Downing Street Says » Afghanistan

Put by the BBC’s political editor that there was an inconsistency between today’s announcement regarding troops to Afghanistan and Downing Street pouring cold water at the end of last week, the PMOS said that in the spirit of equal honesty, the question showed a complete disregard of the proper process as outlined at lobby last week. The PMOS made no apology for sticking to that process. The process was that military commanders on the ground, as we said, made an assessment. That assessment was then passed to their superiors in London, and it was then assessed within the MOD, where it was the passed to the Prime Minister who made a decision. It would have been totally wrong for the PMOS to pre-empt any element of that process, and the decisions on this were not taken until the weekend. Therefore, the Defence Secretary would go to the Commons to outline the position. The PMOS said again that he made no apology at all for not engaging in hypothetical speculation, which as people knew, was a sin not to be committed by the PMOS.

Put that was it not a greater sin to give the impression that something was not going to happen, when it actually was going to happen, the PMOS replied that the impression he hoped he had given was that no decisions had been taken, which was correct. The impression the PMOS also gave was that no requests had been passed to Downing Street, at the same time as people were reporting the reverse. It would have been totally wrong to give the impression that the process was further on than it actually was.

Asked if the nature of the mission had changed, the PMOS said that it had not changed at all. There was a danger that reconstruction was no longer seen as not part of the mission, whereas, it was at the centre of the whole mission. One of the most important elements in the mission was reconstruction, and the statement this afternoon would reflect that. What we needed to show people in Helmand province was that our presence there would result in life getting better for them. Part of that was security, but part of it was also providing the economic and physical structure that would allow the economy to start growing.

Asked about the reconstruction progress, the PMOS said the journalist should speak to DFID for more details. However, as Hilary Benn had said this morning, the fact that there were now more schools and hospitals. There were girls being taught in schools, which was against the wishes of the Taliban, which was why they had taken the vicious actions that they had against teachers. The PMOS said that a place was not instantly transformed, as it took time. However, the important thing was that the infrastructure, equipment and personnel was put in place in order to make that change.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Monday, July 10, 2006

Afghanistan

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries