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Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government policy on Afghanistan.
It is a real pleasure to be opening this debate on the important subject of Afghanistan. I am grateful to see the Minister, whom I know is familiar with the country, having visited there many times, as well as the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West). I have much to cover, so to ensure that others have time to contribute, I make it clear that I will not take any interventions, because doing so would delay my speech.
After dominating our headlines for decades, Afghanistan is now the forgotten country and rarely features in our news or, indeed, parliamentary debates, and a population of 40 million people, not least women and girls, understandably feel abandoned. As I found out on my visit last summer, Afghanistan remains a very raw subject.
I spent some time at the British cemetery in Kabul, which was established in the 19th century to honour some of the dead from the previous British incursions into Afghanistan—the battle between the Oxus and Indus rivers, and the “great game” between Russia and Britain. In that cemetery, there are a dozen or so plaques marking the names, in date order, of the 455 UK personnel—including 54 from my regiment, the Rifles—who lost their lives in the latest war. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families and the hundreds who returned with life-changing injuries. Whatever the operational outcome, we must never neglect our duty of care to our brave veterans.
The war in Afghanistan was bruising for NATO—the most formidable military alliance the world has ever seen—as an entity. At its peak, it had 150,000 troops in the country. They departed demoralised, with many asking the question: what is the purpose of NATO? In August 2021, when Parliament was recalled so that the Government could announce our withdrawal, I said that this signalled the high-tide mark of post-world war two western liberalism. Two decades of state building in Afghanistan cost the United Kingdom £20 billion. It cost the US, which lost over 2,400 lives, $2.3 trillion. As our adversaries, who do not share our values, have observed, we have collectively lost the appetite to stay the course and defend the international rules-based order. The war brought an abrupt end to the post-cold war thinking that the west can impose its values anywhere in the world.
There has been no official UK inquiry about the lessons that might be learned, such as how we squandered the incredible umbrella of security created by our brave service personnel through the absence of a co-ordinated strategy to rebuild, and through total mission creep and strategic contagion. A western boilerplate governance structure completely ignored the complex tribal power bases and, indeed, the lessons of Afghanistan’s history, not least Britain’s previous efforts to run the country in the past. Corruption became endemic in Kabul. Lord Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser, summed it up in his book, “Hard Choices”, where he says:
“We became the problem, not the solution.”
In July 2019, President Trump gave a nine-month deadline to remove all US forces, simply to boost his presidential election prospects. He then struck a unilateral deal with the Taliban that excluded the Kabul Government, with no built-in human rights guarantees for women and children. However, it did see the release of 5,000 prisoners, including many terrorists. Afghanistan’s fate was sealed, resulting in the nation being handed back to the very insurgents we went into the country to defeat.
Just months after NATO’s article 5-approved invasion of Afghanistan, which followed the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, an international conference took place in Bonn, in Germany, in December 2001, to consider the future security and governance of Afghanistan. The Taliban requested attendance, but Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary at the time, told them to go away, saying that the losers do not get to sit at the table. Of course the Taliban did go away, across the border with Pakistan to rearm, regroup and return to fight another day.
I have visited Afghanistan about a dozen times since 2005. I sat in the same swivel chair in the large conference briefing room in Camp Bastion, I have been shown PowerPoint slides on how the Taliban were being defeated, and General Petraeus famously said of Iraq that it is not enough to defeat the enemy; we must enable the local. However, I am afraid that I saw very little evidence of that on any of my visits. I saw very little of enabling programmes or indeed of a strategy to develop workable local governance, and win over hearts and minds.
When President Karzai had to approve a new school headteacher in Lashkargah, and when an enormous turbine delivered by 16 Air Assault Brigade in 2008 to the Kajaki dam to generate game-changing electricity for communities remains in its bubble-wrap for a decade beside the dam, we know that something has seriously gone wrong in our post-conflict reconstruction planning and indeed in the efforts to win over hearts and minds.
The irony is that Helmand is the breadbasket of Afghanistan and beyond thanks to two decades of US investment just after world war two, when the same company that built the Hoover dam created the massive irrigation systems around the mighty Helmand river, which to this day continue to help to grow the crops that feed the nation. That is how to win hearts and minds. However, for 20 years there was no Paddy Ashdown character to co-ordinate efforts.
If we step into the shoes of the Afghan people today, we find that they are war-weary. They have endured four decades of conflict and instability. We have to go back to President Daoud’s time in the 1970s to find a time when it could be said that the country was relatively stable. Today, there is an eery calm, as another phase in Afghanistan’s history plays out.
As I found out, security is different now, but that is thanks to the Taliban’s daily attacks having ceased. Satellite images confirm that Afghanistan’s opium trade is significantly down, but that is because the Taliban’s black market to fund their insurgency has gone, and farmers are able to grow other crops, rather than opium, and take them to market without fear of running into the Taliban’s improvised explosive devices.
Whether from the people of Afghanistan or indeed from the Afghan diaspora here in the UK—the Pashtuns, the Hazaras, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, many of whom I have engaged with—there is no clarion call for regime change. That prompts a very difficult question: if the Afghan people are not calling for regime change, should we continue to punish them because the Taliban are in charge?
There are no easy options here, but the challenges that this fragile country now faces remain immense, and the Taliban know it. First, there is the economy. It was mostly US funding that propped up three quarters of Ashraf Ghani’s budget, in order to keep the country going. That funding has now gone. Varying estimates suggest that Afghanistan now has about two years before its economy collapses. In 2019, the UN estimated that around 6 million Afghans were considered to be in need of humanitarian aid. Today, that figure is estimated to have risen to 28 million. Meanwhile, China is eyeing up Afghanistan’s rich mineral resources and could easily turn the country into a vassal state.
Secondly, there is the demise of human rights. The brave demonstrations on the streets of Kabul by women who sought to retain their basic freedoms to work and study are dispersed by gunshots. Only a few days ago, that happened again in Kabul. It is just one example of how the Taliban are rowing back on the initial assurances given to women and girls when they gained power. The latest example is denying schooling to 11-year-olds, preventing 11-year-old girls from going to school, and preventing women from working in certain trades. Such diktats offer understandable, absolutist grounds to rule out having any truck with the Taliban until these conditions are removed.
Finally, there is the renewed threat of terrorism. As Afghanistan becomes ever more unstable, terrorism is once again allowed to incubate—most worryingly in the form of ISIS-K, which is increasingly active in the country. Senator Lindsey Graham warned in 2019:
“If we abandon Afghanistan out of frustration and weariness, we pave the way for another 9/11.”
Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, recently warned of the uptick in radicalisation that we are now seeing and that could impact the UK, saying that it is “unparalleled”.
This all leads to the difficult question: if our current strategy of condemning from afar is having no effect and if Afghanistan is on a worrying trajectory where international aid could be so pivotal, is it time to better understand what is happening in the country and within the regime that is leading to the increase in restrictions? I say that because the Taliban, as I discovered, are far from one cohesive identity. There are clearly tensions within the regime that was once united with the principal goal of violence against the Kabul Government and NATO. No doubt it remains an ultra-conservative movement with the most ruthless interpretation of sharia law in the world, but there are differences of view between Kandahar, where the reclusive leader Akhundzada is based, and Kabul, where the practical realities of holding the country together are grappled with.
