Afghanistan Update

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and join him in paying tribute to those who have served in Afghanistan. We remember in particular the 456 service personnel who died and those who have suffered life-changing injuries.

I too believe that Afghanistan is a better place as a result of our efforts. We have achieved this through co-operation with our NATO allies. Nevertheless, a further commitment of 440 personnel is significant, and it is our duty to probe this. Noble Lords will understand that 440 on the ground will involve many times that number, as personnel are trained, deployed and rested.

It is appropriate to pause at this point. We will be sending people into harm’s way, and we civilians do not really understand what that is like. This place is enriched by the number of people who have done that; we even have one who has been in harm’s way. Afghanistan is a dangerous place, and NATO personnel were killed in the early days of these training missions. I wonder whether the Minister can give us a sense of the risk involved by telling us how many NATO personnel have been killed since the end of NATO ground operations, which I believe was at the end of 2014.

I shall now turn briefly to the Chilcot inquiry, if I may. I am told that it contained 2.4 million words, but I felt that it really had only two key recommendations: first, that the decision to commit military personnel should be taken by due process; and secondly, that before taking the first step one should have a plan for the second and subsequent steps.

On the first step, can the Minister explain the process by which the decision was made? Who was involved? Was the FCO or DfID part of the decision? Was the Prime Minister? What criteria were set to measure success? How were the risks to our troops’ lives assessed? Can the Minister assure us that the risks are indeed minimal, and that there are no scenarios in which our people will be drawn into combat operations?

Secondly, how long will the deployment last? Is there an end date, or at least a set of criteria to measure success and, hence, lead to withdrawal? Have all scenarios been considered?

We all hope and pray that the mission is successful but, sadly, history is littered with limited military interventions turning into full-scale war. Can the Minister assure us that in no circumstances will that be allowed to happen? I have complete faith that our people will be able to help the Afghans fight more effectively, but could the Minister give us more detail on the training that will be provided? Will it be complemented by softer essential skills such as policing, particularly with respect to corruption, and governance? Will the further input to produce those skills come from the FCO and DfID, or will our allies provide the resource?

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and I echo the words of the Secretary of State and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, on the commitments that this country has made to Afghanistan and the tributes paid to the service men and women who have given their lives in Afghanistan.

This is clearly a serious decision that is being announced today. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, pointed out, 440 service personnel is a significant number. It increases the personnel that we currently have in Afghanistan by two-thirds. It is noticeable that the decision has been made, we are told, in response to a NATO request, at the time of a NATO summit and on the eve of a visit by the President of the United States. What is not clear is when the request was made. When was the United Kingdom asked to make this additional commitment and when was the decision actually taken? Is the confluence of timings just ahead of the NATO summit intentional? Is it intended in any way to send a signal to the President of the United States that the United Kingdom at least is keeping up to its NATO targets?

There is a whole set of other issues associated with the nature of the contribution and some of the key decisions that need to be considered, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, has pointed out, have not necessarily been answered in the Statement. How long is this additional deployment intended to be? We have been told that about half the troops are due to be deployed in August 2018 and the rest by February 2019, but we are not told how long this is intended to last. The more deployments that we have, the more questions there are about the sustainability of deployments and the pressures put on Her Majesty’s services. While we pay tribute to the service men and women who are deployed to Afghanistan and everywhere else around the world, there is a question of the impact that this will have on forces morale. Is the Minister content that the resources are there to ensure that this additional deployment can be managed? Can he tell us a little bit more about what the Government’s exit strategy might be?

Finally, the Secretary of State commented that this shows our commitment to NATO, which,

“must remain the cornerstone of our defence”.

Nobody in your Lordships’ House would disagree with that, but does the Minister think that the President of the United States feels similarly? What discussions might the Prime Minister have with the President to try to ensure that, by the end of this week, the United States’s commitment to NATO is strong as that of the United Kingdom?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for their support for this announcement and, indeed, for their well-directed questions. Some of the questions from both noble Lords coincided, and I shall attempt to address them all in turn.

The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked me about the process that led to this decision. He is absolutely right to remind the House of the lessons from Chilcot, and that there needs to be a formal deliberative process across government for a decision as momentous as this—and that is indeed what happened. The UK was initially asked to consider this additional deployment in March of this year—that request came from NATO itself. We subsequently did so; that is to say, the Ministry of Defence considered the feasibility and a decision, following a discussion, was taken formally by the National Security Council on 26 June. It was then endorsed formally by the Treasury and by No. 10.

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, was again correct to make the point that the decision to do this was based not only on the fact that we thought it was the right thing for Afghanistan, for the UK and for NATO, but that it was intended—as I hope it will—to underline our commitment to NATO and the fact that Britain has particular skills that it can offer in a context such as this. I am sure that that message will not have been lost on any of our NATO partners.

The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, made the perfectly fair point that we will be sending troops into harm’s way. I would, however, just qualify that by making clear, as the Statement does, that the roles that are being and will be performed by our personnel in Afghanistan are non-combat roles. They are therefore quite distinct from the kind of role that we saw being performed under the ISAF banner before 2015, when our troops were very definitely on the front line against the Taliban. Chiefly, our troops will be charged with supplementing the Kabul defence force within Kabul itself. We have to remind ourselves that the NATO mission operates under the banner of “Train, Advise, Assist”. The UK contribution will therefore be to support that NATO mission but—to come back again to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe—the safety and security of our troops remains, as it always will, our key priority. We keep the protection measures for our personnel under constant review and will not hesitate to adapt those measures to the changing threats. They are benefiting from bespoke equipment, such as the Foxhound armoured vehicle, which is suited to the streets of Kabul. Essentially, as far as force protection is concerned, our personnel are equipped and mandated to protect themselves, as well as to protect coalition and diplomatic personnel. It is the Afghan national defence and security forces which are responsible for maintaining security in Kabul.

Both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness asked about the timescale. I hope that they will understand that it is not possible to put a timescale on the deployment of our troops within the NATO mission in Afghanistan. All NATO allies are agreed that we will continue to support the Afghan national defence and security forces until the conditions are right for our collective withdrawal, which includes the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people of Afghanistan without support from international forces, and when progress has been made on a peace process.

The noble Baroness—and, I think, the noble Lord—asked what kind of training we are delivering in Afghanistan. As I have already said, the mission goes under the strapline “Train, Advise, Assist”. The UK is mentoring and advising Afghan personnel, helping to develop capable and independent Afghan government and security structures, and working in the mission headquarters and the Afghan security ministries. An example of this is at the Afghan national army officer academy, where we are working alongside our NATO allies and Afghan partners to produce the next generation of Afghan military leaders.

Finally, the noble Baroness asked about the messages that we wish to deliver this week at the NATO summit. We have a number of objectives for that summit. Essentially, they can be summarised as making NATO more modern and adaptable. NATO continues to adapt to ensure that it is less bureaucratic, better at prioritising its activity and more capable of taking and implementing decisions quickly. The principles for all those things were largely agreed at the NATO summit in Cardiff and endorsed at the subsequent summit in Warsaw. We are confident that allies will agree ways to deliver those objectives, with the aim in view of strengthening deterrence and defence against Russia, increasing our efforts on tackling terrorism and addressing the threats presented by cyber and hybrid warfare. That very much relates to how we can improve readiness so that we can make sure that we have the right forces in the right place so that they can act when needed to protect our people. I believe that the UK already has an important part in that process, supporting the design of a new NATO command structure, and I think that we can be very proud that we will be committing an extra 100 posts to that structure, taking our commitment to over 1,000 UK service personnel.