Lord Garden: My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for repeating in your Lordships' House the Defence Secretary’s Statement. From these Benches, we join in paying tribute to our brave men and women in the Armed Forces serving under very difficult and challenging circumstances.
Looking first at the Statement’s reference to Iraq and Afghanistan, I again regret that we are having to respond to developments in those two difficult and important operations through the process of a Statement rather than full debates, as we should have. On Iraq, there is much optimism in the Statement but no assessment of why things have been going so badly. Are the Iraqi people really, as it says, seeing, “improvements in their daily lives” when they now die violently at the rate of about 100 per day? Does the Minister agree with the assessment of his colleague, Jack Straw, that the situation is “dire”? Does he agree with the US Marine Corps Colonel Devlin’s intelligence assessment sent to the Pentagon about al-Anbar province, in which he said that there were no functioning central Iraqi government institutions in the province and that local governments were under the “control of the insurgents”?
In our area of responsibility, can the Minister tell us in more detail what has been the trend in the security situation? The Statement refers to the handing over of responsibility in two areas. How has al-Muthanna province been in terms of violence and governance since our withdrawal in June? In Basra, what progress has been made in the difficult relationships with the local police?
Most importantly, what is our strategy for the future of Iraq? The Statement talks about there being much debate about the way forward. Are the British Government involved in the work of the US envoy James Baker? What does the Minister feel about the widely discussed US strategy for dividing the country into three parts? What are we going to do if that becomes US policy?
Turning to Afghanistan, as the Statement says, the latest extension of the NATO mission is to cover the whole of the country. That means that NATO is now responsible for all of Afghanistan, but there are still 8,000 US-led troops operating under Operation Enduring Freedom and all their air power is retained under American control. The Pentagon press statement issued at the same time as the NATO press statement states:
“We”—meaning the US—“will continue to lead the counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, train and equip the Afghan national security forces and assist with reconstruction”.So we now have both NATO and Operation Enduring Freedom doing the same jobs in overlapping geographical areas. Can the Minister share with us the military logic behind that arrangement?
Next, how are the Government responding to General Richards’s assessment reported yesterday morning that we must improve the lot of the Afghans within the next six months if they are not to turn to the Taliban for support? It is also clear that there is a turf war between the military and development agencies in helping Afghanistan—I trust that we shall explore that more deeply when we debate the Unstarred Question this evening. Can the Minister assure us that the Ministry of Defence is totally content with the work that the Department for International Development is doing and does not have its eyes on the department's funding?
Turning to the pay proposals in the Statement, from these Benches we welcome the tangible recognition through a flat-rate, tax-free operational bonus that the services are not just working in challenging circumstances but have also been operating beyond the defence planning assumptions year after year. We agree that a straight payment is better than trying to introduce some complex tax regime through taking them out of the tax bracket when they are away. However, it will take us some time to consider the detail, which is not in the Statement, to decide how different servicemen and women are affected and it will be very important that it is seen as a fair system by all members of the Armed Forces and the reserves. Can the Minister assure us that there will be an opportunity for the MoD to change the arrangements when anomalies surface, as they certainly will over the coming months? I also want to know how the Armed Forces Pay Review Body will treat this allowance. It will be bad if we end up having the X factor reduced next April because of the allowance that is now being implemented. Let us hope it is exempted from that.
I welcome in the Statement the assurance that the defence budget will not have to fund this extra money from the current budget. I trust that that will remain the case into future years.
Finally, more generally, what are the Government doing about the degree of tasking that our Armed Forces are now experiencing? They need either more people or fewer tasks. The Government must do something soon.