Afghanistan

Jane Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)]

Above my desk in my constituency office there is a picture of Sir Winston Churchill, under which are the words:

“We are all of us defending…a cause…the cause of freedom and of justice, of the weak against the strong, of law against violence, of mercy and tolerance against brutality and ironbound tyranny.”

Sir Winston Churchill was speaking in 1942, but in many ways his words speak of Afghanistan throughout the centuries, and certainly in the 21st century.

When we think of Afghanistan, we think of our heroes—of the soldiers who went to serve and who did not return, or who were injured, their lives changed forever. We think of heroes such as Flight Lieutenant Alan Scott, a former Loughborough University student, or Guardsman Jack Davies of Loughborough, who was only 23 at the time of his death. We think of the Royal Anglian Regiment, whose members were awarded the freedom to enter the borough of Charnwood in 2006, in recognition of their service to our country and our town.

Sadly, I remember 9/11 very well and can understand the need at the time to, as the President of the USA said, “degrade the terrorist threat” and to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks against the United States could continue. Given that no more terrorist attacks on that scale have been launched from Afghanistan in the last 20 years, it is clear that the intervention achieved its aims. However, the President also justified the fast-paced withdrawal of military personnel by claiming that the USA

“did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build.”

Despite that being the case, the USA, with the support of NATO and the UK, has moved the nation forward. That is demonstrated by the fact that today millions of girls in Afghanistan go to school and women hold more than a quarter of the seats in Afghanistan’s parliament, in stark contrast with the situation under the previous Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in which no girls attended school and women were excluded from governance. We absolutely must not sit back and allow that progress to be undermined.

I do not advocate the imposition of our western society on any other society—countries should of course be free to do as their people wish—but I do advocate democracy and the people of every country being afforded their basic human rights, including free will and the choice to determine how they live and the environment in which their children grow up. As such, the UK Government continue to play a role as we transition to a new phase of international support for Afghanistan. We must be clear with the Taliban that if they continue to abuse domestic human rights, they cannot expect to enjoy any legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people or the international community. A small number of my constituents have relatives in Afghanistan, and I would like their applications for refugee status, or discretionary right to remain in the case of spouses, to be dealt with swiftly and positively.

For 20 years, the work of our armed forces has protected the Afghan people and denied terrorists a safe haven from which to launch attacks against the UK. Those same forces have enabled development to take place that has improved the lives of millions and transformed Afghan society. I thank our armed forces for their huge sacrifice and the contribution that each has made, and I ask that those who helped our armed forces to deliver that help and support in Afghanistan also be helped and supported here in the UK.