Afghanistan

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

The US surrender of its wardship of a problem child is a monumental failure of statecraft, geopolitical confidence and strategic patience that has been made all the worse by the fact that it spans two Administrations. The US is diminished by this, but so are all of us in the free world. The winners are those who are lined up against us and against our values. The losers, from Taiwan to the Caucasus, are those who will see their champions as having feet of clay.

We are left with a looming sense of foreboding at this ignominious end of the fourth Afghan war. It seems very likely that murderous civil war and the mother of all refugee crises will ensue, and it seems to many of us that the geopolitical plates are shifting—and they are shifting against us.

But the past 20 years have not been for nothing. Shout it from the rooftops! Four hundred and fifty-seven men and women demand it; their families demand it; and hundreds and thousands of our countrymen and countrywomen who are damaged in mind and body demand it. Twenty years of fundamentalist terror has been denied a power base, degrading its exportability to our streets. Twenty years of progress in Afghanistan cannot be erased by the brutes now in charge. They are 20 years in which the Taliban and its associates have not destabilised a fragile neighbourhood, and in which the export of opiates has been cut, to the benefit of our streets, and 20 years of Afghan dreams of a better life that will not be undreamt.

What now? What mitigation? Who will step up where the US has stepped back? Who will lead? Who will be the convener? Who will hold the pen? It must be Britain. Four hundred and fifty-seven British dead demand it. The Prime Minister has taken an early lead. I would expect nothing else, and this House must get behind him.