Political

Nick Harvey outlines the UK’s objectives in Afghanistan

Minister of State for the Armed Forces and Liberal Democrat MP Nick Harvey set out the government’s objectives in Afghanistan in a speech he gave during his visit to Denmark this week.

Nick Harvey made clear the limits to what the government is now seeking to achieve:

We do not seek a perfect Afghanistan, but one able to maintain its own security and prevent the return of Al-Qaeda.

This is primarily a mission of national security.

We are neither colonisers nor occupiers.

We are there under United Nations Security Council endorsement and at the invitation of the Afghan Government.

We are not in Afghanistan to create a carbon copy of a western democracy, and we are not there to convert the people to western ways.

We seek the government of Afghanistan by the Afghans for the Afghans.

We insist only that it does not pose a threat to our security, our interests or those of our allies.

Neither a fully functioning democracy nor an end to corruption is necessary to meet those aims – and wisely so given that if those are the yardsticks for military intervention in a country, the UK would be militarily committed in dozens and dozens of countries around the world. Because of the more modest nature of the aims, Nick Harvey was able to repeat the pledge to withdraw British troops from combat within this Parliament:

Britain is clear that we will no longer have troops in a combat role by 2015, but we foresee an enduring role in the country as part of a wide relationship.

Harvey’s speech also highlighted how deeply intermingled Britain’s defence forces now are with other countries, well beyond the relations with the French which caught the news earlier this year:

British Prime Minister David Cameron said in his meeting with Lars Lokke Rasmussen in August: “our troops have fought together, have suffered together and sometimes, tragically, have died together.”

Over the last 20 years this has taken place first in the Balkans, then in Iraq and now in Afghanistan.

But we are also side by side fighting piracy off the Horn of Africa, under the NATO operation Ocean Shield.

We have a strong and active training, exercise and exchange programme.

We train together for Afghanistan and Denmark has air crew embedded in Joint Helicopter Command – and at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters co-ordinating the Afghan mission.

We conduct together a series of planned activity such as the annual JOINT WARRIOR exercise.

British personnel are embedded in your Defence Ministry, Army Operations Command, and Royal Navy and Royal Air Force pilots fly your Lynx, Merlin and F16.

Nick Harvey’s speech both started and ended with a strong emphasis on the need for countries to work together:

There is an old Danish proverb: “No one is rich enough to do without a neighbour.”

The English poet John Donne put the same sentiment this way: “No man is an island, entire of itself.  Every man is a piece of the continent”…

No nation – no matter how large, no matter how powerful, no matter how rich in resources – can hope to secure its national interests acting alone…

I am a Liberal Democrat.

We are the most internationalist and pragmatically pro-European party in Westminster.

We instinctively understand the need to work together with other nations – and we embrace interdependence.

This new British Government will look outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards.

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