Afghanistan

Lord Hammond of Runnymede Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hammond of Runnymede (Con)]

My Lords, as a former Defence Secretary, I pay my own tribute to the 457 British service personnel who lost their lives in Afghanistan and the many hundreds more who suffered life-changing injuries. I know that many people will be asking whether their sacrifice was in vain, and I want to assure them that it was not. For nearly 20 years, we held the ground in Afghanistan; we denied that territory to Islamist terrorist extremists who would have attacked our populations using the safe haven of Afghanistan. Many other benefits flowed, but that was our primary purpose, and the mission was a success in those terms. I salute the heroism and commitment of our service personnel and I record the huge debt of gratitude that we owe them for keeping us safe over that long period.

What has happened now is a catastrophic failure of western policy, and, more particularly, US policy because, as my noble friend has already set out, whatever the romantics tell us, once the US decided to leave, it was inevitable that no other partner in the coalition could safely deploy modest numbers of troops effectively in the theatre. The die was cast. I confess that I do not understand the reason for this decision. Since the end of combat operations in 2014 and the drawdown of forces, we were deploying relatively small numbers of troops at relatively small cost and delivering a hugely leveraged effect on the ground in Afghanistan, denying space to terrorists to organise and excluding our strategic challenges from exploiting the situation in that country. It might have been messy, but it was a whole lot better than the alternative that could have been.

When I listen to the US President, I cannot help reaching the conclusion that this decision was made out of a sense of political tidy-mindedness: we need to close a file; we need to draw a line; it has gone on for too long. I fear that that tidy-mindedness is a western disease that is unsuited to modern asymmetric military conflict, which is messy and enduring. Our strategic adversaries understand that—they thrive on messy compromise, ambiguous outcomes and frozen conflicts. The western alliance has brought this catastrophe on itself to save a very small-scale deployment.

Today, the victims are Afghans, particularly Afghan women and girls. Tomorrow, however, the victims might be our citizens if our streets once again echo to the sound of Afghan-based terrorism. Let us now discharge our obligations to those who have worked closely with us in Afghanistan, but let us also learn the lessons of this debacle. Let us make it clear that we, for ourselves at least, are prepared for long-term low-intensity deployment of our troops to reinforce local militaries and reasonably friendly governments in order to deliver relative stability. We will be able to do that only with US support. Mr Biden said on Saturday that he had learned that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. I fear he was right and that that is the price of being a superpower.