Afghanistan

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the United States came to our rescue in two world wars. Without its intervention in the second, Europe—including the UK—might now be under either a Soviet or a Nazi yoke. We should be for ever grateful for that. But the US was a reluctant interventionist. Separated from most of the world by two mighty oceans, there is a deep isolationist tendency in US society. Never forget that it was Japan’s ill-judged attack on Pearl Harbor that forced America into World War II and al-Qaeda’s monstrous attack on 9/11 that took the US into Afghanistan.

We and our allies are broadly united in our foreign policy goals: we want to protect our security; we want a prosperous and accessible global economy; we want—and the pandemic explains why—the benefits of a healthy world; we do not want to see suffering, abject poverty or starvation; and we want a world which promotes democratic values, equality, freedom of expression and the rule of law.

Yet we appear a long way off achieving this better world. So many countries, on every continent, are in the grip of totalitarianism or despots of various shades. The chaotic exodus from Afghanistan, following decades of investment and sacrifice, marks a serious reverse in the most unstable region in the world—the 4,000-kilometre arc that spans from Syria to Pakistan. As then Senator Joe Biden so presciently said in 2003,

“the alternative to nation building is chaos, a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists”.

Europe and the United States share a bedrock of common values. Europe’s GDP, including the UK’s, matches that of the US. However, as America’s unilateral withdrawal so painfully illuminates, Europe is no match for America in terms of military capacity. It is all too clear that the nations of Europe cannot alone protect and promote all their global goals; the risk of dependency on, or even of abandonment by, the US is too great. It is time for all of Europe to stand back, to review and to reflect.