that it was prepared to use those military assets to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956, to blockade Berlin, to invade Czecho- slovakia in 1968 and to try to destroy the Solidarity movement in Poland. It was quite clear to most of the public why we needed military assets to protect ourselves and why we needed to co-operate with other countries to do so.

That was long ago. We still have foreign policy differences with Russia—for instance, over Syria.

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[Jason McCartney]

My hon. and gallant Friend makes a good point. There are a number of anomalies, such as the situation of the dependency of the Falklands Islands and the tensions between Greece and Turkey, which of course are both member nations, in Cyprus. There are certain cases, of which he gave a prime example, in which article 5 perhaps has a little leeway.

Crisis management is another core task of NATO, and it has a unique and robust set of political and military capabilities to address the full spectrum of crises before, during and after conflicts. Of course, my hon. and gallant Friend was involved in one such conflict in Bosnia.

Another task is co-operative security. The alliance engages actively to enhance international security, through partnerships and by contributing actively to arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament. Other recently added facets of NATO’s work are cyber-security, which has been much in the news in the past fortnight, energy security and the threat posed by climate change.

NATO has been at the heart, and at the head, of command and control for current and recent western military interventions and operations. In many ways, it now delivers the military aspects of the United Nations’ work. I will highlight three examples. First, as we have heard, there is the international security assistance force, the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan that the UN Security Council established in December 2001 under resolution 1386. Secondly, there was Operation Unified Protector, the NATO operation enforcing UN Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973, concerning the Libyan civil war. Those resolutions imposed sanctions on key members of the Gaddafi Government and authorised NATO to implement an arms embargo and a no-fly zone and to use all necessary means, short of foreign occupation, to protect Libyan civilians and civilian-populated areas.

Thirdly, there is Operation Ocean Shield, which was referred to earlier. It is NATO’s contribution to the anti-piracy campaign off the coast of the horn of Africa, following the earlier Operation Allied Protector. Naval operations began early in 2009, having been approved by the North Atlantic Council, and primarily involve warships from the UK and the United States, although vessels from many other nations are also included.

That brings me to some of the challenges facing NATO, a big one of which is duplication. The operation against Somali piracy is a good example. I have been with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to Djibouti, which is strategically placed on the horn of Africa, and there are clear signs of overlap and mission repeat. We have not only the NATO-led mission but an EU-led operation called Operation Atalanta, also known as European Union Naval Force Somalia. There is also an independent French air base, a US army camp and a Japanese air base. Time and time again, I ask the commanding officers how much liaison there is between the different operations, and I have never got a satisfactory answer.

[Mike Gapes]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that at Northwood, in this country, there is close co-operation between the NATO and EU activities, and there is also UN discussion about anti-piracy activity. I do not think we should be quite as pessimistic as he implies.

[Jason McCartney]

I guess that the hon. Gentleman is a bit more pro-EU than I am. That is probably what is behind his comments. I will give another example of what duplication does. It can confuse command and control, and further evidence of that is the EU force headquarters being set up in Belgium, in a similar location to NATO’s headquarters on the outskirts of Brussels. That is more costly duplication of command and control.

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[Jeremy Corbyn]

Of course piracy off the coast of Somalia is not a good thing. Instability in Somalia is very bad, but surely one solves that problem by political support for changes in Somalia—to some extent that is happening and considerable changes are taking place. I sometimes get the feeling that NATO spent the 1990s and early 2000s looking for something to do, and that it was more than pleased to get involved in Afghanistan and present itself as the armed wing of the United Nations. It may be that the UN should have its own force, and that is a matter for consideration and debate. However, when NATO calls itself the arm of the UN, what does that say to countries that are not in or aligned to NATO, or indeed are deeply suspicious of NATO and its activities? Members who talk about NATO as being the effective arm of the UN should think carefully about the implications of what they are saying.

The costs of NATO membership are considerable—probably far greater than those of membership of the European Union, which seems to excite massive debate on the Government Benches. NATO requires 2% of our gross national product to be spent on defence, and Members complain that other countries do not meet those demands. Presumably, NATO membership requires a level of expenditure that many countries simply cannot afford, yet they are required to make that expenditure and, for the most part, to buy those arms from the United States or approved suppliers that produce NATO-issue equipment. We must think far more seriously about why we are in NATO and what it is achieving.

Let us consider Afghanistan from 2001 onwards. Yes, 9/11 was a dreadful event and an act of murder against civilians, but was it an appropriate response to invade Afghanistan? Twelve years later, 400 British soldiers, a larger number of American soldiers, and a very much larger number of Afghan civilians, and others, are dead. Drone aircraft are operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there is a real threat to the civil liberties of everyone in the world from Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and anti-terror legislation. That has not made the world a safer or more secure place.

[Mike Gapes]

Does my hon. Friend accept that in 2001, an estimated 10,000 terrorists came out of training camps in Afghanistan from areas that the state had effectively handed over for al-Qaeda to operate in? Was there not a need to protect communities around the world by removing those terrorist bases from Afghanistan?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I question the figure of 10,000 and I would take my Friend back a little further. In 1979, Soviet support for the then Afghan Government provoked a massive US response and arming of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. Massive amounts of US money went into Afghanistan from 1979 onwards and—hey presto!—the Taliban were formed with US weapons. Al-Qaeda was founded by US trainers. What goes around comes around and we should think more carefully about instant information and instant sending of vast amounts of weapons to opposition groups. The same may happen if we decide to send arms to one group in Syria. Where will those arms end up? A little bit of historical analysis might be helpful.

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[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert), who, like me, is a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I want to pick up on a reference he made—it has come up in other contributions too—to Kosovo.

