The three speeches/headings immediately before

1. 1 earlier: John Stanley

   It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells), who we on the Foreign Affairs Committee remember as a Minister with a refreshing propensity to deviate from the official brief. The right hon. Gentleman, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) and the Front Benchers rightly focused on Afghanistan, and I wish to pay my own tribute to the extraordinary courage and skill of our service personnel there.

   I wish to devote my time to the situation in the western Balkans, which I visited last month with other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In the three most difficult countries, we face a time-critical issue. In Serbia, the bicycle analogy is now something of a cliché, but I think that it is applicable in this case. The reality is that we will probably not maintain the forward-looking Government of President Tadic unless there is continuing momentum towards EU accession. Although the EU has managed to sign up to, but not ratify, the stabilisation and association agreement for Serbia, there is now an impasse created by the Dutch position. We all understand that the Dutch are still transfixed by the passive role played by Dutch UN forces around the time of the Srebrenica massacre. It is still an explosive issue in the Netherlands, and it has already brought down one Dutch Government. However, having recognised the political realities in the Netherlands, I have to say that it is not reasonable to impose on Serbia conditions for making progress with its EU accession that are simply not realisable.

   My right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary mentioned the phrase "full co-operation with the ICTY", but the new chief prosecutor for the ICTY, Serge Brammertz, has said that he will not use that phrase, as he believes that it has become politicised. It is not therefore a realistic hurdle to put in front of Serbia. We all want to see Mladic and Hadzic alongside Karadzic in The Hague, but the issue is whether Mladic is still in Serbia. The Serbian Government can deliver only those people within their territories.

   The key issue will come next week, when we get the next report by Mr. Brammertz. That will be followed by an EU Foreign Ministers meeting the following week. My information is that the Brammertz report is likely to be as favourable as is reasonably possible as far as Serbia is concerned, and in the discussions that we had with Ministers in Belgrade, they were all determined to co-operate fully with the ICTY and to do their best to find Mladic and Hadzic if they were in Serbia. I therefore very much hope that if the ICTY report comes out as I believe it will, the Government and the Foreign Secretary will take the two crucial steps at the forthcoming EU Foreign Ministers meeting that will be necessary to keep Serbia's EU accession going forward. Those steps will be making progress towards unblocking the implementation of the interim agreement under Serbia's SAA, and beginning the EU ratification process for Serbia's SAA.

   Let me move from discussing Serbia to dealing with the position in Kosovo, where we also have grounds for a reasonable degree of cautious optimism. Among the Serbian municipalities, the municipality elections in Kosovo two years ago were effectively a write-off. There was virtually no turnout at all. In contrast, the elections two years later, which have just been completed-I refer to those south of the Ibar river-have been a remarkable success. The turnout has averaged between 20 and 25 per cent., which is a dramatic improvement and a dramatic increase in the willingness of Kosovo Serbs now to participate in elections organised from Pristina.

   The critical issue now is what will happen in the elections for the two remaining Serbian municipalities, in particular north Mitrovica. President Sejdiu has wisely deferred those elections for six months, until 15 May next year, to enable the maximum possible time to ensure that they are held on a free and fair basis. That will be a serious challenge in north Mitrovica. The area is dominated by Serb hardliners. Their control is exercised by threat, intimidation, telephone calls threatening actions if people participate and knocks on the door at night. In the past, those intimidatory tactics have had considerable success.

   A huge responsibility now lies with EULEX, the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo. EULEX is the largest civilian deployment under the European security and defence policy, and something of the ESDP's civilian credibility hangs on its success. EULEX has six months flat to try to create conditions in Kosovo under which the elections can be held on what we hope will be a reasonably free and fair basis in north Mitrovica. If that can be achieved, we shall have moved a long way to maintaining the integration of Kosovo and creating conditions in which its progress towards EU accession can take place.

   I come finally to Bosnia and Herzegovina. My right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary was entirely correct in his opening remarks when he referred to the fact that the position in Bosnia and Herzegovina is going backwards. As we are all aware, the constitutional arrangements that are now in place were a brilliant triumph at the point at which they were concluded-in other words, the Dayton peace agreement of 1995, which had the hugely beneficial effect of stopping the terrible bloodshed taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was the most serious violence and bloodshed to have taken place in Europe since the end of world war two.

   That peace agreement was achieved at a price. The price was a constitution that contains a series of ethnic blocks-blocks at the state level; blocks at the entity level; block after block after block. Although the agreement brought peace, it has not brought a constitution that is viable in terms of a governmental decision process for EU accession. The EU recognises that, the US recognises it, the Bosniaks recognise it and the Bosnian Croatians recognise it. The one group that does not, of course, is the Bosnian Serbs. At the moment, unless they can be persuaded to amend the Dayton constitution and to create a viable governmental structure at the top to deal with EU accession, the impasse will continue.

