Nick Harvey MP

DEFENCE POLICY

Nick Harvey (North Devon) (LD): I start by echoing the words of tribute to the men and women of our armed services at every level, on the front line and at home, and to those who help and support them, those who equip and supply them, and those who look after them when they come back. In particular, I pay tribute to the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Bob Russell), who have just returned from a gruelling tour of duty in Afghanistan, and to my own constituents, the marines and engineers who have gone out there to take over from them. We should all be very proud of what they are doing, often in very difficult circumstances.

I should also like to welcome the new Secretary of State to his new responsibilities. Like the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), I recall shadowing him in his health role some years ago. I was rather surprised when the hon. Member for Woodspring suggested that he expected to find a more bipartisan atmosphere in our debates from now on, but he then went on to surprise me, because I found myself agreeing with much more of his speech than I usually do. It was one of the best speeches he has made on defence. Perhaps I was wrong to think that we would not find bipartisan support for a number of things, because, in fact, we are doing so.

I also pay tribute to the Secretary of State's predecessor. I entirely agree that he was a straight and decent man, who did a difficult job in very trying circumstances. Rumours have been circulating all year that, when a reshuffle came, he wanted to divest himself of his responsibilities. I have no idea whether that is true, but I think that he can look back at the time he spent as Defence Secretary with pride and satisfaction.

For five years, defence policy has been focused on, and to a great extent overshadowed by, our intervention in Iraq. Sometimes to the detriment of our forces, our capabilities and our wider operations, the Government have remained somewhat too steadfast-to my taste-in their involvement in that country. That has had a considerable cost. During the time of our involvement there, we have lost the confidence of many allies and friends around the world, and diverted our attention away from the real problems, not least those in Afghanistan, which predated our involvement in Iraq.

We now have a new Secretary of State in charge, however, and I very much welcome what he said at the weekend, and again in our debate today, about the drawing down of our forces in the region. It may be that our time there is drawing to an end, and if so, I welcome that very much. I know that our troops are currently involved in training the 14th division of the Iraqi army. The previous Secretary of State said in an answer in early September-I think that the new Secretary of State has more or less confirmed this today-that this will be completed early next year. I gather that we are also anticipating handing over the Basra air base by the end of this year.

I very much hope that we can assume that we are coming to the end of our significant engagement and that we have not been given yet another elastic deadline. Questions need to be answered about the draw-down to what I understand will be a few hundred troops remaining. I am particularly keen to understand where they will be and how they will be protected. The Minister of State was asked in the Select Committee on Defence about the minimum scale of forces that are capable of protecting themselves. If we are talking about drawing down to a few hundred, clearly they will not be able to protect themselves.

I think that we have a much more sensible basis on which to build a long-term bilateral partnership with Iraq of the sort that the Secretary of State was defending. I see no problem with, or have any objection to, British expertise continuing to be available as the Iraqi army and nation rebuild themselves. If we want to be friends of Iraq, it is appropriate that we should do that, and the sooner that we bring our skills and expertise to Iraqis in modest numbers and not by dint of keeping a self-protecting force there, the better it will be for Iraq, for our involvement in Afghanistan and for the strain on our resources, manpower and finances. I hope that we are seeing the beginning of our withdrawal from any significant engagement in Iraq.

I appreciate that we will have to wait a little longer to hear the terms of the bilateral deal that will be agreed between our Government and the Iraqi Government beyond 31 December, when the UN mandate concludes, but I hope that the House will discuss that in detail at some point. We also await with interest the attitude of a new American Administration. We will know soon what political complexion that will be, and we have heard slightly different remarks from the two candidates as to their view of long-term involvement in Iraq, but perhaps in either case we should judge what they say in their early days in office rather more than what they had to say on the campaign trail. I think that from early next year, more and more of our defence debate on current operations will focus, as it needs to, on what we are doing in Afghanistan, rather than on what we have done in Iraq.

I opposed our involvement in Iraq. To pick up on a point made by the hon. Member for Woodspring, I am not aware of anyone who says that our troops have done nothing beneficial in Iraq. It is not my view that they have been in any sense wasting their time there or that they have not contributed something positive to the well-being of the people of Iraq. However, it is a measure of how badly planned the post-war involvement was that a full five and a half years on, we are discussing issues such as the availability of power and water, which in some parts of Iraq are not back to the state that they were in during Saddam's regime. I welcome any progress that we can make, but we should not be in this situation five and a half years on.

