Evacuations from Afghanistan

Catherine West Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

The report of the Foreign Affairs Committee on the UK’s botched evacuation from Afghanistan is one of the most damning reports that I have ever read. At a time when the UK can be proud of our support for the Ukrainian mission, this report drags us back to a dark period when we turned our back on our allies. It details a disastrous tragedy of errors that fundamentally undermines the 20 years of progress that Britain and its allies helped to bring to the Afghan people.

When Kabul fell, political and senior leaders were all on holiday, despite repeated warnings from US intelligence agencies that the Taliban were in the ascendant. People who supported the allied mission or were especially vulnerable to the Taliban were left behind. Sensitive documents were abandoned in the embassy because the evacuation was rushed and under-rehearsed. There was no plan. Consular staff were withdrawn before replacements were ready to be deployed, which led to a crucial delay in processing cases. Visa schemes were led by three separate Government Departments, which utterly failed to co-ordinate, and—a year on—these problems endure, including the problem of the British Council staff. National security decisions were taken with potentially life-and-death consequences, with no clarity and with no record of which Ministers authorised what. As my hon. Friends the Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) made clear at the time, the Government were asleep at the wheel at this moment of acute crisis, putting British lives at risk to clean up their mess.

The effects on the UK’s international standing are immensely damaging. Shaky senior leadership in Government not only had disastrous consequences in the short term, but has damaged the trust that others have in us in the long term. The lack of leadership and the repeated mistakes make a mockery of the notion of “global Britain”, betraying the good work of our armed services and diplomats and signalling a strategic incoherence at the heart of the Government’s foreign policy.

I will be blunt in asking two questions of the Minister. First, who has been held accountable for the clear failures in our handling of a situation in which incompetence was promoted and negligence rewarded? Secondly, will the Government get a grip and commit themselves to working with the international community to ensure that there is a coherent strategy to engage with Afghanistan in the medium to long term? In the light of impending famine in the country, we cannot afford to turn our back on the Afghan people forever. The Government must make amends for this sorry episode, and improve.

[James Cleverly]

In my opening comments, I made the point that the Government had reserved the Baron hotel. Apart from the United States, we were the only country in the world to have that physical presence at the airport. We had made arrangements at Dubai to have an airhead there to facilitate the evacuation and onward passage. The report from the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), is an important document and we will pay it the attention it deserves and respond to it in the timescale requested of us by his Committee.