Afghanistan

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I was telling the House that we are making sure that we bring back the 35 brilliant Chevening scholars so that they can come and study in our great universities. We are deploying an additional 800 British troops to support this evacuation operation and I can assure the House that we will continue the operation for as long as conditions at the airport allow.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

As of last week, it was still Home Office policy that we would send people back to Kabul because we thought that it was safe. Will the Prime Minister also confirm that it is not just about people coming out of Afghanistan but about keeping people safe here, and that we will not send people back to this nightmare?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady is entirely right that we will not be sending people back to Afghanistan; nor, by the way, will we allow people to come from Afghanistan to this country in an indiscriminate way. We want to be generous, but we must make sure that we look after our own security. Over the coming weeks, we will redouble our efforts, working with others to protect the UK homeland and all our citizens and interests from any threat that may emanate from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, from terrorism to the narcotics trade.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am sure I speak on behalf of everyone in passing on condolences to the Member who has just spoken.

What we are dealing with here is a failure of leadership, not of the military that served that leadership—we should never confuse the two. Both western and Afghan forces have served with great courage and are responsible for the successes achieved in the 20 years. It is a failure to understand Afghanistan and how the Taliban capitalised on UK and US forces’ counter-insurgency approaches, and the corruption of tribal leadership.

The Pashtun saying, “You have all the watches, we have all the time” reflects the speed with which the Taliban have acted. They took their first city just 12 days ago and now they have Kabul. But just as this was not inevitable, or indeed unexpected, so it is not inevitable that all we can do is despair.

The Taliban said on Monday that those who worked with foreign forces have nothing to fear as long as they show remorse. Do not tell them that they are cowards or that they should stay; help them get out. The bureaucracy that our interpreters, support staff and their families face must not be the reason why they lose their lives. I urge the Government to talk to the current and former servicemen and women who know those people, rather than asking people about paperwork, bureaucracy and biometric tests, because that it what is keeping people in Kabul airport right now.

Yes, the airport matters, but people have to get through the checkpoints to get to Kabul, so we need an extraction plan for everyone. We need to be clear on whom we owe a duty to: not just the interpreters, but the women who set up schools and the people who stood up when we asked them to work in the embassies and NGOs. The resettlement scheme is very welcome, but resettling from where, and how? Wars and persecution do not work to a timetable for paperwork.

Like many, in Walthamstow I have families who are desperate. There is an interpreter for the UK, whose dad did the same job for the Americans, and the Taliban are looking for them both. Another is here but his disabled family members in Kabul are at risk because he helped the MOD. Are we comfortable that mum or dad or brother or sister is fair game for the Taliban as punishment? Of course we need family reunion to be part of the settlement scheme. Or there is the family who walked for four hours to get to the embassy but have an Afghan mother. Are we really going to separate them? Or there is the man who has been trying to get his wife out since 2018 but, because of covid, her visa was delayed.

Numbers matter less than need. We need to reject this artificial distinction between resettlement and asylum. I am pleased to hear the Prime Minister commit not to send people back, but I hope the Home Secretary was listening, because the same Ministers who proudly boast about stopping boats forget to tell us that it is Afghans on those boats—people who have been fleeing this situation.

Instead of posturing, we need to challenge Macron and our European partners, and work with them, to ensure that everybody does their fair share to help. We need to get ahead of this crisis because at the moment we are always playing catch-up. President Biden may not have spoken to other world leaders since the fall of Kabul, so I am pleased to hear that the Prime Minister is, because we need to get agreement, via the UN and NATO, that if the Taliban provide a safe haven for al-Qaeda or ISIS, we will not stand for it. We need assurances from our counterparts in China and Russia that they will not veto action at the Security Council either.

Yes, this is a humanitarian disaster, but it is also a human rights one. Equality is not just being able to leave the house alone. Those Afghan women who are doctors, judges and politicians need us to do more than wring our hands. We have already heard that girls are being banned from school and forced into marriages. As the quote goes, “The Taliban talk nice during the day and disappear people at night.”

We must also say that this is not Islam. Islam is not the reason why people are clinging to planes to save their lives—that is brutalism and terrorism. We must not let people divide us here or overseas in the fight for those values. There may have been a failure of leadership so far, but it does not have to continue if we work together.