Afghanistan and Pakistan

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). I wish that we had heard from him in earlier years, because his calm and rational approach was very impressive. I look forward to hearing the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis): his idea of establishing sovereign bases that we should seek to control, but without going out on patrol to have our men killed, is entirely sound. I also look forward to hearing the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who has direct experience of the region.

The plain fact is that this is not a winnable war. I found the Prime Minister’s metaphor about al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, and Sinn Fein rather bizarre and ill-judged; but judgment is not, perhaps, the Prime Minister’s strongest suit at the moment. We are talking about a huge mess: an intervention undertaken for sincere and decent reasons that is now terminating as so many other interventions throughout recent and older history often have. I do not think that we withdrew cleanly from India and Pakistan, from Aden or Cyprus, or from any number of situations. The same could even be said of Northern Ireland. Some might observe that the almost apartheid segregation between Catholic and Protestant communities is hardly a tribute to community and society building in parts of Belfast and Derry.

The real problem is the eternal question posed by, I think, Lord Salisbury, who said, “If we listen to the generals, we will never be safe.” Clemenceau, 20 years later, said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” We have allowed our Afghanistan policy to be over-driven and over-controlled by the military: of that there can be no doubt. My hon. Friend from Scotland who is on the Defence Committee quoted the generals who had spoken to the Committee—

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

All of Scotland!

[Mr MacShane]

Well, it is nice to have a true Scot here, rather than a nationalist.

I do not know of any recorded moment when any British general giving evidence to any parliamentary or public inquiry has admitted he got things wrong. It is in their contract that generals are always right. If they are let down, it is the fault of the politicians. Before the election we were told continually by Labour Members that it was the Prime Minister’s fault for not providing enough Chinook helicopters and reinforcements, and that Ministers were responsible for the fact that we were not succeeding in Afghanistan. It is a tribute to my colleagues on the Front Bench that they have not adopted those rather shoddy tactics—as some might have been tempted to do—in respect of the handling of the conflict since May last year.