Afghanistan

Lord Udny-Lister Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Udny-Lister (Con)]

My Lords, the invasion of Afghanistan—a combination of regime change, although yesterday President Biden said that the USA was not in the business of nation building, and the need to stop al-Qaeda and to confront its leaders after 9/11—was quickly followed by the second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq with no clear endgame other than regime change and a failure to think through what would happen when we won. We saw the total dismantlement of the Baath Party and anyone involved in government, and we left a vacuum that we have struggled to fill ever since.

In both cases—Iraq and Afghanistan—we, the West, poured in resources to build new Governments and created new armies to police the country. In both cases, these armies were in trouble as soon as western support was withdrawn. The parallel between the collapse of the Iraqi army when faced with ISIL, and the collapse of the Afghan army in the face of the Taliban, is frighteningly similar. It is not that these armies were populated by poor people, and many had been fighting the Taliban for many years with great bravery and had paid a terrible price with the loss of troops. In both cases, however, they struggled to handle a well-motivated opponent and were saddled by weak politicians, who, in turn, had done nothing to stop corruption and political patronage within both the military and the Government.

We cannot now walk away and say that it was only a matter of time until the Afghan Government collapsed without western support. The Trump Administration undermined the Afghan Government by negotiating directly with the Taliban. Again, little thought seems to have been given to what would happen as the USA left. We and others went in there to support a US-led invasion and, from what I can see, were never part of these negotiations.

We must now, as a House, ask what government policy is in Afghanistan. President Biden might not want to do nation building, but we will not deal with the terrorist threat until we help Afghanistan create a stable Government who are free of corruption and recognise that it is not in their people’s interests to harbour terrorists. This is going to be a long journey and one that, regrettably, I suspect, will not be achieved without future intervention at some point. I do not think that anybody believes that Afghanistan will not be a new home for ISIL, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. They are there already and are not going to be leaving any time soon.

Most immediately, we need to be assured that we have an anti-terrorism monitoring and intervention capacity in that part of the world. As we have closed all our bases, I struggle to know how we are going to do that. To do this, we must start to engage with our friends and look at opening up direct links with the Taliban and start negotiating, as has already been said. For that, we are almost certainly going to need an embassy, which will be no easy task. Recognition of the Taliban as a Government, which will come in due course, must come at a cost, and that cost has to be in curtailing terrorism, curtailing drug exports and becoming a worthy member of society.