Afghanistan

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

There is some evidence for it. My right hon. Friend will probably have seen evidence on his television screen of individual Taliban commanders. The Taliban are not a monolithic organisation but individual insurgent commanders who have indicated an attraction to the ideology of ISIL. That will be a problem that has to be managed. Everything is relative, is it not? A few years ago, we talked about the Taliban as an extreme Islamist movement. In the light of what we have seen in ISIL, it is probably fair to say that much of the Taliban agenda looks more like a nationalist agenda. It remains our belief that significant elements of the insurgency in Afghanistan are capable of being incorporated into a peace process. There will be small elements that are ideologically opposed to any compromise, and they will have to be dealt with very harshly.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

The Foreign Secretary’s welcome admission of the fragility of the situation in Afghanistan was illustrated by the actions of Lieutenant-Colonel Enayatullah Barak, who did not reach Newport, although he was planning to be his country’s standard-bearer, because he sought asylum at Heathrow airport from what he regards as the hell of life in modern Afghanistan. Now that we are faced with many grave decisions on military activity in future, would it not be appropriate that this House looks to the decision that we took in 2006—when only two of our soldiers had died in combat—that led to 453 of them dying? That was the decision on going into Helmand. Should we not now plan to discover what went wrong with that decision?

[Mr Hammond]

The military, at least, regularly look at decisions that have been taken and consequences that flow from them, as part of their lessons learned process. We should be proud of what we have achieved in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding an individual who has decided that life in the UK looks more attractive than life in Afghanistan, the fact is that for ordinary Afghans life has got enormously better over the past few years.

This country has been in a state of almost constant war for the past 30 or 40 years, and for the first time in most people’s living memory they have the beginnings of a functioning democracy; a rapidly growing, though still fragile, economy; human rights on a scale that they have never seen before; and access to health care, education and transport infrastructure that their parents could never have dreamed of. That is real and tangible progress, and we should be proud of the part we have played in it.