The hard-line political messaging is abrupt and, rightly, internationally condemned. An example involves women denied university and school education. “How does any woman have access to a female doctor?” I asked, and how can women continue to work in Ministries, at the airport and with non-governmental organisations, including the United Nations, as I witnessed? The response was that licences are quietly issued, allowing those women to continue to work in such necessary professions.
Saad Mohseni, an Afghan media entrepreneur, set up TV and radio companies across Afghanistan a few years ago, when NATO was there. They all continue to operate today and now broadcast a range of educational programmes for children. Many urban areas now have access to the internet, and Zoom lessons are commonplace for all manner of subjects and all ages.
Let us be clear: this is so sub-optimal. It is, though, tolerated by the Taliban who are running the Ministries in Kabul, quietly maintaining some of the gains that have been secured over the last 20 years. But ironically the Taliban leaders in Kabul, understanding the rules on schooling, send their girls to school in Dubai. Clearly, the duality between Kandahar and Kabul is unsustainable in the longer term. One side or the other will eventually need to give. Are we really going to watch from afar this latest phase in Afghanistan’s history play out, or is there a more cognitive, proactive approach of engagement and influence?
In his excellent book “The Return of the Taliban”, Hassan Abbas, a professor at the National Defence University in Washington, suggests that about 40% of the Taliban are signed up to the full religious ideology. But for the majority of people in Afghanistan, it is either the military and fighting lure that encourages them to support it, or simply a social one—a bond extended through family and tribal loyalty. Many of the rank and file receive little religious training. They do not understand the sharia law obligations; they simply join the Taliban because that is what happens in Afghanistan. When a force looks like it is going to win, everybody then sees the changing winds and joins sides with it.
The older generation, many of whom held leadership roles back in the late 1990s and were content to be globally isolated, now lean upon the younger, Kabul-based, more tech-savvy generation to run the state Ministries. Those Ministries have changed little in function since 2021, but they know that their stability comes only with greater international engagement. That is why Kabul is growing ties with Doha, the Emirates, Turkey, Russia, China and so forth. Afghanistan certainly has changed from what it was in the ’90s. It is a more populous, more complex country, with complex needs and a desperate request for international support.
I dared to suggest this summer, and I repeat it today, that given the dangers that are looming, we re-evaluate our strategy. We should answer the plea of Roza Otunbayeva, the UN head in Afghanistan, and engage. She stressed in her formal report to the United Nations General Assembly in September last year that engagement does not mean endorsement, nor any form of recognition. The Taliban in Kabul recognise that there is $9 billion of frozen assets. That could easily be used to provide conditionalities in improving rights for women and girls if we used it more cognitively.
Other respected voices are also coming to the same position. Thomas West, the US special envoy in Afghanistan, says that we should engage. By the way, the United States has given $2 billion since 2021 compared with our £100 million a year. Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur for Afghanistan; Ms Fawzia Koofi, the former Deputy Speaker of the Afghan Parliament; the UK’s former ambassador, Laurie Bristow; General David Petraeus; Rory Stewart; General Sir David Richards; General Sir Nick Carter; and distinguished journalists Christina Lamb and Kathy Gannon all have extensive experience and understanding of Afghanistan. They are all saying, “Let’s engage.”
Mr Ellwood
I will not, if my hon. Friend does not mind, because I want to finish, but I look forward to his contribution.
As I mentioned, most tellingly, it is the Afghan people who desperately need our help and want us to engage. Let me end by speaking about the value of education. My brother was a teacher and educationalist. It was his death—he was killed in the 2002 Bali bombing by an al-Qaeda affiliate—that prompted me to visit Afghanistan so many times, to understand what we were doing to counter terrorism. My brother spoke passionately about the importance of teaching people how to think, and the dangers of simply being told what to think.
The UN head Roza Otunbayeva has raised just $0.5 billion of the $4.5 billion that she needs to honour the humanitarian programmes on the ground. Education restrictions on 11-year-old girls are a concern of course, but her bigger worry is that half of all children under the age of 11—boys and girls—are getting no education whatsoever. The schools and buildings did not exist, and do not exist, to teach them. That means that unless the international community helps soon, half of the next generation of Afghans will be open prey for radicalisation —the next generation of extremists—as they are lured into a false belief that their violence will be rewarded with a fast track to paradise.
It is Charlie Wilson all over again, abandoning a country that turns into an incubator for terrorism. We should not make that same mistake again. As the saying goes, we may have lost interest in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has not lost interest in us. We now have a duty to develop a strategy of engagement that moves from our current position of punishing the Afghan population for the Taliban’s takeover. Our approach to Afghanistan at the moment is not just incoherent but ineffectual. Our financial support is down to just £100 million, as I said. An economic, humanitarian or terrorism crisis is looming. Afghanistan’s threat is not just to the country itself but to the region and beyond. Let’s make sure Afghanistan and its people are not forgotten. It is time to engage. It is time to reopen our embassy.
My experience this summer was bruising. It made me reflect on this place, on Parliament, and more specifically on the conduct of Parliament. On a good day, we match that accolade of being the mother of all Parliaments. We have pioneered that important democratic journey across the centuries that is now emulated across the globe. Yet on a bad day, we are an exemplar of how shallow, discourteous and intolerant we can be of each other. Politics has always been a contact sport—I understand that—but by and large it remains civil, respectful and professional. Parliamentarians should be encouraged to show political curiosity and passion for an issue, cause or interest, and yes, advance or even challenge current thinking and dare to look four or five chess moves ahead and ask, “What if?” However, if we lose the art of disagreeing or offer latitude when a colleague miscommunicates a serious message, as I did this summer, and it is replaced by a “Gotcha!” culture deliberately encouraging a media storm, that is indeed a sad day for Parliament.
Political curiosity is what this place should be about. It should be encouraged and respected, otherwise MPs simply will not stick their heads above the parapet. That cannot be good for democracy and will certainly not inspire the best in our nation—the next generation—to consider following in our footsteps. We need to keep the bar high. Thank you, Dr Huq. Once again, I am grateful to have the opportunity to debate this important issue today. I will listen with interest to colleagues and to the Government’s response.
Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)
Order. Please stand if you want to speak, and we will then work out how long everyone has.
Several hon. Members rose—
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon, Dr Huq. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing the debate. Like him, I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say as it has been some time since we have had an update on his Department’s policies on Afghanistan. I am aware that the newly appointed Foreign Secretary responded to some questions in the other place at the start of December, but considering the dire situation we know the Afghan people continue to face, I hope the Minister can provide something more concrete in his responses this afternoon. I am sure that he will.
