The Conservatives have called for the government to do more to stop regimes like the Taliban gaining power.

The party's shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram argued on Tuesday that the international community could have avoided having to overthrow the former-Afghan regime by intervening earlier.

Ancram also argued that it was time to "end the outdated cold war mentality" of some countries.

He argued that the principle of pre-emption should aim to halt terrorism, stop states acquiring Weapons of Mass Destruction and prevent flashpoints such as Kashmir and the Middle East.

Ending the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan had helped halt future terrorist outrages but if the group had been prevented from taking over in the first place, he argued, events could have been different.

"By pre-empting the terrorists' opportunities to launch further attacks on such a scale we have hopefully saved many lives. Arguably, however, the international community could have stopped it getting to this stage by intervening earlier but the lessons of post-cold war changes were not yet learnt in their entirety," he said.

If governments focused on acting early, Ancram argued economic and humanitarian disasters could also be either prevented or lessened.

"The end of the Cold War has dramatically altered the world's political and diplomatic landscape. It calls for altered thinking on international affairs and for fresh perspectives," he said.

The events of September 11 showed what happened when nations failed to deal with problems around the world.

"In today's globalised world what happens elsewhere affects us. Because of this pre-emption must work in many different ways - military pre-emption despite the fact that this is what springs most readily to many peoples minds, is in many ways not as important as economic, diplomatic or political pre-emption," Ancram said.