Afghanistan

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP) [V]]

Like the Minister and the shadow Secretary of State, I pay tribute on behalf of the Scottish National party to all those who served, and of course, we remember all those who sadly lost their lives in Afghanistan.

All of us want the Government to get this right. I accept that there are no easy, clearcut, black and white ways forward, but I share some of the concern at the somewhat over-optimistic assessment that the Minister comes to the House with today. There is no absolute victory, of course—there is victory of sorts—but the peace is unstable. Governance is better, but it is still unstable, and the Taliban are not the outfit they once were, but they still pose a threat. The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), made some excellent points on how lessons are learned about what went wrong, because some things did. I return to the question he asked, which the Minister was not quite clear on: what is the Government’s view of a Chilcot-style inquiry? If we are all committed to getting this right, that is the kind of thing that surely needs to happen.

This might be the end of one of America’s forever wars, as it is sometimes known, but for Afghanistan, it remains immensely uncertain. What does the post-September relationship look like with the Afghan Government? I say this to the Minister on foreign aid. We can either have peace and stability in countries such as Afghanistan, or we can have foreign aid cuts; we cannot have both. If the Government are committed to a stable future for Afghanistan—which, in fairness, I believe they are—they need to reverse not just the cut that the shadow Secretary of State mentioned but the cut in its entirety across the foreign aid field.

[Mr Speaker]

May I remind the SNP spokesperson that he has one minute, not the more than two minutes that he has taken?

[James Heappey]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right to ask what the mechanism is for solidifying the peace within Afghanistan, but I am not sure that I see what the international military presence would do to solidify that peace any further. What needs to happen now, as we have seen in Northern Ireland and many other conflicts in which we have been involved in the past, is this deeply imperfect and—for those of us who have served —uneasy reality that all parties, irrespective of the role they played in the conflict, need to come together and make the politics work. I think that the conditions are right for that to happen now.

I do not mean to sound over-optimistic. My eyes are wide open. I said in my answer that the future for Afghanistan is uncertain—of course it is. But there is a set of Afghan national security forces in place now that are capable of maintaining the peace, and I genuinely believe that there is a political will to achieve that and an expectation within the Afghan public that their politicians will achieve that.

How the lessons are learned from this campaign, as they were with Iraq, is for my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary to decide in due course. Of course, in everything we do in the Ministry of Defence, we look at what we have done, and where it worked, we reinforce, and where it did not work, we change. Within the integrated review, there is already a recognition that the way we have done our business in the last two decades may not be the way that we do it in the next.

On the hon. Gentleman’s final point about the relationship with the Afghan Government and the need to financially support them, as the Secretary-General of NATO said, this is not the end of our involvement in Afghanistan; it is just the start of a new chapter. That new chapter is one that remains every bit as committed to supporting the Afghan national Government, and this year alone the UK will spend up to £70 million on supporting the Afghan security forces. Such support—both diplomatic and financial—is key to ensuring the future that we envisage for Afghanistan in the absence of a military contribution.