As one of the co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group on Afghan women and girls, I often link in with networks of Afghan women both here and living in their country, including in preparation for today’s debate. Shortly before today’s debate, I spoke to one who will be listening in to hear what the Minister has to say. In fact, I know that they will all be listening with interest, anxious to hear about an action plan. The reality is that women in Afghanistan are living in what can best be described as gender apartheid. Over the past two and a half years, there have been discussions and meetings at different international levels and with different partners, but nothing has improved. Indeed, I would argue that it has got worse.
As the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East said, it is a privilege to be a Member of this place and to serve our constituents. I know that it is a rare and special opportunity to have this occupation. However, I do not often stop in awe at my mere ability to have a job, that I went to university or that my daughter recently completed her secondary education; that I have been able to travel from my home in Fife down to London this week unaccompanied by my husband or father; that when I served in the police, we were not arresting people for having the wrong type of clothing or belief or even for visiting public places; and that when we brought people into custody they did not routinely experience torture and sexual abuse. Sadly, that is life for so many women in Afghanistan, with the obvious exception that there are no women in the police either.
Girls are banned from education after primary school. That is fundamentally wrong and I know that the Government—in fact, all of us here—agree with that. Yet the question is, what are we going to do about it? How will we put pressure on the Taliban to get girls back into classrooms? Again, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East pointed out that we know the hypocrisy of senior Taliban members, who send their own daughters to be educated overseas. With the growth of segregated madrassahs, how will we ensure that all students, but especially girls, get access to sufficient secular education?
The continued restrictions on women working are not just a serious abuse of their human rights but a financial disaster, particularly for female-headed households, in the context of an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. There are continued reports of women being arrested and imprisoned without charge, from both formal channels such as the recent UN Secretary-General’s report and the networks I hear from through the APPG. One explanation the Taliban have given for that is that mass arrests are clearing beggars from the streets. Even if that is true, we know that groups of women are being forced to beg because of the dire financial situation they find themselves in, having been excluded from the labour market.
There has been a total crackdown on protests and dissent, and it is clear that a number of arrests are purely politically motivated. It is notable that the Taliban’s own statistics show the prison population in Afghanistan to be well on its way to doubling in size since they took power. Sadly, that is again somewhat inevitable given that it is illegal to shop, work, beg, go to the park, speak an opinion or engage in any way in civil society. I was told in the run-up to this debate that last week women were arrested simply for wearing the wrong type of hijab.
I do not want the Minister just to say that this is obviously wrong—and I am absolutely sure he will not—because we all know it is. I want him to use his time to set out how the Government plan to put pressure on the Taliban. The right hon. Member for Bournemouth East said we should be engaging but, at the very least, what minimum standards should we ask to have met before engagement takes place in the backest of back rooms? I do not see anything that suggests that there is a desire to change. I hope the Minister will confirm that there will be a continued, and hopefully elevated, aid package to the region, but how can aid be used to incentivise those basic standards?
I opposed the merger of the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office, and indeed secured an urgent question on the issue back in 2020, but its stated purpose when it took place was that the UK’s presence on the international stage would be more effective when both foreign and international development policy worked together. I hope the Minister can demonstrate that they are and prove the initial doubts wrong.
For some Afghans, however, it is not possible to stay in their home country, such is the risk of persecution. Some two and a half years since the fall of Kabul, people are still hiding in fear of their lives in an unsafe third country, waiting to be told they can travel to safety. I welcome the restarting of flights from Pakistan in the light of the threat of expulsions from that country, but it feels like the threat of expulsions was what got things moving again.
Why is it that, after all this time, applications still do not seem to be being progressed? Barely a week goes by without MPs receiving emails begging us to take up the cases of people who feel abandoned by the British Government. They are not our constituents, and without a scheme like Homes for Ukraine, which provides a local link, there is simply very little that we can do. Most recently, I received one yesterday, as I am sure many other Members did, from a young person who said they acted as an interpreter to the British Army. Why are they still waiting, and what are the Government doing to speed things up?
My concern, and that of many, is that the Afghan relocations and assistance policy has purposefully or inadvertently minimised the number of people able to seek safety by limiting automatic eligibility to those who were directly contracted by the British Government or armed forces. The use of local contacts or contracts is not uncommon, and just because the Government might want to say, “Well, they didn’t directly work for us, so we deem them not to be at risk,” that does not mean that the Taliban will not see such an individual as somebody who assisted us and seek reprisals. I am also told—I hope the Minister takes this away and passes it on to his colleagues—that the process to apply for assistance under ARAP’s case-by-case consideration is complicated and opaque, and narrow in who it covers. A review of its effectiveness and, at the very least, how it is communicated, would be very welcome.
I want briefly to touch on two more resettlement issues before concluding. First, will the Minister provide an update on when the second phase of the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme pathway 3 will open? Without a meaningful timeframe, the scheme has in practice stopped. If that is the case, the Government should be honest about that to the House.
The second issue is the campaign of the Linda Norgrove Foundation to bring over a group of female medical students to finish their studies in Scotland. I have spoken to the foundation, and I am sure other Members have too. Securing visas that will allow those students to enter the country but crucially, given their financial circumstances, pay home student fees is the final hurdle to getting those women over to Scotland. That is not just the right thing to do to send a signal about how serious we are about girls’ right to education; it is also deeply practical. The UN’s most recent report warned of a medical brain drain out of Afghanistan. If we think long-term, we only win by helping to equip future generations of doctors, particularly female doctors.
Finally, I turn back to the APPG on Afghan women and girls. It was set up a little over a year ago to help lift the voices of women being silenced at home and too often left out of the conversations about them elsewhere. Government policy about Afghan women has to include Afghan women, and it must include a range of Afghan women from all regions and tribes. I have had the privilege of meeting some of those women, and I am grateful to them for giving up their time to me. What can the Minister say about committing to an inclusive political process in which the Government use the expertise available to them here and their influence at an international level to make sure Afghan women are included in high-level negotiations? That must go beyond round tables where they have input; it must be more collaborative than that.
We are here to consider the Government’s policy on Afghanistan, but I want them to think instead about their policy in relation to the people of Afghanistan—to women, children, the LGBTQ community and the Afghans who worked for British or NATO forces or in the former Government. Too often, Foreign Affairs is abstract—the time and energy involved is a zero-sum game with new crises taking away official focus, as the people of Afghanistan know too well—but the gender apartheid, the gross human rights abuses and the humanitarian and economic disaster faced by the Afghan people are not abstract. I urge the Government to put that at the centre of their response.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I shall put forward a few random and hopefully connected thoughts that have occurred to me in the course of the contributions we have heard so far. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing the debate, and I commiserate with him on the fact that he paid a high political price in losing the chairmanship of the Defence Committee, which I know he valued greatly, as a result of speaking out on this subject.
