Afghanistan

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I endorse especially the points so ably made by my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon. I was a junior Foreign Office Minister, first covering Afghanistan from July 1999 until January 2001, and then, from June 2001, was Europe Minister during 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan to eradicate al-Qaeda’s base. I am therefore implicated in what Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, described as Britain’s

“biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez”,

questioning what on earth so many British soldiers, coalition forces and Afghans bravely fought for—and sacrificed their lives for.

We must now find ways to incentivise the Taliban—and, yes, that includes engaging with them alongside regional powers like China and Iran—so that they are discouraged from returning to their bad old ways, including their oppression of women and girls. A United Nations panel reports that the Taliban have kept up a close relationship with al-Qaeda, permitting them to conduct training and deploy fighters alongside its forces. Something similar may be true of ISIS.

But experience from Northern Ireland—hard learnt at bloody cost to life and limb—shows that you will fail if you treat groups like the Taliban as pariahs. As Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, explains in his excellent book Talking to Terrorists, you have to negotiate with them, offering economic incentives and tough deterrents to respect international norms and human rights. The costly nation-building, democracy-building strategy of the West over these past 20 years has failed abysmally. A fundamental mistake of US-UK policy from the outset was not accommodating the Pashtun, the biggest group in Afghanistan, from where Taliban power comes. Instead of cultivating only Afghan forces and individuals amenable to the United States from 2001, instead of occupying a country that has always rejected foreign invaders—from Britain in the 1830s to the Soviets in the 1980s—surely after 9/11 the West should have negotiated a deal to remove al-Qaeda with the Taliban and other Afghani leaders.

And, yes, the story might have been different if the US and UK focus on Afghanistan after 2002-03 had not been diverted by the calamitous invasion of Iraq. We all share the shame, both the Labour Government in which I was proud to serve and, since 2010 the Conservatives—including Liberal Democrats when in coalition—in our betrayal of the millions of Afghans. It is no good just finger jabbing at Biden or Bush, at Johnson or Blair; there must instead be a proper reckoning by this Parliament and by Congress about the real lessons of our common culpability in this utter catastrophe.