Afghanistan (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join everyone in welcoming the report and thanking our chairman for producing it. I also echo the problem that we have with it being more than a year old. This is not a government problem. This is a problem because the House of Lords cannot manage to organise its business. We really need to send a message to the leadership of this self-governing House, as we are called, that when effort is put in to producing reports of the stature, elegance and erudition of this one, we expect the House authorities to table a debate in reasonably short time, certainly not after a year, and a year in which there have been momentous developments. I hope that message will be carried to the leadership of this House.

We have to look at the lessons for the future and the lack of strategy. The most relevant matter is in one of the briefings I received that quotes Professor Michael Clarke, former director-general of RUSI, who identified

“only one overall strategic driver, dated 2001: to support the US, regardless of whether its strategy was sound or not.”

I cannot disagree with that. A barrister called Frank Ledwidge was also quoted as saying:

“I have asked eight Defence Secretaries what our strategy was … I have not been able to identify a national strategy.”


I am afraid that equates with my own view of where we have gone wrong. Part of our problem, which was classically demonstrated in Afghanistan, is that we are bit players, not major players. The moment the Americans decided to leave, Joe Biden put down the phone, put a tea cosy over it, did not call anyone and said, “We’re off”. At that point, all the rest of the NATO group had to leave. There was no way in which we as NATO without the United States could mount any mission whatever. We were out behind it. I think we did a reasonable job in getting out our supporters and the people who had assisted us, but let there be no doubt that out was the only destination we had, because one of the biggest lessons we have to learn is that we have repeated the same mistake in Afghanistan for 150 years. We never learn, and it is about time that we did.

The second thing I would like us to learn is that you cannot have a policy based on bombing people into submission and then sending aid to rebuild the place. This is not a strategy. We may have to face the fact that in some parts of this great world of ours there are people who do not share our values, and we cannot force them to share our values. What Afghanistan has demonstrated is how quickly the castle can disappear into the sea because it is just a sandcastle. We have many people from Afghanistan now in Britain and in other western countries, but we had to pull them out because we had not built any structures that would survive for even a very short time.

I received, among other things, a rather good briefing from the BBC. It has got most of its people out. It has clearly done a good job there. We need to continue to support the BBC. But I find it bizarre that the funding for the World Service comes out of exactly the same pool as “Would I Lie to You?”, which is a programme on the BBC—it is not Prime Minister’s Question Time, incidentally. I really think that we need to see the World Service as a protected species; in other words, we need to make sure that it is protected, because it is the one body that is universally respected. I have travelled all over the world in my career and it is the one body that is always mentioned to me as something that people are very proud of and listen to and trust. We need to somehow pull the BBC World Service out of this mélange of BBC funding. It needs to be looked after.

What are the lessons for the future? Some 20 years ago, when this was just starting, I accompanied a Russian general around a museum of the Afghan war. In that museum there were letters from soldiers—their last letters—and various artefacts that had been in Afghanistan, and I always remember something he said to me: “You won’t win either and your enemy is much better armed than ours was in the beginning because your enemy has been armed by the Americans. They’ve armed the Taliban and it’s their arms that are now going to be used against you.” We need to look at things and say: “What can we actually do?”

A little closer to home, at the moment we are getting ourselves in a complete mess in Ukraine. Germany is refusing to let Estonia hand over its weapons. We cannot get overflight of Germany. But we need to reflect, as the German foreign office does, that we cannot do anything militarily in eastern Europe. If you talk to people at the German foreign ministry, that is what they will tell you. They will say that all you are doing is stoking up trouble. No one has ever won a war against the Russians. We are not going to be starting it. But we need a much sounder policy when we look at the lessons to be learned from Afghanistan. I think the lessons are that we can export western values through an aid and support programme and through helping with education and women’s rights—all the good things that we do—but we can do that only when we have fertile ground in which to sow our seeds. Self-evidently in Afghanistan we did not.

My conclusion on this excellent report is that we should use it as a series of signposts as to what we should not do again. That is the most important thing that comes out of it. I read it and at various points thought, “Hmm, maybe not. Better be careful there.” If we can get one good thing out of it, it should be realism in British foreign policy.