Afghanistan

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, other Ministers and the Chief of the Defence Staff are all very fond of the phrase, “Even the Taliban were surprised at the speed of the Afghan collapse.” They do not use this because we are interested; they use it because it is supposed to support an inference that we therefore should not be surprised that they were caught out by it, and to assert that everyone was surprised by the speed of the collapse. This is not true.

We now know that multiple US intelligence reports in spring and summer warned of the fragility of the Afghan army and the Afghan Government. If that were not sufficient—and it should have been—here in the United Kingdom the visiting professor of war studies at King’s College, a man called Tim Willasey-Wilsey, who spent 27 years in the Foreign Office on these issues, was freely writing blogs on the Cipher Brief, an open-source DC-based website, explaining all the factors in the inept deployment of the Afghan army and the behaviour of the Afghan Government that supported this fragility. The question for the Government is this: why did that information, which was in the public domain and being discussed, not ring alarm bells in the intelligence community and in the UK MoD? If that cannot be answered, why should anyone trust that the Government are being honest about the situation in Afghanistan?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I have to say to the noble Lord that we were working on preparations. The preparations for Operation Pitting, for instance, involved intensive work by many government departments over recent months. It was the huge effort, bravery and commitment of our Armed Forces personnel, diplomats and civil servants in Kabul that enabled us to evacuate more people than any other country, other than the United States. The specific evacuation plan for Afghanistan was revised in January 2021 and kept under review until it was enacted. So we were making preparations as the situation unfolded.

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[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

Yes, I can assure my noble friend that that is exactly what we will be doing. We will also want to be pragmatic and through organisations and some form of dialogue see whether we can talk to the Taliban and encourage them to do the things that we are talking about, such as providing safe passage. We have a number of levers at our disposal and will use all of them to try to make sure that we can achieve safe passage for those who want to leave Afghanistan and to make sure that many of the gains in civil society and within the country for women and girls and for minorities are not lost in the coming months.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for engaging with the question that I asked earlier, but she did so without dealing with the germane point of the evidence: did the Government have the ability in any form to come to the conclusions reached by other people who were not in the intelligence community? Why did the fact that they were doing that not ring alarm bells with Ministers who had responsibility, with their officials and with the intelligence community?

The noble Baroness tells us anyway that the Government were planning. Dominic Raab told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that, back in July, the Government were planning for the possibility of an evacuation of British citizens and those who were quite rightly entitled to think that we had a moral obligation to secure their lives. Will the Government share this planning? Did it include the explicit possibility that, unlike with any other evacuation I know of, those conducting it would remove the military before they had removed the civilians? If so, did we discuss this with the United States of America and with our NATO partners and say, “We have to face the possibility that history will look back on us as having removed the source of these people’s security before we could take them out of the place of danger”? Did we do that?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I am afraid that all I can do is once again reiterate the point that the specific evacuation plan for Afghanistan was revised in January 2021 and kept under review until it was enacted. Plans within it included options to support and evacuate our diplomatic team, British nationals and their families, the continuation of the evacuation of those eligible under the ARAP scheme and the withdrawing of remaining military personnel.