Dr. Fox: As a matter of interest, the objection of the hon. Gentleman's party was based not on the quality of the planning for the post-conflict scenario, but on their view that we should not have been there in the first place. Had we not been there, the people I met in Basra would not have the improved security there; nor would they be looking forward to some of the material benefits that might accrue as a consequence.

Nick Harvey: That is not what I said. The hon. Gentleman is trying to have it both ways. I do not recall that a purpose of invading Iraq was to restore the water supplies. As he well knows, our objection was that it was completely illegal and we were sold a duff prospectus on the purposes of the engagement. However, I honestly do not think that at this stage there is a great deal of purpose to be served by trawling over all that.

Linda Gilroy (Plymouth, Sutton) (Lab/Co-op) rose-

Nick Harvey: I can see that it is too much for some to resist.

Linda Gilroy: Does the hon. Gentleman seriously think that having seen off the weapons inspectors, the dictator Saddam Hussein would not have become an even more serious threat to the security in that region at that time and, therefore, to our security at home?

Nick Harvey: That was certainly not my assertion, but, as the hon. Lady knows perfectly well, the terms, timing and nature of our involvement in Iraq were issues of profound division at the time, and remain so to this day.

However, attention now turns to Afghanistan. As the Secretary of State observed, there are fundamental problems there, and the position is very complicated. No one ever said that it would be easy, and indeed it will not-it will clearly be a very long haul-but we need to retain a steadfast commitment, and this is by no means a time for faint hearts.

During his short time in office so far, the Secretary of State has already visited both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I welcome what he has said since his return. It is clear that there are complex issues for us to tackle. Our involvement in Afghanistan looks set to last for many years, but I am still not convinced that the general public are entirely clear about why we are there, what our objectives are, or by what yardsticks they can judge the effectiveness of what we are doing there. Their confusion will probably have been increased by remarks such as those of Brigadier Carleton-Smith, although I agree with others that he should not be condemned for what he said, because there was some essential truth in it. As he remarked, we are not going to win this war by military means alone.

The hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Harry Cohen) has intervened a couple of times to raise the issue of talking to and negotiating with the Taliban. It is pretty much an open secret that the Afghan Government do it, that the tribal elders do it, that the Pakistanis do it and that we do it, and it is entirely right that we should. The Secretary of State said that it could not possibly be part of the solution for us to hand over any part of power to those who had not laid down arms and who were maintaining the stances that they had taken in the past, and he was entirely right to say that, but there is a world of difference between saying that and saying that we would not be willing to talk to the Taliban.

I remember appearing on the BBC's "Question Time" on the day it emerged that the Major Government had been talking to the IRA. David Dimbleby turned to me and asked, "Are you outraged that it has emerged that the British Government are talking to the IRA?" I replied, "I am not half as outraged as I should have been if it had emerged that they were not doing so." It is entirely logical and right that such dialogues must take place if we hope ever to reach a point at which the opposing sides could be reconciled and made part of a lasting solution.

The Secretary of State was right to say that we could not establish any form of agreement with the Taliban unless and until they agreed to renounce what they had been doing, but we cannot hope to reach that point without engaging in some sort of dialogue with them. I do not know by what means it would take place, or whether it would begin for real now or later; but there is no way we will find a lasting solution unless and until it becomes part of what we are trying to do.

During our last defence debate a couple of weeks ago, I stressed how vital it was for us to send more helicopters to Afghanistan as part of our work there. The Government's statement yesterday about the issue of more protected vehicles was welcome, but I emphasise yet again the need for more helicopters, especially in view of the expected life of the existing helicopter fleet.

We also need to look to the wider region. I should like to know what dialogue has taken place between the British Government and America about American incursions into Pakistani border territories. On Sunday an American drone killed 20 people in Waziristan in Pakistan, and the raids continue. It is surely an irony that the security of Pakistan may now be threatened as our allies step beyond the bounds of the original mandate. I do not seek to minimise the problems that exist in the border territories, but we need to be careful that we are not opening a can of worms in unsettling Pakistan, which is absolutely vital to British interests in that part of the world. We must proceed with enormous care.