During the Whit recess, I went with a NATO Parliamentary Assembly delegation to Serbia and Kosovo. We went by road from Belgrade through north Mitrovica and south Mitrovica down to Pristina. We visited a Serbian orthodox monastery in Kosovo, which is now in an area overwhelmingly populated by Kosovo Albanians, rather than Kosovo Serbs. One interesting development is that in Belgrade, Mitrovica and Pristina everybody unanimously praised the work of KFOR, the NATO-led force doing the vital job of providing stability and protection to the minority Serbian communities and religious places in Kosovo, as well as acting to prevent conflict in north Mitrovica.

KFOR divided Kosovo into five areas of operations, and its commanding officer is German. The most difficult area covers north Mitrovica, in which approximately 80,000 Serbs live. Many do not accept that they live in Kosovo—they still identify with Belgrade. Significantly, the KFOR commander for this area does not come from a NATO country—he is from the neutral country of Switzerland. Through its structure, infrastructure and continuity, NATO enables partner countries and others to participate and play important roles in NATO structures.

There is a similar situation in Afghanistan, with an alliance of 28 countries—or 43 countries, I am not sure what the actual figure is now—that participate in international operations. NATO has played an essential part in providing the framework for that to happen. Similarly, EU co-operation is happening in different places. Wearing my Foreign Affairs Committee hat, I was in Mali last month. I was pleased to meet and talk to the EU’s training mission, led by French officers who are doing a fantastic job, which includes 46 British forces personnel. Interestingly, for the first time British officers will be in charge of Irish soldiers, from the Royal Irish Regiment. The two flags will be working together for the first time since the 1930s. That is a symbol of international co-operation. That work is done under an EU initiative, so that Ireland, Sweden and other EU countries that are not in NATO can nevertheless contribute and work with NATO countries. Often, the assets and resources of NATO are used in that way to enhance our European defence and security.

[Hugh Bayley]

rose—

[Mike Gapes]

I give way to the president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

[Hugh Bayley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the new military co-operation between Britain and the Irish Republic. When I was in Mali, just a week or two before him, I saw a training unit led by a British major and, from the Irish Republic, an Irish captain. However, my hon. Friend made a slip of the tongue: he referred to the Royal Irish Regiment, but of course those forces were from the Republic of Ireland.

[Mike Gapes]

I am grateful for that intervention.

Let me turn to some of the other issues that have been raised. An important point was made about the internet and cyber-warfare. NATO has a facility in Estonia—I have visited it with the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and I know that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly has also visited it—to bring together best practice for dealing with cyber-warfare. As we have seen from the media headlines in the last few days, we will face significant challenges, not just from states but, I suspect, over the coming decades from private interests and private companies spying and stealing data and commercially sensitive material. We also know of reports—I am not in a position to say whether they are true—that the Iranian nuclear weapons programme was seriously set back because of the activities of some countries and the so-called Stuxnet, and there are other areas where these matters are also of great importance.

International security is enhanced by co-operation, not just in hardware and personnel but in intelligence and security sharing. We need to be honest: these are not issues that can be dealt with by simplistic headlines in The Guardian or any other newspaper. They have to be looked at seriously. There needs to be international co-operation to deal with threats to our security, which might come not from terrorist bombs but from somebody sabotaging a banking system or undermining the supply of electricity or water to our major cities by making a minor change to a software programme, albeit one with potentially disastrous consequences. We need to look at those issues. I believe that NATO has a role in that respect.

My final point relates to the United States, which has already been referred to several times. We have heard about the so-called pivot towards Asia, President Obama’s strategy of leading from behind and all the other concerns that we have as Europeans. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly provides one of the few forums for members of the US House of Representatives and the Canadian Parliament to come to meetings at which we can have regular discussions with them. Sadly, given the nature of the insane political system in the United States and two-year elections to the House of Representatives, it is difficult for its members to get abroad very often, because they have to spend all their time raising election campaign money or fighting re-elections, normally in their primaries.

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly is important, because it means that there is a group of Americans from the Republicans and the Democrats who have had contact with and learnt about European politics. In the same way, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly provides a way for people from European countries to understand the politics of other countries better. The current President of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, was a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly for many years. I am sure that that was important, given that he comes from the AK party, which comes out of an Islamist tradition. He has clearly learnt a great deal and built confidence and understanding with other European parliamentarians and those from across the Atlantic.

The forum that is provided, the specialist committees and the reports that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly publishes provide members of Parliaments in different countries with vital information that they would not always get from their own Ministries of Defence—I am glad that the Minister is in his place to hear this. In the more than 10 years that I have been attending meetings of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I have found that the access we get to high-level meetings and the information we get in those meetings is often far superior to the level of information I used to get as a member of the Select Committee on Defence or the Foreign Affairs Committee. That is not something to be proud of.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Can my hon. Friend say—I am genuinely interested in this—what degree of influence over NATO policy and strategy the Parliamentary Assembly has?

[Mike Gapes]

Without straying too far from what I was going to say, I can say that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly produces reports which are published online and are published in draft form before final versions are produced. Every year the NATO Secretary-General produces a response to the points made. It is a bit like the relationship between Select Committees and the Government. Recommendations are made, reports are published and then the NATO bureaucracy—the Secretary-General, on behalf of NATO as an institution—responds to the assembly’s recommendations. The Secretary-General and other senior NATO figures come before our meetings. We hold them to account, whether at the February session in Brussels or the autumn meeting, which rotates among different countries.

There is therefore a level of connection and accountability, although NATO is not a democratic parliamentary structure. It works through a consensus arrangement between the different member Governments. In a sense, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly is far less democratic than other bodies—there is no qualifying majority voting, like in the European Union—while the European Parliament has a lot more powers. Nevertheless, the work we do as parliamentarians, representing our national Parliaments but also understanding and working in co-operation with others, is vital. Under my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), the president of the assembly, I believe we will have a much higher profile in future.