A speech to the House of Commons by the Prime Minister about the Government’s strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Read the transcript
With permission, Mr Speaker, following my visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan earlier this week, I should like to make a statement on the government’s strategy for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
First, Mr Speaker, I am sure the whole house will join me in paying tribute to all those serving in our armed forces - and remembering with gratitude those who have given their lives in the service of our country. As I saw again on Monday, our armed forces are facing enormous challenges with great skill, determination and courage. They are the best in the world - and we are immensely proud of them.
Mr Speaker, our counter-terrorist strategy published last month set out how we are working to tackle terrorism around the globe but one priority - indeed the greatest international priority - is the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are the crucible for global terrorism. They are the breeding ground for international terrorists. They are the source of a chain of terror that links the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are, of course, different countries at different stages of development; but as the document we are publishing today emphasises, together they face this shared challenge of terrorism.
In Afghanistan the afghan Taliban are using mines and suicide bombs to carry out attacks on our troops and on innocent civilians.
In Pakistan, the army and security services are now dealing with the wider territorial ambitions made clear by the Pakistan Taliban. Last year alone, in Pakistan itself, 2,000 civilians and security personnel were killed in terrorist attacks. Suicide bombs in Pakistan, once relatively rare, were used 60 times last year and are at the same level this year - an almost ten-fold rise in over two years.
And we know that terrorist leaders are orchestrating attacks around the world from these border areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and we know also of the stronger connections that now exist between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, and between them and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and this requires us to take further more determined and concerted action.
In our December 2007 strategy, we made right long term decisions for Afghanistan, decisions that were reinforced in the conclusions of the United States review last month.
Now, following our own review to identify what is working and where we need to go further, I want to set out an updated strategy for our actions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan: and how we will mobilise our resources to do this.
In both countries we are working with elected governments - including through our commitments to support their economic development, and combined development and stabilisation expenditure of £255 million, £256 million and £339 million - a total of almost £1 billion in each over three years; and in both cases our involvement in these countries is focused on the tasks that are necessary to enable these countries to counter the terrorist threat themselves.
For Afghanistan our strategy is to ensure the country is strong enough as a democracy to withstand and overcome the terrorist threat. And strengthening afghan control and resilience will require us to intensify our work in the following key areas:
- First we will build up the Afghan police and army, and build up the rule of law - and we should now adopt the stated goal of enabling district-by-district, province-by-province handover to afghan control.
- Second, we want to strengthen Afghan democracy at all levels - including by ensuring credible and inclusive elections and improving security through that period.
- Thirdly, we want to help strengthen local government in Afghanistan, not least the traditional afghan structures, such as the local shuras.
- And fourth, we want to give people in Afghanistan a stake in their future - promoting economic development as the best way of helping the Afghan people to achieve not just stability but prosperity.
In Pakistan, our strategy to tackle the same underlying problem of terrorism results in different proposals
First, we want to work with the elected government and the army – but while Afghanistan’s forces are at an early stage, so international forces have to play a front line role, by contrast Pakistan has a large, a well-funded army and we want to work with them to help them counter terrorism by taking more control of the border areas.
And secondly in Pakistan - not least through our support for education and development - we want to prevent young people falling under the sway of violent and extremist ideologies.
Now let me just address these proposals in turn.
Mr Speaker, as I said to the house in December 2007, success in strengthening Afghanistan to withstand terrorism will ultimately depend on building the Afghan’s capacity to take control of their own security.
So we want to work to build up the Afghan army from its current strength of 80,000 to a total of 134,000 by late 2011 and I believe that we will need even more numbers than that for the future. Already 300 of our forces in Helmand are dedicated to training them. Nationally we are leading the training of non-commissioned officers and have trained over 18,000. And together with France we have also trained over 1,000 army officers.
Afghan army brigades, as many here know, have fought bravely alongside our troops, and we saw in a major operation to drive insurgents out of Nad-e-ali earlier this year. Ninety per cent of the Afghan public also see their army as an honest and fair institution.
But the same is not true yet of the police and it must be achieved if Afghans are to spread the rule of law throughout their country. We have 120 civilian and military advisers working with the police. I can tell the house that, as resources are freed from the south as the us moves in, we will over time shift the balance of our operations away from front line combat and towards an enhanced contribution to training both the army in Afghanistan and its police.
Mr Speaker - at its sixtieth anniversary summit last month, the NATO alliance unanimously agreed that supporting the Afghans to build a stronger democratic Afghanistan was its highest priority.
Afghanistan is about to hold its second presidential election. A safe, credible and inclusive election is essential. We are providing £15 million for election support. President Karzai has given me personal assurances about his determination to ensure credible and inclusive elections and I also reiterated to him the concerns that we have and the whole world has over the Shia family law and I welcome his decision to review this draft bill.
I urged him to step up his government’s efforts to tackle the corruption that has discouraged Afghans from backing democracy against the Taliban. And I made clear that we will back the Afghan government as it takes forward the progress of reconciliation.
Our aim is divide, isolate and then remove the insurgents - offering, to those prepared to renounce violence and accept the afghan constitution, the prospect of work and security. But those who refuse must prepare for a long and difficult battle in which there can only be one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state.
Now, just as the Afghans need to take control of their own security - they need to build legitimate governance.
