Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Lord Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

I will be brief because I have no choice in the matter.

This has been the

“greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez”

in 1956. They are the words of the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who has left the Chamber, hopefully to change his mind, but he was accurate when he said it. It sounds slightly clichéd, but in this case it is accurate. This is the biggest disaster since 1956.

The motion directly calls for a Joint Committee investigation because we need to know who said what to whom, who made the decisions and what conversations have taken place over the past few weeks. For example, we do not even know if any representations—any representations—were made by British Ministers or civil servants to their American counterparts on the speed and timetable of the withdrawal. That question has not yet been answered.

I personally, like many of us, have dealt with in excess of 200 cases, or 200 individuals rather—not so many cases, but over 200 individuals, many of them British nationals. We have been able to get some of them out of Kabul, where they were concentrated, but many are still stuck there. I have had many reports of rapes, abductions, murders and attacks on Hazaras; many of the cases I have happen to be Hazaras. There are stories of young men and boys threatened with “Either you join the Taliban or we’ll shoot you”, and of girls and young women—we have heard these stories before—forced into sexual slavery or forced into marriage against their will. Journalists and academics, with absolutely no connection with the American and British forces—no connection—are still being threatened into silence and threatened with death and torture.

I am sometimes slightly hesitant about calling for inquiries, because we gets calls in this place and outside for inquiries almost weekly, on a variety of issues, but of all the problems, catastrophes and crises that have occurred since 1956, this case requires a full, public, judge-led inquiry more than any other. Just as importantly, we ought to make it clear, as my hon. Friends have made it clear, that whatever the strictures of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Members of this House have a duty to represent their constituents and make their cases. We have that duty, regardless of what we are told, particularly when we are told to be quiet by a Government Department, which is effectively what the FCDO has done.