I can go part of the way with my right hon. Friend in support of his thesis about engagement, by saying this: no matter how much we detest a particular regime, a time always comes when, if in reality it has established full control over a country, it gets international recognition. That was true for the Bolsheviks, for example: Britain intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to prevent the Bolsheviks from establishing communist control in what became the USSR, but we failed, and, after a few years, that regime had eventually to be recognised. Where I find it hard to go further with my right hon Friend is in the belief that we can somehow manipulate the system to make significant improvements or avert significant threats from an Afghanistan run by the militant Taliban, even if he detects—rightly, I am sure—significant factions within the Taliban spectrum, such as it is.
As too many past speeches will attest, I came to the conclusion over a decade ago that the whole concept of the west trying to engage in nation building from the ground up in countries such as Afghanistan was largely futile, because—and I quote my right hon. Friend, who referred to this country’s democratic journey across the centuries—it often takes centuries for democracy to evolve in a society.
We have no reason per se to feel superiority over countries that we regard as undemocratic today, because we had so much longer than they have had so far to evolve the institutions, values and tolerances in which we have reason to be proud. The fact is that, if we were to go back 400 or 500 years into the history of our own country, we would find religious fanaticism that is not all that dissimilar to what pertains in countries that are subject to what has today been termed radical political Islam. If we then frame the proposition that some completely different society, seeking to impose their more modern values on the England of 500 years ago, could have managed to inculcate those values into a society with a belief that God Almighty was telling them to do one thing and to disregard all alternatives as infidel structures that must be destroyed, we can see that it is pretty unrealistic to think that societies could be transformed with that degree of rapidity.
I have therefore felt, and argued for over a decade, that what we needed with a country such as Afghanistan was not an approach whereby we would be able rapidly to bring it into the modern world, but that we should be able to contain the threats that it posed to us—for a very long period, if necessary—until, by its own evolution, it came to develop the sorts of values that would result in those threats ceasing to exist. That option has now been taken away from us by President Biden’s catastrophic decision to abandon everything and effectively betray all the people in Afghanistan who had put their trust in the NATO countries that had tried, over-ambitiously, to develop Afghan society.
What I feel very strongly, which came out so well in the remarks that the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) made about Afghan women, is that we may have pursued an unrealistic and utopian policy towards Afghanistan, but, in doing that, we created obligations to those Afghans who sought to travel along the route with us. We must not abandon them.
When I hear about the idea of our having a strategy towards the country, I think of our options as extremely limited. The strategy that we ought to have had is one of containment, whereby we would make it perfectly clear that we had intervened militarily once and would not get sucked in, but that, if there were to be any sign of further terrorist activity aimed at us or our allies, we would not hesitate to intervene militarily again. In that case, we would again make it clear that we would not get sucked in, but would continually keep the threat of counter-action available while avoiding seeking to transform the society in a way that was wholly impractical.
Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)
I am very grateful to the right hon. Member for giving way. He is talking about a situation in which a terrorist threat may emerge in the future. At the height of the UK’s presence in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister of the UK talked about Afghanistan and Pakistan in the same breath and had an AfPak strategy. That was because there was a fear of Islamist intent coming together with the weapons of mass destruction capability in Pakistan. Does the right hon. Member think that those threats have completely dissipated, or would he still regard the federally administered tribal areas and the North West Frontier Province as a threat?
Sir Julian Lewis
I absolutely am concerned about the attitude of Pakistan and about the potential for Pakistani nuclear weapons to one day pass under the control of more radical elements than are currently running that country. What should particularly worry us—this is what I think David Cameron had in mind when, as Prime Minister, he talked about Pakistan facing both ways on the question of radical Islam—is the fact that there has been a wish in Pakistan Government circles to see the triumph of the Taliban. The reasons for that are probably more related to Pakistan’s relations with countries such as India, and have too little regard to the other effects that bringing in a regime such as the Taliban’s might have on the stability and security of the international system and the rules-based international order—about which we hear so much although we often wonder whether it exists.
I share the continuing concern of the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). I am far from satisfied that we are in a secure situation. On the contrary, I feel that the withdrawal and abandonment of Afghanistan have given a huge boost to those who say that the western system of society is degenerate and enfeebled, and will surely fail in the face of a radical Islamic alternative.
What do we do about this now? What I think we can do can be summed up in the following way. We will, indeed, have to recognise that the Taliban are in control. Therefore, just as we have a sort of relationship, however adversarial, with obnoxious and hostile regimes in other countries, so we will have to do that with the Taliban. We must not fool ourselves that having a relationship with them will result in any real reduction in the threat that they and their of way life poses, particularly when they have adherents within our own societies. We saw for many years how much damage people who owed a form of allegiance to the Soviet Union could cause, through their fifth columnists in democratic societies. There is an equivalent danger from radical political Islam, too.
Let us by all means face reality, but let us reassert that we know that this combination of politics, regime and religious extremist ideology is a total threat to us. We will do everything in our power to protect ourselves. Any aid and support that we give to the Afghan Government, as we will eventually have to call it, must be contingent on something in return at every stage. That will probably be in relation to the saving of groups, whether they be women’s groups or former military personnel to whom we owe obligations. That is the saving of people whose lives were changed by our intervention, and who have a right to look to us to help to protect them against the ghastliness of the regime that has sadly re-emerged and taken control of their country.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)
Order. If we keep within seven minutes, there will be enough time for the three Front Benchers and for Tobias Ellwood to conclude.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I was just going to ask you about that, Dr Huq, but you have beaten me to it, so thank you. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and I will share the time between us.
I say a special thank you to the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood). He is a gallant colleague and friend of many of us. Along with others here, I always honour him sincerely and honestly for his service in uniform. It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). His concluding comments sum up exactly how I feel.
We have to call the Taliban what it is: an evil organisation. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) outlined the case for women and children and what is happening to them in Afghanistan because of the Taliban. If we are to have any influence in Afghanistan, our economic aid—or grant aid, or whatever it might be—has to be conditional on things happening. If I were to take one thing from this debate, it would be that, so I thank the right hon. Member for New Forest East for saying that.
I believe I am well known as a supporter of our armed forces and the war effort in Afghanistan. I have been a strong advocate for those we left behind. I want to make a plea for one person. The Minister will perhaps have an idea of what I am referencing when I mention those left behind who worked with our soldiers and our Government and who have not been able to access a visa to come over here—namely, one of my constituents who served in Afghanistan, who worked alongside a gentleman who we have not been able to get out of Pakistan. We are still awaiting the appeal. This man’s only crime was being a contractor and working with the British Army and administration. He and his family have been under threat since the withdrawal took place. Any strategy or discussion about Afghanistan must recognise and rectify the failings of our previous dealings with them.
There is a reason why I say that in my introduction, because I also want to make a comment as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for international freedom of religion or belief, as Members know well. To return to the point that the right hon. Member for New Forest East referred to, if we are to help, it should be conditional on human rights, so that people can worship their God in whatever way they wish. I am a Christian, but I speak up for others—hon. Members know that. From a human rights perspective, it is clear that things are not as we would like to see them. Any discussion of Afghanistan and the role played by our Government and our nation must have the good of the ordinary people of that country at heart.
