Afghanistan

Lord Darroch of Kew Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Darroch of Kew (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the outcome in Afghanistan is a tragedy for the Afghan people and a humiliation for the West. The immediate priorities are clear. We must honour our obligation to those Afghans who worked for us, a category that we should define widely. I agree with noble Lords who have called for a more generous resettlement scheme, delivered over months rather than years and with the appropriate infrastructure in place here in the UK. I also support the call from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, for reconsideration of the asylum applications of the 3,000 Afghan refugees already in the UK.

On diplomacy, it is right to co-ordinate with allies, to be cautious about recognising the new leadership in Kabul, and to judge the Taliban by their deeds, not their words. I pay tribute to the courage of those British military and officials, including some former Foreign Office friends and colleagues, who remain on the ground in Kabul organising the evacuation, and of course to the contribution and sacrifice of British forces throughout the Afghan deployment.

I have one broader point about why we are where we are. During my three and a half years as National Security Adviser I travelled to Afghanistan around a dozen times. I saw for myself the extraordinary transformational work of the British military, but I also could not miss the reports about low morale and high desertion rates in the Afghan army and its total reliance on foreign support. I would hear that without our presence it could not maintain the equipment we were giving it, get basic supplies to its bases or get its wounded to hospitals. It is now being reported, all too believably, that in the run-up to this collapse most Afghan soldiers had not been paid for months and that when the fighting started there was a failure to get ammunition to those on the front line. No wonder the collapse was so swift. It was also clear to me that corruption was deep and endemic in the Afghan system. The Afghan people did not want to return to Taliban rule, but nor did they appear to have much attachment to the Government they lived under.

We went to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 to destroy al-Qaeda. That mission evolved into something approximating to nation building. We had the best of motives, but we were working in an environment where the ordinary Afghan soldier felt little loyalty to his commanders, where the army could not function without hour-by-hour support from international contractors, and where the Government were seen by the people as the corrupt and ineffective creature of foreign powers. In short, we set ourselves a Herculean task that was going to take decades.

Meanwhile, the Taliban strategy was one of waiting us out, expecting our resolve to break, as it did. To compound this failure, the abject Trump exit deal of last year effectively gave the Taliban 18 months to plan their final assault. There was never any chance that the Afghan army would hold out after we abandoned it. Our baling out prematurely meant that it was bound to end like this. It was predictable and predicted, not least by the Lords International Relations and Defence Committee. I believe that this outcome would also have been predicted and anticipated in Washington, although not the speed with which the collapse unfolded, which makes its withdrawal look all the more cynical.

We are left with some big lessons to be learned, perhaps, as some have suggested, through a formal independent inquiry that includes lessons about mission creep, intelligence failures, the danger of wishful thinking and ignoring the facts that do not fit the preferred narrative of progress, and, most of all, the need for strategic patience.