The Secretary of State has identified tackling the opium trade as one of our chief objectives, and he is right to do so. Given the scale of heroin addiction in Iran, I should be interested to know whether we have had any discussions with the Iranians about this. It is known to be something about which Iran has enormous concerns. I appreciate that we are significantly at odds with Iran over uranium enrichment and other matters, but it is vital-given that Iran has been involved in the west of Afghanistan-that we should have discussions with it.

On strategy, the hon. Member for Woodspring quite rightly pointed out the folly of continuing to operate on the basis of defence planning assumptions drawn up in the context of 1998. Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be viewed just as add-ons to our general strategic outlook. They have to fit in far more fundamentally to our view of things and what we are trying to do.

The Secretary of State has started to give a lot of thought to his new responsibilities and has identified some of the headline priorities, but before any of the key decisions can be tackled we have to go back to the drawing board over some of the big strategic issues. Some would characterise the decisions that need to be made as a tension between the priorities dictated to us by the wars of today and the longer-term threats that might emerge in other scenarios, where we have to retain a capacity to deal with what might emerge.

Although they did not really do so today, the Conservative Front-Bench team can, when they get the bit between their teeth, wax lyrical on the threats that we might face at various points in the future. I always feel that, rather like the Old Testament, they should not be taken too literally, but neither should they be disregarded. They are absolutely right to say that we cannot concentrate entirely on the priorities of today at the expense of any consideration of these issues, but the purpose of arriving at a defence strategy is to strike a balance between them. I am not content that doing that on the basis of calculations made a decade ago is a sensible way forward.

The right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chair of the Select Committee, asked the Secretary of State where the procurement of the new armoured vehicles fits into the FRES programme. The Secretary of State's reply was that the two had nothing to do with one another. One was funded by urgent operational requirements, the other was a long-term plan for the future. This shows precisely the problem that I am trying to illustrate. We cannot view these things in silos, as they all have to be moulded into a defence strategy that guides and governs the decisions that need to be made.

There is a backlog of unpleasant decisions that need to be made, as I am sure the Secretary of State is now only too aware. He has been hinting in the media that it may become necessary for one of the large procurement projects to be cancelled. This will be difficult when some are rooted so firmly in the constituency of the Prime Minister and others are rooted so firmly in the constituency of the Secretary of State. Nevertheless, there are some big decisions that will have to be taken, and it is essential that they are taken in a strategic context. I have read suggestions that the joint strike fighter might be cancelled and have wondered at the sanity of that. The project is absolutely fundamental to my understanding of our procurement strategy.

The biggest problem is the mismatch between the commitments on the one side and the resources on the other. I hope that one of our significant commitments,

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namely Iraq, is now winding down to a point at which one can begin to get these things back into balance. As we look forward to what the purpose of our armed forces might be, I believe that we will have to look afresh at how we co-operate with our allies. As part of that we must recognise the different amounts of weight that different NATO countries have been pulling. There will have to be an enhanced role for co-operation in defence matters at a European level.

The Secretary of State said-and I had some sympathy with him-that his remarks on this issue were not designed to give rise to the sort of headlines that we saw about there being a European army. Let me make it perfectly clear that I would oppose the creation of a European army; it would be unthinkable for British citizens to sign straight up to a European army that was subject to a European political tier, but that is not at all what is being talked about. However, it is clear that the European members of NATO must pull more weight in the NATO partnership.

Given the economic strength and potential of Europe, European countries have a responsibility to co-operate much more than before, not only on procurement but in a wider sense. There is no need for anyone to be alarmed about this. There are circumstances in which British troops belonging to the British armed services will find themselves operating under either a UN flag or a NATO flag, and there is no reason why, in other circumstances, they should not also operate under Europe's colours. In my view, there is no encroachment on our sovereignty in that. There is, however, a responsibility for there to be more rational planning and co-operation with our European neighbours if we are to pull our weight in the future.

We should not be in splendid, budget-restricted and tired isolation; stronger capabilities, greater co-operation and constructive use of resources could only be of benefit to us, Europe, NATO and the world. I hope very much that, having mapped this out as a way forward, the Secretary of State will give more energy to it and ensure that it becomes a reality in future.