Afghanistan

David Davis Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the hon. Member, who raises an important point. Many of those individuals will already be going through procedures in the courts, and we cannot interrupt them, so they will go on.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

The whole House agreed with the Prime Minister when he celebrated the heroism of our troops, but that simply served to crystallise that this was not so much a defeat as a capitulation: an abandonment by the west of both people and principle. Does the Prime Minister believe that Tony Blair was right this morning when he said that western leadership was “naive” to believe that countries could be remade, or was it that our remaking of Afghanistan needed to last longer?

[The Prime Minister]

If Tony Blair was saying that it was naive to believe that countries could be remade and he was thinking of some of the things that he supported, I think he was spot on.