Afghanistan (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, few individuals and no organisations emerge unscathed from last August’s debacle in Afghanistan, and I regret to say that our House is among those institutions, having failed to find time to debate our committee’s report, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, for more than year—a momentous and tragic year for Afghanistan and for Britain’s involvement in that country. If our conventions are responsible for that delay, there is something seriously wrong with the way they are being operated. It is beyond parody. I make the rather unusual request to the Minister that he convey to the usual channels the unanimous view so far in this debate that this sort of thing should not be allowed to happen again.

I add, with some regret, that the Government do not seem to emerge very well from that debacle. Just look at the bland complacency of their response to the report or the evidence that Ministers gave to the committee before we wrote it. In neither was the slightest sign of awareness of the disasters that lay a few brief months ahead. Could that debacle have been avoided? I rather doubt it, once President Trump signed off on a deal with the Taliban in February 2020, a deal that totally ignored the views of the elected Government of Afghanistan and made withdrawal in no way conditional on the Taliban’s performance. Clearly, the Biden Administration made some major tactical errors, but the die was cast by President Trump. Our own Government have deplored the way this was handled, and I would like the Minister to tell the Committee what representations the Government made over that when the Trump deal was being negotiated in early 2020 and what representations were made to the Biden Administration when they were shaping their Afghan policy in early 2021.

That is enough history. What can be salvaged from this shipwreck? First, we need to help the long-suffering people of Afghanistan—faced with starvation, draconian and inhumane social policies and the loss of much of women’s and girls’ education and job opportunities—as best we can. That means funding UN and other international agencies which are capable of getting food, medicines and development assistance through to those who need it. It also means assisting any of our NGOs which are capable of continuing to operate in Afghanistan and, in particular, assisting them to convey funds to their Afghan employees who are carrying out this essential work. I hope the Minister will have something to say about that. It also means a generous approach to supporting refugees and receiving asylum seekers who are fleeing in well-justified fear for their lives. What are the Government’s policies on the ground and in practice on these three points? I know what has been announced, but it is not always what is happening.

Should we be recognising the Taliban in any way beyond the inevitable extent needed to assist our humanitarian efforts? I do not believe so and I welcome that that also appears to be the view of the Government. What is the case for recognition of a group which has seized power by force, refuses to share power with representatives of many sections of the population and flouts the provisions of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—itself an integral part of UN membership?

We, in close concert with the US and the EU, surely need to find ways of working with Afghanistan’s neighbours, most obviously Pakistan, but also Iran, China and Afghanistan’s northern neighbours. Whatever our other differences with these countries, we share many broad objectives; for instance, avoiding Afghanistan again becoming a base for terrorist attacks—which could be a serious problem for Pakistan, China and Iran—ensuring that it does not remain contagiously unstable, and reducing the flow of illicit drugs. Again, this is an objective we share with many others.

Even if we have different views on the best road to take to achieve those objectives, we share quite a lot of common ground and should overcome any hesitancy about dealing with these matters in concert with others. The recent UN Security Council resolution on humanitarian aid was very welcome in that respect. What prospect is there of building on that with a wider UN approach which could underpin the pursuit of those objectives?

Clearly, we must not turn a blind eye to the lessons from the debacle in Afghanistan, but nor should we draw too sweeping and unjustified conclusions from it by flinching from the challenges we face around the world—not least from China and Russia—and from the need to address collectively the problems of state failure, of gross abuses of international humanitarian law and of the consequences of climate change.

I hope I may be forgiven for concluding on a rather personal note. It is now a little over 60 years since my wife and I, a recently married couple, drove up to the gates of the British embassy compound in Kabul, whose Curzonesque splendour was more a reminder of Britain’s imperial past than its present state. We had travelled by Land Rover from Tehran. Even in my wildest dreams—let us be honest, nightmares—I could not then have imagined the circumstances in which today’s debate is taking place. The Afghanistan of 1961 was an often overlooked but peaceful backwater in the Cold War—the safest place on earth to be, as I thought a year later during the Cuban missile crisis. The last 40 years have turned Afghanistan into a horrendous reminder of the mayhem and human suffering that can result from political miscalculations—miscalculations by Afghanistan’s own rulers, by its meddling neighbours, and by the two great superpowers of the day, the Soviet Union and the USA. One can only hope that President Putin has that in mind as he ponders his next moves on Ukraine.