Open Doors is an organisation that I support. I appreciate the information that it shares. It tells the story of what it is like to be a Christian woman in Afghanistan. It is difficult to read. The hon. Member for North East Fife referred to how difficult it is for women. For a Christian woman it is even more difficult because of what they believe. I want to quote this lady—her name has been changed because that is the best thing to do. Open Doors states:
“Even prior to the Taliban’s seizure of power in August 2021, living as Christian carried enormous risk, particularly for converts. But the militant group’s takeover has made conditions even more dangerous for our Afghan family, forcing them to flee the country or go deeper underground. One person who knows all too well the dangers of following Jesus in Afghanistan is Gulshan.”
Her name has been changed to Gulshan.
“Relatives of hers have been killed for their faith, whilst her Christian neighbours have disappeared.”
She has no idea where they are. She does not even know if they are still alive.
“She hopes and prays they are safe somewhere.”
I hope so as well.
“‘It is our great desire to join with our brothers and sisters and worship God together, but now this is not possible,’ says Gulshan. ‘We can only meet our pastor in the dead of night, so no one can identify him or us.’ She and her family also face the threat of starvation, due to food shortages in the country.”
I think that is the issue that the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East was trying to hit on. But we have to make the aid that we give conditional, so that we can try to change things by subtle means.
Open Doors goes on:
“Despite everything she is risking, Gulshan knows that she is following a faithful God. ‘Our faith is in Christ, and will remain so until our last breath. Dear God, help us to find a straight and smooth path in our lives.’”
I and others in this Chamber are great believers in prayer, and we know that those prayers can make a difference. We understand that. Also, God gives us as MPs in this House a physical role to play, and part of that physical role is what we do to energise change. That is where I am coming from.
I am mindful of your direction, Dr Huq, so I will conclude by returning to the gentleman I mentioned in my introduction, Mohammad—I will only give his first name because I do not want to disadvantage him or his security in any way. Mohammad has been abandoned by us—that is the best way to describe it—after helping British forces for years. Our policy must be with women such as Golshan, a Christian woman. It must be with the woman that the hon. Member for North East Fife referred to. It must be with the young girls who are not receiving any education, healthcare or opportunities. They should not be brought up until they are nine or 10 and then abandoned. Our policy must be for the young girls who are not receiving an education. It must be for the young men who have been trained to fight before being trained in a trade, or even to read and write.
Our policy must focus on how we can work with the envoys from all our allied countries to bring about change. We all agree that we need change; it is how we achieve that change. The right hon. Member for New Forest East captured my thoughts very well. If it is true that the new Taliban regime is different, then this will be easily tested. The facts are there. I believe there is no evidential base at the moment; we just need to look at the treatment of women and girls, and at how the nation is being rebuilt and not torn down. If that is happening—we do not see any evidence of that, by the way—then I would urge Government to do what is internationally acceptable to help them achieve this. Just think of all those today who we will never meet in this world, but who need us to be their voice in this place.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I am glad that the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) has secured this afternoon’s debate, because it has given us all the opportunity to raise our concerns about the ongoing situation in Afghanistan. He mentioned his comments of last year. I do not doubt that he has reflected carefully upon that, but I want him to know that many of my constituents and Afghan friends in Glasgow were deeply hurt by the comments he made. They felt that it was very hurtful and upsetting, particularly from somebody in a position of power, such as he held at that time. They felt that very deeply indeed, and wished me to pass that on, now that I have the opportunity.
Richard Foord
I wonder whether the hon. Lady agrees with what the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) said about the importance of political curiosity, and sometimes saying things that might not be the convention.
Alison Thewliss
I do, and I understand where that comes from. I also understand that we can say or do things that we later come to reflect and change our mind on and regret. In politics, we should be allowed to say we have made a mistake or changed our mind. There should be space for that, but I had comments at the time from my constituents about this, and they felt it very deeply indeed. It is important that the views of my constituents and friends are reflected in this place.
I also want to use this opportunity to talk about the paucity of response from the Home Office. I appreciate that the Minister here is not a Home Office Minister, but I still have constituents coming to me every single week who are experiencing severe delays and difficulties with family reunion visas, for example because their family member has moved out of Afghanistan and is in Pakistan or Iran or somewhere else and is waiting for the paperwork to be completed. They are extremely disturbed and upset when they come to see me because of the inexcusable delays these people face in coming to safety and being reunited with, often, the only family they have left. The ARAP and the Afghan citizens resettlement schemes are failing to do what the Government had asked them to do. That is very much reflected in the many Afghans coming over in small boats, because they see no other alternative to get to the UK. The schemes that they were promised would help to get them to safety have failed repeatedly to do so.
A constituent of mine, Mr d’Angelo, has repeatedly raised the case of somebody he worked with in Afghanistan who has been trying to get over on the schemes now for the best part of two years. I wrote to the Veterans Minister, the right hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), a month ago, and I have yet to receive even an acknowledgement of that letter. This is somebody who is fearful for their own survival in Afghanistan. I urge the Minister to put more pressure on ARAP and on ACRS to ensure that people who need that safety can get here.
I remind Members that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that the UK has taken only 0.2% of the total of Afghan refugees. More than 6 million fled Afghanistan, but only 0.2% have actually made it here to the UK, so there is certainly a lot more that we could and should be doing. Those left behind include those who worked for the British Council as teachers, those who worked in the armed forces for the Triples, and those who provided various services to British forces in Afghanistan. I spoke to scores of constituents at the fall of Afghanistan—people whose family members had done something as simple as supply goods and services to the British armed forces. The Taliban saw no distinction between somebody who served in an active frontline role and somebody who supplied plates. All those people were tarnished by their association with the British forces. There is an awful lot more that could and should be done to ensure that those people who put their faith and trust in us see it returned.
Like the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), I will briefly mention the 20 female Afghan medical students whom the Linda Norgrove Foundation wishes to bring to safety in Scotland. There is no excuse for them still to be waiting. The foundation was told that these women would be entitled to resettlement under ACRS in January last year. It has been waiting a full year. It was told that the women would be brought to the UK in August, but they are still waiting now, so I ask the Minister to get personally involved in this case. The women should be allowed to come to Scotland to complete their important studies and become the medical professionals they wish to be, because it is not something that will ever be possible for them in Afghanistan in the short or even medium term. They will be welcome, and we have the places. All they need is permission from the Government to come and start their studies, so I urge the Minister to make some progress on that.
Finally, will the Minister provide us with an update on the prospects for people who are stuck in Pakistan and whom the Pakistani Government wish to remove and send back to Afghanistan? Many of the folk who have been in touch with me are waiting for the British Government to process the paperwork. I have had cases where the visa centre in Islamabad had processed all but one of a family’s applications and the family did not want to leave that one member behind. I do not know whether that was deliberate or due to incompetence, or what it was that went wrong with the paperwork, but I am aware of so many cases where people are stuck waiting in Pakistan for the Government to have the processed paperwork, so that they can come to safety. It serves nobody well that they are still waiting, two years after the fall of Afghanistan.
