2 November 2011, Westminster, United Kingdom
I do not have time. I believe that some of my hon. friends and some opposition members will join us in the lobby and that a substantial number of hon. members will abstain. We and the abstainers will only grow in number in the days to come.
There is a fantastic dislocation between the atmosphere in the chamber and the atmosphere outside in the country, and still more in the wider world. One would not think, listening to the secretary of state for defence, that more than half the population of this country want the bombing to stop now so that humanitarian aid can flood in.
One would not know, listening to some of my colleagues who often lecture us about feminism, that more than half the women in Britain are demanding an end to the war. One would not know, listening to the Liberal Democrat spokespeople, that more than half the Liberal voters in the country are demanding an end to the war. One would not know, listening to some Labour Members, that millions - if the opinion polls are right, some 12m to 14m people - in this country were demanding an end to the war, or that millions of them were Labour voters.
One certainly would not know from some hon. members who represent constituencies with substantial Muslim populations that there was great unease and opposition to the war in our country. One would not know that the campaign was going disastrously around the world. One would not know that it is scarcely possible for an American politician to set foot in the Arab countries. Our prime minister has to go as what The Wall Street Journal unkindly described as "the American ambassador" to those countries.
When our prime minister goes to Arab countries, he receives short shrift from the leaders whom he meets. As my hon. friend the member for Linlithgow said, countries such as Iran are unequivocally against the bombing. Syria lectured the prime minister yesterday against bombing. If anyone here thinks that public opinion in the Arab world is with them, they are living in cloud cuckoo land.
I have the benefit of watching Arab television, listening to the phone-in programmes and reading the Arab press. If Members of Parliament think that they have the support of the Islamic world - 1.3bn people stron - they are living in cloud cuckoo land.
Our new friend General Musharraf promised his people at the outset that the campaign would be short, sharp and targeted. The fact that it is neither short nor sharp is the reason why it is now a dagger pointed at his heart. Everyone in Pakistan knows it. More than 90% of the people of Pakistan are demanding that their government desist from co-operating in the savage bombardment of Afghanistan. That is a fact. The secretary of state for international development may think that General Musharraf is secure in his post. I do not know anyone else who thinks that the self-appointed president of Pakistan is in any way secure.
Sharp? B52s, sticks of bombs, carpet bombing - is that sharp? We saw just how accurate the targeted, laser-guided weapons were. Now we have moved to carpet bombing from B52s. We are told that the bombing is of military positions, as if the military lines in Afghanistan were somehow wholly separate from the villages and towns in which people lived, not to mention from the displaced people in Afghanistan.
Sharp? Cluster bombs? I never thought I would hear Labour spokespeople defending cluster bombs. Is the military struggle with the Taliban so finely poised that we cannot eschew the use of cluster bombs? I watched the secretary of state for international development on the beach at Brighton - done up in her mine-clearing suit - weeping about the victims of land mines. She knows that in so far as cluster bombs are not land mines they are worse than land mines, because land mines at least are mapped - land mines dropped from aeroplanes are by definition unmappable.
I only have time to deal with a couple of additional points. The aims of a campaign such as this cannot be separated from its likely outcome. Members who wish it to be restricted to Afghanistan are fooling themselves: this war is going to be extended to other countries. If they do not want that to happen, they must join us now. If they do not want the Northern Alliance, they must join us.
The Northern Alliance are the people who destroyed and beggared Afghanistan in the first place, whose mediaeval obscurantism put the women in chains, destroyed the towns and cities, took the women out of the universities, hanged the former President Najibullah from a lamp-post - they put his penis in his mouth and left him hanging to rot. That is the Northern Alliance - your new best friends who you hope to put into power.
My last point is this: we want this war stopped during Ramadan - not out of respect for the Muslims, but because it would give the government a chance, without losing face, to send a message to the Islamic world that they are going to pause during the holy month of Ramadan; that they are going to consider how the project has gone so far; that they are going to consult more widely; that they are going to try diplomacy; that they are going to try legal means and political means during that pause in the war; and that, above all, they are going to flood the country with humanitarian assistance - food and kindness - which will do far more to win the masses of Afghanistan to their cause than bombing them from B52s and bombing them with cluster bombs will ever do.