Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy was speaking to the Henry Jackson Society think tank.
Britain must learn the lessons of the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan if it is to combat the spread of violent Islamist extremism, shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy has warned.
Speaking to the Henry Jackson Society think tank, he called for a new focus on “preventative intervention” avoiding a repeat of the “heavy-footprint operations” of the past.
In a move to distance Labour from the past policies of Tony Blair, he criticised the interventions in Afghanistan for a “primitive understanding” of the local population and culture and in Iraq for a “serious deficit” in the comprehension of Shia-Sunni dynamics.
“A principal flaw of past operations was to mis-understand the complexity of the threat,” he said.