Jim Shannon
Given the situation with the Post Office/Horizon scandal, we all recognise that if there is a willingness, there is a way of making it happen. I endorse what the hon. Lady has said, and I referred earlier to the example of my constituent. He is living in Pakistan with his wife and four children. I met him in Pakistan in February last year, when I was there on an APPG visit, and I understand his worries and the threat he is under. I know what my constituent has done for our United Kingdom and the British Army, and the hon. Lady is so right. Honest to goodness, if we can address the Post Office/Horizon scandal, we can bring Afghans to safety in this country.
Alison Thewliss
We absolutely can. The Homes for Ukraine scheme shows what can be done in a pinch when there is an emergency, but nothing has been done to the same extent for the people of Afghanistan.
For many people, there is not a simple route to come to safety in the UK. I have people who find that the very strict criteria for family reunion do not allow them to come. They have been told that they are not eligible for ARAP and ACRS, and their family members in Glasgow live in constant fear about what will happen to them. They do not know. Will the Minister explore with the Home Office routes for people who have family links and support networks? They do not need to rely on public services, because they are well provided for by their families. How can they be brought to safety, so that we can fulfil our duty to families who have relatives in Scotland?
Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing the debate and on the thoughtful and considered way that he opened it, posing many challenging questions for us all. I thank the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) for their contributions.
Until the return of the Taliban in 2021, the core objective of UK policy on Afghanistan was to promote stability by building a viable Afghan state in which everyone, regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity, could build a life. As the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East said, the policy was to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. However, despite tens of billions of pounds in international aid being poured in—much of it from the UK—Afghanistan is in a state of near collapse following the withdrawal of international financial support, the imposition of sanctions and the freezing of state assets.
The right hon. Member for New Forest East was absolutely right to say that the obscenely rapid withdrawal in 2021 betrayed so many people who had put their trust in us. That has left Afghanistan on the precipice of a dire humanitarian crisis, with high infant and maternal mortality, vulnerability to climate change, food insecurity, widespread corruption and drug production all remaining significant problems. Indeed, 90% of Afghanistan’s population is living in extreme poverty, so it is absolutely essential that the United Kingdom recognises its historical responsibility to the people of Afghanistan, and that we try to get as much aid as possible into the country, and to those who need it most.
I listened carefully to the right hon. Gentleman’s argument that engagement does not mean endorsement, but remain unconvinced that a return to normalcy is desirable at this stage, given the conflict in the regime in Afghanistan between Kabul and the power brokers in Kandahar, and I wonder just how much aid, support, recognition or legitimacy we would give to that regime. The question is: how can we provide aid and support without legitimising and assisting financially a brutal, theocratic regime that oppresses women, religious and ethnic minorities, and indeed anyone who veers from their very narrow and blinkered view of the world?
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central and the hon. Member for Strangford for saying that we also have to protect and assist as much as we can those Afghans who fled to neighbouring countries, particularly Pakistan, in 2021, and now face the terrifying prospect of being deported back, and to facing a very dangerous and uncertain future. Of course, as I think every Member has said, we have a moral responsibility to those brave Afghans who, prior to 2021, were trained by and worked with British forces—including interpreters, who, as the hon. Member for Strangford said, now live in fear of Taliban reprisals.
Along with every other right-minded person, we in the SNP are unequivocal that the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls is absolutely unforgivable. As other Members, including the hon. Member for North East Fife, have said, since the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, so much of the progress made in the previous 20 years has been eroded, and the pledges that were made, particularly around education, have been reversed or abandoned.
Two years on from seizing power, the Taliban have banned women from going to parks, gyms and public bathing houses; they have stopped women pursuing education beyond the sixth grade; and women are all but prohibited from working, other than in health and education. The Taliban even issued a decree banning women from working in national and international non-governmental organisations, and then they extended that ban to cover women working for the UN’s agencies, which is already having an impact on the delivery of aid. It makes it harder to assess the needs of women and girls, and increases safeguarding risks. We fully and absolutely support the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in its condemnation of that ban and in its assessment that the decision puts at risk millions of Afghans who depend on humanitarian assistance for their survival.
Indeed, the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan has been rightly described as gender apartheid by the UN. Last year, in a joint report to the Human Rights Council, the situation in Afghanistan for women and girls was described as being the worst in the world. The report said:
“While the backlash against women’s and girls’ rights has unfolded in different countries and regions in recent years, nowhere else in the world has there been an attack as widespread, systematic and all-encompassing on the rights of women and girls as in Afghanistan.”
We must never lose sight of that fact.
I commend the work of Baroness Helena Kennedy of the International Bar Association’s human rights institute. At the start of this week, on 8 January, with the support of women from both Houses of Parliament, it launched a gender apartheid inquiry, which will look at the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran. It will consider how those regimes’ discriminatory and misogynistic policies, and their harsh enforcement methods, constitute the most appalling gender persecution.
It is not just gender-based persecution that is the hallmark of the Taliban; the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Hazaras, has also defined the Taliban’s time in power. Once again, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Strangford for his unstinting work in supporting freedom of religion or belief around the world.
In late 2020, I was proud to be part of the cross-party group of MPs and peers who worked on a report that highlighted the atrocities suffered by the Hazara community in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the first half of 2022 alone, those atrocities led to hundreds of members of that community being killed, and even more injured, as a result of targeted attacks, including the bombing of Hazara schools, places of worship and other centres. In September 2022, a suicide attack claimed the lives of 50 girls and young women belonging to the Hazara community. Sadly, attacks on Hazaras continue unabated, and although the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is in possession of the report that we published, it is yet to respond. I am grateful to Lord Alton for reminding the Department of that just last week.
We have to face facts: over decades, a string of badly formed policy decisions made with short-sighted and politically questionable objectives has proven very costly, both financially, and, tragically, in terms of lives lost. The UK Government are in a position to put some of that right, and to make amends to those who have suffered most from their policies. As the right hon. Member for New Forest East, the hon. Member for Strangford, and my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central said, the UK Government cannot and must not abandon Afghans fleeing this crisis, nor leave them to the mercy of the Taliban. There must be a commitment to helping all those Afghan nationals who risked their lives to assist the United Kingdom. Getting those people and their families resettled in the UK must be a priority and a matter of urgency for this Government.
We have to show determination to support in any way we can women and girls who face the violent, discriminatory policies of the Taliban. We must pledge to assist those protecting refugees in Pakistan, and we must show the beleaguered Hazara community, and other minority groups in Afghanistan, that they have not been forgotten or abandoned.
This has been an incredibly useful debate, and it has been very challenging. I do not agree with the conclusions of the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East, but I welcome the opportunity to listen to him, and to have put into context what was condensed into a 45-second news clip way back in the summer. It has been a useful exercise for us all. I thank him for securing the debate, and every hon. Member who has taken part in it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)
Order. I think there will be a vote any second, so we will suspend for 15 minutes.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I thank the right hon. and gallant Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) for securing the debate, and for the tone and words he used. The minimum requirement for Members of Parliament is to care, and that was very much summed up in his words. We all enjoyed the story about his brother and the impact of his legacy, after he lost him tragically in the Bali bombings. The legacy of a teacher is always crucial, particularly in foreign policy, so I thank him very much for that.
Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in that heartbreaking summer of 2021, the House has not often debated a more general Government position on Afghanistan, so this debate is timely, necessary and very welcome. We all remember the optics as Kabul fell: a sunburnt right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab) lying on a sunbed in Corfu, and an absent senior member of Foreign Office staff. I do not think any of us will forget that sense of a dereliction of duty. It is certainly not something that could be levelled at the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East who brought forward this debate but, sadly, that is how I remember that period of time. The most critical Foreign Affairs Committee report I have ever read examined the way in which the Foreign Office failed to support the basic functions of a Government at that crucial time. I would suggest it as recommended reading to anybody interested in this area.
As Labour’s shadow Asia Minister, I pay tribute to the 457 British servicemen and women who made the ultimate sacrifice during our engagement in Afghanistan, and the countless others who remain mentally or physically scarred by their service. Labour is, and always will be, in eternal debt to and have admiration for our armed forces and the work they do in the most challenging circumstances. War has untold consequences, and the war in Afghanistan—a 20-year, multinational engagement —is among the conflicts with the most profound effect on our armed forces, veterans and society that Britain has known for decades.
Many people still say that the effort failed when the Taliban retook Kabul that summer, and that has been reflected in today’s debate. However, although that simple statement is true in many respects, I believe it does a disservice to the work of our armed forces, civil servants, development personnel, allies and, indeed, Afghans themselves, who so clearly came together to transform Afghanistan during the 20 years of NATO involvement. The Afghanistan that the Taliban took control of in 2021 was a world away from the Afghanistan before the western forces first liberated it from their control. Two generations of children had access to education, the country developed its business and an emerging economy—although many of us accept that not enough was done on the economy to ensure a lasting legacy—and women enjoyed many of the same rights and opportunities as their male friends and family members.
Despite the change in Government, much of that legacy is still alive. Afghans are more educated, more connected and more attuned to the world around them than the Taliban allowed them to be in the 1990s, and some Taliban wish them to be now. We should hold on to and celebrate that legacy, but we must also take stock of the Afghanistan of 2024, which is not the Afghanistan of 2021. Women’s rights have been essentially eliminated, the economy is in a dire situation, malnutrition and famine are the reality for millions, and all notions of a Taliban 2.0 have been proven false as human and civil rights are not even considered by the power brokers in Kandahar. We cannot simply pretend that this is the way it should be.
No British, western or neighbouring country should forgive the Taliban’s treatment of the Afghan people, and particularly, as the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) said, women and girls. If we do that, the collective legacy we left behind—that more hopeful Afghanistan that many worked hard to create and that I firmly believe exists there, certainly if the emails I receive from Afghan people are to be believed—and that spirit and resilience will continue, but we must come up with a strategy now to deal with that country of 40 million people that has been all but shut off from the world, barring occasional references to the humanitarian crisis unfolding. The question is emotive and controversial for obvious and deeply held reasons, but we owe it to Afghans to have this conversation.
In June 2022, the shadow Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), became the first senior British politician to visit Afghanistan since the return of the Taliban. He demanded that the UK set out a comprehensive strategy for re-engaging with Afghanistan to help support the people who have been left behind. Despite his demands, very little appears to have changed, so will the Minister outline what conditions he believes are the basic minimum for us to re-engage? Do they include the freedom of religion or belief, which has been mentioned, and basics around human rights safeguarding and the treatment of women? What basics should be upheld in advance of a genuine restart of the UK mission there? Will the Minister please outline that long-term thinking?
I urge the Minister to use this opportunity to outline what further humanitarian response the UK will provide to the people of Afghanistan. As has been said, £100 million is a very small amount compared with what was spent previously, and is much less than what is desperately needed. I also urge the Minister to outline what the Government are doing to support at-risk Afghans who face deportation from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Will he say a bit about the cross-departmental work that the FCDO, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office—an interesting threesome—are doing for the applicants we have heard about today via their MPs, including the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), and for my constituents who are stuck on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan? It was only when Pakistan decided to start deporting people to Afghanistan that the international community restarted the process of applications. I understand that the British Council is aware of 100 outstanding applicants. Will the Minister tell us what is happening about that on the domestic front?
Many thousands of former members of the armed forces, civil servants and civil society activists that the UK supported remain in danger, and we have been woefully slow in supporting them. I firmly believe that no one in this House supports a full recognition of the Taliban, but there is space for a pragmatic, measured and reasonable middle ground to ensure we are there for the people of Afghanistan. Cutting them off for evermore is not what thousands of British, allied and Afghan forces fought and died for.
I will conclude with a couple of points that came out of the debate. First, I mentioned the domestic element, so will the Minister say a bit about the threat of radicalisation? Does he feel that it is still as serious as it was, particularly given the lack of stability in Pakistan? Secondly, what budgetary implications might his strategy have? As I said, the £100 million does not seem to be as much as may be required. If he were to do this, what would he have to cut to put in place more funding? Does he agree that the BBC World Service is really well placed to provide educational programmes such as BBC Bitesize, which was so effective during the pandemic and which, with our language experts at the BBC World Service, could put in place some wonderful programmes for women stuck at home who are not able even to go out and do a basic bureaucratic task without having to be accompanied by their brother or husband? What is his assessment of the current picture of corruption? Would more money simply be at risk from corruption?
Finally, I thank the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East for securing this debate, for caring, and for giving us a lesson on the dangers of group-think.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
It is a tremendous pleasure to serve under your benign sway today, Dr Huq, for the first time, I think. I am extremely grateful to my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) for securing this debate and demonstrating to the House the extent of his knowledge and understanding of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan remains a priority for the Government and is of enduring importance to UK interests in the region and far beyond. We want to see a sustainable peace and stability in Afghanistan, and we remain committed to a leading role in the humanitarian response. I will seek to address all the points made in what has been an extraordinarily good debate with many knowledgeable and experienced contributions. My noble Friend the Minister for South Asia would have been delighted to take part in this debate, but as he resides in the other place, it is my pleasure to respond on behalf of the Government.
As I said, my right hon. and gallant Friend spoke with experience and knowledge. He made it very clear that the Taliban is not a monolithic movement, and I will come back to that point. He spoke with great eloquence about the sacrifice made by those who served, including members of his regiment, and we remember their suffering and that of the families and loved ones of those who took part and paid the ultimate price in the service of our country—a point that the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) and others picked up and that we will all want to echo. He spoke with wisdom about the work of Lord Ricketts, with whom I served on the National Security Council when I was Secretary of State for International Development something of a decade ago when these matters were very much more acute and sharp than they are today. He spoke about the engagement and means of progress of the Government and the Foreign Office, and I will reflect very much on what he said about that.