So Mr Speaker, we will strengthen our efforts on localisation and on civilianisation and the promotion of economic development so that the Afghan people have a stake in their own future.
Our local joint civilian and military teams are supporting the Afghan social outreach programme in Helmand. In key districts we are helping the governors reach out to the traditional tribal system through shuras - which, as I saw on Monday, are now empowering local solutions to local problems.
To support this, we have doubled the number of deployed civilian experts. We are encouraging other countries to follow this example. We are urging the United Nations to play a greater role in coordinating the civilian effort.
And last month the Secretary for International Development announced an additional £50 million for development assistance. And today he is publishing his Afghanistan country plan.
Britain remains Afghanistan’s third biggest donor, with more than £500 million committed over the next four years.
In Helmand, this allows us to support the building of a road to Lashkar Gah and the refurbishment of the hydropower dam from which up to 200,000 people will benefit with irrigation.
We are also investing £30 million over four years to work with the government on a new programme of agricultural support - and that includes the wheat-see programme in Helmand as viable alternatives to poppy - and, nationally, improved access to credit so that more Afghans can invest in farming.
Following my visit last December, the Defence Secretary and I approved a temporary increase - until August - in the number of British troops deployed to Afghanistan: from just over 8,000 to around 8,300. Now, in order to strengthen security throughout the election period, I have authorised a further increase to 9,000 until the autumn.
And to ensure that our forces are properly protected, especially from the growing threat of mines and roadside bombs, we will be deploying permanent additional units for this purpose: some are in the process of deploying now, with others joining them soon.
After the election and through the autumn we plan to return our troop numbers, to 8,300. As always we will keep the situation under review based on the situation on the ground.
Mr Speaker, I am determined that Britain fulfil its international commitments. I believe that, with a deployment of over 8,000 troops, concentrated in the Taliban heartland of the south, and with the additional costs of the reserve increased from £700 million in 2006, to £1.5 billion in 07-08 and then to £2.6 billion in 08-09 – and an estimate in last week’s budget of £3 billion for 09-10 - we are shouldering our share of the burden in Afghanistan. And as more NATO troops deploy to the south we will be able to share that burden more fairly. At the NATO summit this year, allies offered another 5,000 additional troops in addition to the extra 21,000 combat and training troops the us plans to deploy, many of which are destined for the south. I also welcome the additional Australian deployment announced this morning - an extra 450 personnel bringing Australian troops to 1,550.
We will continue to place the highest priority on the safety of our forces, providing the necessary funding, with over £1 billion in urgent operational requirements for vehicles in the last three years: including ‘mastiff’ patrol vehicles, which are among the best-protected in the world. And we have increased helicopter numbers and flying hours by 60 per cent over the last two years.
Mr Speaker, it has become increasingly clear over the last year just how crucial Pakistan - and its border area with Afghanistan - has become: both to stability in Afghanistan and to our national security at home. These border areas are used by violent extremists as a base for launching attacks against the coalition forces in Afghanistan.
As president Obama has said - Al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.
So while the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan are different, and they require different approaches, we can no longer consider the terrorist threats arising in the two countries in isolation from each other.
While in Pakistan, I met with President Zardari, Prime Minister Gilani and with former Prime Minister Sharif and we discussed stronger action against terrorism and violent extremism.
We are agreeing clear, shared principles for our bilateral relationship: that terrorism and violent extremism present the most significant threat to both Britain and Pakistan; and through Pakistan and especially in the border areas, there must be long-term good governance and economic development to underpin progress on security.
To deliver on these principles, we agreed an enhanced strategic dialogue to bring together our senior diplomatic, military and intelligence teams on a more regular basis. We will support this closer co-operation through a £10 million programme of counter-terrorism capacity-building working with Pakistan’s police and security services.
And as Pakistan steps up the fight on terrorism so we will focus greater attention on the basic human challenges Pakistan still faces - in education and health and respect for human rights - in each of which failure serves only to fuel radicalisation.
Britain’s development programme in Pakistan will become our second largest worldwide. We will provide £665 million in assistance over the next four years but we will refocus much of our aid - including over £125 million of education spending - on the border areas of Pakistan.
We are working for the establishment of a World Bank trust fund for development in these border areas. We will press other countries to increase their contribution.
With UK support, the recent friends of Pakistan meeting and donor conference in Tokyo have already delivered pledges of $5 billion over the next two years.
Next month President Zardari will visit the United Kingdom. We will take forward our shared efforts to tackle terrorism, support economic development and harness the international community’s assistance for Pakistan but we will continue our discussions to agree a concordat to strengthen our practical cooperation to meet these terrorist challenges.
Mr Speaker, 40 countries and more have shown the international community’s long term commitment to Afghanistan. In December 2007, we led the way with our proposals to complement the brave action of our troops by building up the afghan army and police and local government to give afghans more control over their affairs.
Tackling terrorism in and from the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan drives forward our new set of proposals today.
We will compliment the necessary military action with economic, social and political progress aimed at building stronger and more effective democracies and strengthening the ability of the Afghan and Pakistan authorities to take greater responsibility for action against terrorism - building the strength in Afghanistan and Pakistan upon which their security and our security here in Britain ultimately depend. I commend this statement to the House.
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