UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Of course, the House is answerable to the public for what it does, and of course at a general election it is right that the Prime Minister should go to the public and say, “Here’s what I’ve done during the last Parliament.” That applies to a wide variety of decisions that are not subject to a vote in this place. The second world war, the Falklands war and the first Gulf war were all conducted without a vote in this place, but the Prime Minister and the Government were none the less answerable to the public. Simply to say that having a vote here is the only way we can be answerable to the public is simplistic and not correct.

There is also a concern about what the consequences would be for the Backbench Business Committee of different outcomes of tonight’s debate. Suppose for a moment there were to be a no vote—it is very unlikely—and the House voted not to leave our troops in Afghanistan. What would then happen? Would the Government say, “Very well, the House of Commons has voted against staying in Afghanistan, so tomorrow we will order an immediate withdrawal.” I doubt that would be the case—indeed, I hope that would not be the case—and if it is not the case, what is the purpose of voting no? Does that not in itself undermine the force of the Backbench Business Committee? However, if the answer tonight is yes, does that mean we are staying in Afghanistan indefinitely? Does it mean that we support what the Government have said about withdrawing in 2015? What is the force, the importance, the wisdom of the vote we will take this evening?

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

As the person who tabled an amendment—and I would have liked to move it—calling for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, I should say that had the House voted for it tonight, it would have sent out an incredibly strong signal that we recognise that our presence in Afghanistan is not making us safer. Even our own security forces raise questions about whether our presence in Afghanistan is making this country safer. A vote tonight would be a wake-up call to look at a different strategy in Afghanistan.

[Mr Gray]

Of course, the hon. Lady is right. It would send out a strong signal, a wake-up call and all the other things she said. I just wonder whether formal Divisions and motions of this kind in the House are designed to send out signals and messages in the way she described. If the House votes that we do not wish to be in Afghanistan, surely it is right that the Prime Minister should be instructed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. How could it be that the majority of Members, who are answerable to the electorate, could say, “We have decided to withdraw from Afghanistan,” but the Defence Secretary and Prime Minister then say, “Well, despite what you said, we do not intend to withdraw”?

There is an extra complication, which is this. Let us imagine that the House were to vote for withdrawal and that there were to be an election in a year or two. What would bind the following Government, who might be of a different party from the current one? The strength of Backbench Business Committee motions, which I strongly support, is undermined by having a vote on something that is impossible for the Government then to carry out. That is something that the Committee perhaps ought to consider.

I very much hope that we will vote overwhelmingly in support of what our troops in Afghanistan are doing, which I strongly support personally. Every single bereaved family whose eyes I look into down the High street in Wootten Bassett, once or twice a week, would not understand it unless we sent out an enormously strong message that we firmly support what those lost soldiers have done in Afghanistan. If we do not do that, we will also be sending a message to the Taliban—the enemy—that we in this place do not support our troops on the ground. I would therefore prefer there to be no Division. I would like to return to the old tradition in this place, which is that the message to our troops on the ground is that this House unanimously supports them. I will be supporting the motion this evening—I will be in the Aye Lobby, as I hope 95% of Members will be. Even better would be to have no Division, but to send a unanimous message to our troops on the ground.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I start by echoing others in saying how much of a privilege it is to speak in this historic debate. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is an important tradition of this House that the names of the brave troops who have been killed in Afghanistan are read out at the beginning of each week’s Prime Minister’s Question Time. Yesterday, that roll call seemed to go on for a very long time, and after it the Deputy Prime Minister said:

“Each of those men was an heroic, selfless individual who has given his life for the safety of us and the British people.”—[Official Report, 8 September 2010; Vol. 515, c. 313.]

Each of those men was heroic and selfless, and our troops are doing an extraordinary job with great courage, but we need to nail the myth that their presence in Afghanistan is making the British people safer. We are constantly being told that our troops are fighting in Afghanistan to keep us safer in this country—the Minister said so earlier in this debate—yet even our security services suggest that the war on terrorism is making this country less safe, not more safe. We also know that the terror plots against Britain were hatched not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan and in Britain itself.

The Afghan war was put to the British people on a simple premise: that it was an act of self-defence in response to 9/11. The objective was supposed to be to capture and kill Osama bin Laden and prevent al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base from which to launch further attacks. That rationale now seems a distant memory; al-Qaeda has been dispersed effectively around the world—over the border into Pakistan and further afield into Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. So if our motive is really tracking down al-Qaeda, we are looking in the wrong place.