My right hon. Friend drew a firm difference between the rulers of Afghanistan and the people of Afghanistan, as did the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), and spoke about the importance of education as a significant bulwark against terrorism. He also spoke about the ups and downs of political life. He, I and others in this debate have known both, and I thought he spoke with great wisdom on that point.
The hon. Member for North East Fife spoke about the gender apartheid. She is entirely right to make that point. She spoke about the merger and said she hoped that development and foreign policy were marching in step in Afghanistan. She will have seen the words of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, yesterday to the Foreign Affairs Committee and noted his and my determination to achieve that effective result.
My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, spoke with his usual wisdom and asked me about the resettlement schemes, as did the hon. Member for North East Fife. I want to make something clear about the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, to which I think my right hon. Friend referred; he asked me whether this was effectively closed. He will understand that it is a Home Office scheme, but I am advised that although stage 1 is closed and in the first year the Government considered for resettlement only eligible at-risk British Council contractors, GardaWorld contractors and Chevening alumni, stage 2 will be broader but is not yet open. My right hon. Friend also mentioned the many difficulties for ordinary Afghans as a result of the nature of Taliban rule.
My hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) advised us of the experiences from within his constituency of those serving in Afghanistan and made, as he often does, an eloquent and highly effective plea on behalf of Christians, who are suffering so much in the way that he described. I will specifically refer his comments to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who, as he will know, is the Prime Minister’s envoy on these matters.
The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) spoke about the importance of those who are seeking to study in Scotland, and I will refer what she has said to the Home Office. On the subject of Pakistan and deportations, which she and others raised—
Mr Mitchell
Will the hon. Lady just hang on a moment? Since September 2023, we have committed £18.5 million to the International Organisation for Migration in Afghanistan to support vulnerable undocumented people returning from Pakistan and Iran. We are monitoring the situation in Afghanistan, including the humanitarian and human rights implications, and we note the Taliban’s creation of a refugee commission to aid the resettlement of people returning. The Pakistan Government have given verbal assurances that Afghans under UK settlement schemes will remain safe while they await relocation to the UK. Letters have been distributed to every eligible family, I am advised, to ensure that the authorities are aware that those individuals are under our protection. Eligible families are advised to take sensible precautions and made aware of how to respond if approached by the police.
The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) set out the appalling basis on which women are being treated and the effect of the ban on their own humanitarian situation as well as the wider situation, and paid a tribute to the work of Baroness Helena Kennedy, to which I would like to add the work that is carried out by Lady Fiona Hodgson.
If I may, I will come to the points made by the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green, before I return to the substantive points I want to make. I thank her for her words about our servicemen and women. She raised with me the particular issue of malnutrition. I draw her attention to the work of the global food security summit, which took place at the end of November and where I announced an additional £10 million to this year’s spending in that respect. The humanitarian spend next year will rise by nearly 50% to £151 million. Of course, in addition to our bilateral spend, we work through the agencies that are engaged with Afghanistan. She also spoke about the BBC World Service, and I completely agree with her about its effectiveness. The Foreign Office and the Government remain very strong supporters of the BBC World Service, for the reason she set out.
If I may return to the—
Mr Mitchell
I will give way, but may I make some progress first, in case I run out of time? I want just to say a word or two about the current situation. No one should be in any doubt that since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the country has faced a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Despite continuing international efforts, of which Britain is a part, 36% of the population are expected to experience crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity this winter. Since 2021, the Taliban’s increasingly repressive policies have had a devastating impact on women and girls. They can no longer support their families through work or fulfil their potential through study. They are no longer free even to walk to the park. Limitations on women’s rights to education, work and freedom of expression have taken a terrible toll on the hopes and dreams of millions of Afghans. As was set out eloquently during this debate, women’s suicide rates have surged. Alison Davidian, the country representative for UN Women, characterised Afghanistan as being
“in the midst of a mental health crisis precipitated by a women’s rights crisis”.
Rights have been rolled back elsewhere, too: minority groups such as the Hazara people face discrimination and attacks.
The position of the United Kingdom is that the UN security resolutions have consistently set out the basic expectations of the Taliban. These include preserving the rights of women and minorities and ensuring that Afghanistan will no longer be used as a base for terrorist activities. Our senior officials speak regularly to the Taliban, including to secure the release of four British national detainees last October. Officials also visit Kabul when the situation permits, including a visit last month from the British chargé d’affaires to Kabul, where he met a wide range of senior Taliban figures. Regardless of the complexities of the relationship, the UK Government have helped to lead the way in securing the Afghan people. In respect of the right hon. Gentleman’s plea about the embassy, we will note what he has said and keep that very much under review.
On the subject of aid, since 2021 we have disbursed more than £600 million in aid for Afghanistan, and we remain one of the most generous donors to the humanitarian response. Our aim is that at least 50% of people reached by UK aid will be women and girls, and we have supported 125,000 Afghan children, two thirds of whom are girls, to access education in the last year. On the subject of human rights, the Taliban’s repressive actions have been rightly condemned by the international community. The UK Government closely monitor the human rights situation in Afghanistan, and we work with international partners to press the Taliban to respect the rights of all Afghans in the face of attacks and discrimination. Afghan women and minority groups continue to demonstrate incredible perseverance, fortitude and courage. My noble friend Lord Ahmad regularly meets Afghan activists and provides a platform for women to speak out, advocate for their full inclusion in society and promote their rights to access essential services.
We are now at an important moment internationally. The UN special co-ordinator presented his independent assessment of Afghanistan to the Security Council in November. Following this, the Security Council adopted resolution 2721 on 29 December, taking positive note of the report recommendations and requesting the Secretary-General to appoint a new UN special envoy for Afghanistan.
I recognise that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East visited Afghanistan last year and made a strong plea for re-engaging with the Taliban. Our intention since August 2021, as I mentioned, has been to re-establish a diplomatic presence in Kabul when the security and political situation allows. We do not believe that is the case at the moment, but officials continue to visit and will keep this under close review. We are clear that we must have a pragmatic dialogue with the Taliban. However, that does not amount to recognition. We are some way off moving to recognise the Taliban, and we need to keep the pressure on them to change their approach. That does not stop us from having an impact on the ground and directly helping the people of Afghanistan in a pragmatic way.
In conclusion, I would once again like to thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East very much for securing this debate. I look forward to engaging further on this issue with Members across the House. Afghanistan remains a pressing priority concern for this Government and we will continue to play a leading role in catalysing international aid efforts.
Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)
I call Tobias Ellwood to conclude. Hard stop when the clock says 4.15 pm.
Mr Ellwood
Thank you, but this is an injustice. I cannot do justice to such an important subject—my time is up already. I am saddened. This is an important subject. Perhaps I can now raise a point of order, Dr Huq?
Mr Ellwood
On a point of order, Dr Huq. Please, some latitude. The next debate is here. I am sure they will not mind another minute—
Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)
Order. The Clerk is saying that I am compelled to stop you. Sorry about that.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).