   This issue is also time critical. The present EU-US negotiating team will not be in play for ever; it is time limited. Indeed, I would say that it is crucial that progress be made in the next two or three months. I hope that the British Government, along with our EU and US partners, will use all possible influence to prevail on Mr. Dodik, and to make him understand the reality that he is taking the Republika Srpska into a complete cul de sac. There is no future for the people of the Republika Srpska if it is an isolated, supposedly independent, mini-state with no prospect of going anywhere. I do not believe that it will receive material support from Serbia for much longer, if at all, and I do not think that it can hope for very much from the Russians either. It is in a cul de sac, and Mr. Dodik needs to be persuaded that that is the case, so that Bosnia and Herzegovina can make progress.

   Over the past 15 years, we in the EU, the US and Britain as an individual country have all invested enormous amounts of time, effort, money and resources into the western Balkans. I earnestly believe that, having made that investment, we cannot allow any of those countries to fail.

2. 2 earlier: Kim Howells

   I am certainly not making this speech or writing anything on behalf of the Intelligence and Security Committee; I can tell my hon. Friend that for a kick-off.

   There are significant differences between the aims of the Afghan Taliban and their brother organisation in Pakistan, and al-Qaeda. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are fighting to take control of their respective countries, while al-Qaeda's objectives remain much more global. Al-Qaeda wants to destroy America and its western allies, as well as the Governments of the middle eastern states that it considers to be too pro-western. It has little love for Shi'a Islam or any other variation of its Wahhabi and Deobandi Sunni orthodoxies.

   The differences between the aims of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, however, do not mean that they can easily be prised apart. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) looks as if he has had enough of this, but I want him to listen. I believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are simply different faces of a common ideology-what one observer has defined as an

   "obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam."

   That has manifested itself in the form of murder and mutilation, from New York, through Madrid and London, to Mumbai and Bali. Osama bin Laden is but the best known of these obdurate non-compromisers; he and his disciples have a record of moving on, and they will continue to do so. As I said, al-Qaeda's response to the superb professionalism of the British armed forces and those of our allies has been to seek to re-establish for itself sanctuaries in fragile, troubled territories such as northern Yemen and war-torn south-central Somalia, as well as Pakistan. I do not believe that we or any other NATO member intend to deploy large numbers of our soldiers to fight in Yemen and Somalia, despite the possibility that al-Qaeda will use those places, as it used Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, to train its bombers and assassins.

   If we accept that al-Qaeda continues to pose a deadly threat to the United Kingdom and if we know that it is capable of changing the locations of its bases and modifying its attack plans, we must also accept that we have a duty to question the wisdom of prioritising, in Government spending on counter-terrorism, the deployment of our forces to Afghanistan. I am arguing once again that it is time to ask whether the fight against those intent on murdering British citizens might be served better by diverting into the work of the UK Border Agency and our police and intelligence services much of the additional finance and resources swallowed up by the costs of maintaining British forces in Afghanistan.

   General Dutton, the deputy commander of ISAF, says that it would be impossible to deny al-Qaeda the advantage of having training camps in a future Taliban-controlled Afghanistan without there being substantial US, NATO and Afghan Government troops on the ground for many years to come. I was interested to hear what the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea said about this issue; I very much agree with him. General Dutton argues that it will be impossible to destroy training camps-the potential springboards for terrorist attacks-simply by patrolling from the skies. In other words, the use of airborne firepower will have to be supplemented by very large numbers of ground troops.

   If previous conflicts are anything to go by, General Dutton is probably right. However, I am not convinced that life for al-Qaeda camp dwellers could not be made extremely dangerous and uncomfortable as a consequence of the attentions of unmanned Predator aircraft, attack helicopters, guided missiles and so on. The current wisdom is that NATO and ISAF should continue to build up troops, including British troops. General Dutton said recently that the ideal number of troops required to turn the tide in a country such as Afghanistan, with its 28 million people, is around half a million. Currently, many fewer than half that number of foreign and Afghan troops are available to him. General McChrystal has complained about that and wants more troops. Recent attacks in Kabul and other centres suggest that the current balance of territorial control is at best likely to remain, or more likely to shift, in favour of the Taliban.

   I hope that a Government will emerge in Kabul who are capable of convincing the Afghan people that they have a society worth protecting from the misogynistic, mediaeval cruelty and backwardness of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but I sense that the vast majority of the British public share my pessimism and believe that it will be a very long time before that happens.

   I also sense that the British public, for better or worse but increasingly, will become less tolerant of Governments placing at risk the lives of our armed forces by deploying them to such conflicts in support of outcomes that are complex and confusing. In other words, I believe that we have no choice but to seek different ways of ensuring this country's security, ways not only that the public find more acceptable but that will be more successful.

3. 3 earlier: Andrew MacKinlay

   The significance of what my right hon. Friend wrote and is saying derives not from the fact that he was a distinguished Foreign Office Minister-although he was-but that he is Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. That means either that he knows what he is talking about because he has seen the intelligence, or, if he has not seen it, that he should have done.