Afghanistan

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate, and I add just two points. One is a warning note on military interventions and the other concerns the possible future scale of asylum claims from Afghanistan. First, I suggest that we must be much more careful in future about military interventions in foreign countries, especially in the Middle East. The liberation of Kuwait was certainly successful, perhaps because it was a relatively limited operation in both time and scope, and because it had full support from the people of that country. Since then, we have had Iraq, Libya and, I would add, Syria. All of them have largely failed. Having served for 15 years in the Arab and Muslim world, including as ambassador in Syria and Saudi Arabia, I have concluded that those outcomes were mainly because we fail to understand the internal dynamics of those very complex countries. I support the calls by other noble lords for a wide-ranging inquiry—and the sooner the better, so that lessons can be learned.

Secondly, of course we should grant asylum to those who have worked directly for us, together with their families; the same should also apply to female judges and officials, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, pointed out, but we need to be careful. The scale of further applications from Afghanistan could be huge. The Afghan population is now about 40 million, and there are a further 5 million who are refugees, mainly in neighbouring countries.

The British Government recently made a promise of eventual settlement in the UK to 4.5 million people from Hong Kong. Meanwhile, our own society is already struggling to cope with massive levels of immigration, which has averaged 300,000 a year. That is despite 10 years of promises to reduce it. This has driven population growth of 7 million in the past 20 years, placing considerable strain on our social cohesion.

The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, pointed out in a 2016 report that there are

“worrying levels of segregation and socio-economic exclusion in different”

areas of the UK. She is right. The Government should be very careful about adding to our difficulties in this very delicate area.