Afghanistan Update — House of Lords, 2018-07-11
Topic: Defense
Frederick Richard Penn Curzon (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for their support for this announcement and, indeed, for their well-directed questions. Some of the questions from both noble Lords coincided, and I shall attempt to address them all in turn The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked me about the process that led to this decision. He is absolutely right to remind the House of the lessons from Chilcot, and that there needs to be a formal deliberative process across government for a decision as momentous as this—and that is indeed what happened. The UK was initially asked to consider this additional deployment in March of this year—that request came from NATO itself. We subsequently did so; that is to say, the Ministry of Defence considered the feasibility and a decision, following a discussion, was taken formally by the National Security Council on 26 June. It was then endorsed formally by the Treasury and by No. 10 The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, was again correct to make the point that the decision to do this was based not only on the fact that we thought it was the right thing for Afghanistan, for the UK and for NATO, but that it was intended—as I hope it will—to underline our commitment to NATO and the fact that Britain has particular skills that it can offer in a context such as this. I am sure that that message will not have been lost on any of our NATO partners The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, made the perfectly fair point that we will be sending troops into harm’s way. I would, however, just qualify that by making clear, as the Statement does, that the roles that are being and will be performed by our personnel in Afghanistan are non-combat roles. They are therefore quite distinct from the kind of role that we saw being performed under the ISAF banner before 2015, when our troops were very definitely on the front line against the Taliban. Chiefly, our troops will be charged with supplementing the Kabul defence force within Kabul itself. We have to remind ourselves that the NATO mission operates under the banner of "Train, Advise, Assist". The UK contribution will therefore be to support that NATO mission but—to come back again to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe—the safety and security of our troops remains, as it always will, our key priority. We keep the protection measures for our personnel under constant review and will not hesitate to adapt those measures to the changing threats. They are benefiting from bespoke equipment, such as the Foxhound armoured vehicle, which is suited to the streets of Kabul. Essentially, as far as force protection is concerned, our personnel are equipped and mandated to protect themselves, as well as to protect coalition and diplomatic personnel. It is the Afghan national defence and security forces which are responsible for maintaining security in Kabul Both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness asked about the timescale. I hope that they will understand that it is not possible to put a timescale on the deployment of our troops within the NATO mission in Afghanistan. All NATO allies are agreed that we will continue to support the Afghan national defence and security forces until the conditions are right for our collective withdrawal, which includes the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people of Afghanistan without support from international forces, and when progress has been made on a peace process The noble Baroness—and, I think, the noble Lord—asked what kind of training we are delivering in Afghanistan. As I have already said, the mission goes under the strapline "Train, Advise, Assist". The UK is mentoring and advising Afghan personnel, helping to develop capable and independent Afghan government and security structures, and working in the mission headquarters and the Afghan security ministries. An example of this is at the Afghan national army officer academy, where we are working alongside our NATO allies and Afghan partners to produce the next generation of Afghan military leaders Finally, the noble Baroness asked about the messages that we wish to deliver this week at the NATO summit. We have a number of objectives for that summit. Essentially, they can be summarised as making NATO more modern and adaptable. NATO continues to adapt to ensure that it is less bureaucratic, better at prioritising its activity and more capable of taking and implementing decisions quickly. The principles for all those things were largely agreed at the NATO summit in Cardiff and endorsed at the subsequent summit in Warsaw. We are confident that allies will agree ways to deliver those objectives, with the aim in view of strengthening deterrence and defence against Russia, increasing our efforts on tackling terrorism and addressing the threats presented by cyber and hybrid warfare. That very much relates to how we can improve readiness so that we can make sure that we have the right forces in the right place so that they can act when needed to protect our people. I believe that the UK already has an important part in that process, supporting the design of a new NATO command structure, and I think that we can be very proud that we will be committing an extra 100 posts to that structure, taking our commitment to over 1,000 UK service personnel.