An alternative explanation given is that we are in Afghanistan to bring human rights to that country. Although some improvements were made between 2001 and 2005, the situation is, again, drastically deteriorating and for many Afghans, especially those outside Kabul, the improvements were only ever slight, or they were non-existent. Vicious warlords in rural areas can be just as bent on enforcing sharia law as the Taliban. According to Malalai Joya, the outspoken woman MP who was expelled from the Afghan Parliament, the Government of Hamid Karzai are

“full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban.”

That is notably true of the judiciary, which she said is “dominated by fundamentalists.” This is the President whose authority our troops are dying to defend but who passes the so-called “marital rape” law, which gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance for his wife if she refuses to obey his sexual demands.

On Afghanistan it seems that we are struck by a peculiar kind of amnesia; there is so much that we have forgotten. As Dan Plesch of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy has said, there is no sense that we sought to crush and dominate that country throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. We appear to have no memory of that, but the Afghans do. There is no sense either that the sentiment expressed time and time again by advocates of war—that to pull out now would be a betrayal of those who have given their lives so far—is exactly the same as was said about Vietnam. Yet it is clear that the real betrayal is to be sending more people to die in a war that cannot be won.

We might remember the last time a mighty superpower tried to subdue Afghanistan. The Soviet Union invaded in 1979, and within a few years its soldiers were losing their limbs or lives to landmines—the improvised explosive devices of their day—and the same kinds of angry complaints were made about a shortage of helicopters. As the journalist Jonathan Freedland has said, whatever other reactions we should have to the fate of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan—horror, grief or despair— surprise should certainly not be one of them.

It is not unpatriotic to seek to recognise that there is no military solution to the crisis in Afghanistan and to bring our troops home safely. Almost everyone agrees that sooner or later a negotiation will have to take place. My amendment says that what we should be doing is negotiating now—let us make it sooner. It will not be clean; it will be messy, as others have said. But let us make it sooner and stop the bloodshed sooner.

We should do so because the collective amnesia from which we seem to suffer at the moment has an enormous human cost. The evidence of escalating violence and increasing insecurity in Afghanistan was reinforced by the WikiLeaks circulation back in July of huge amounts of official communications and reports about the US war on the ground. Those leaked war logs reveal that coalition forces have tried to cover up the fact that they have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. As they increasingly use deadly reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada, civilian deaths rise still further.

As of last month, more than 330 British personnel or MOD civilians have died while serving in Afghanistan and several thousand more have been injured. More than 1,000 US troops have died. What of the Afghan casualties? As we know, no official count is kept, but the estimate is that there are many, many thousands. As the military forces increasingly use those deadly reaper drones, those civilian deaths rise still further. ISAF’s own confidential report of August 2009 concedes that its military strategy is causing what it calls “unnecessary collateral damage”. Leaders publicly say that their attacks are proportionate, yet US Lieutenant-Colonel David Kilcullen has said that the US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qaeda leaders at the expense of 700 civilian lives.

Alongside the US and British military in Afghanistan is a “shadow army” of private military and security companies, operating largely outside legal or democratic control. A recent article in Le Monde diplomatique asked, in characteristic diplomatic language:

“How can efforts to put down an insurgency be effective or credible when the countries contributing to the intervention force…use mercenaries whose motivation is not necessarily the restoration of peace?”

That is put very diplomatically, but one British contractor is quoted as saying, rather more bluntly, that for his firm, the more the security situation deteriorates, the better it is for business.

All that might not be so horrific if the lives of ordinary Afghans were significantly improving and the country was developing, but although on some indicators there has been some improvement—such as access to education, for example—overall the situation is bleak. Indeed, by some indicators, Afghans are getting poorer—child malnutrition, for example, has risen in many places, which is an effect of the chronic hunger that now affects more than 7 million people. Despite that, the US has spent 20 times as much on military operations as on development in Afghanistan while Britain has spent 10 times as much. The UN Security Council notes that 25 times as many Afghans die every year from under-nutrition and poverty as from violence.

Finally, there is not just a human cost but a financial cost, too. This is an unwinnable war that is costing us more than £7 million a day. If the Chancellor is looking for places to make cuts, he should start right here and bring the troops home. The financial cost to Afghanistan is huge, too. The Afghan Government spend a massive 30% of their budget on the security sector. That money would be much better spent on development in Afghanistan.