Afghanistan

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, sometimes in politics there are no good options. You have to choose between bad alternatives: you can do X and ugly things will happen or you can not do X and ugly things will still happen. Whichever one you have chosen, the media and a chunk of the public will point to those ugly things as clear evidence that you should have picked the other course, either because they do not understand the concept of lesser evils or because they affect not to.

The reality is that ever since the terrorist abominations of September 2001, we have been in a world of lesser evils. Every course of action open to the West will have carried costs. Going into Iraq and Afghanistan carried visible costs, dissipating blood and treasure and causing civilian deaths. I was and remain an opponent of the Iraq war: I continue to believe that the costs we incurred were higher than the costs that we would have incurred through non-intervention.

I am not going to pretend, however, that the costs of non-intervention would have been zero. There is always a balance to be identified, and to that extent I have some sympathy with at least the part of President Biden’s argument where he said, “Look, given the way in which the authorities collapsed, it is clear that our only alternative to Taliban rule would have been an open-ended occupation.” That is not a knock-down argument. As other noble Lords have said, the US has had a fairly open-ended commitment to South Korea since 1957.

All I am saying is that we should accept that every decision in Afghanistan was a choice among bad options. Going in was a choice among bad options. Prolonging the mission after the degradation of the al-Qaeda bases was a choice among bad options. Extending the mission to cover nation building, female emancipation and education was a choice among bad options. Leaving was a choice among bad options. None the less, I consider it to have been the worst choice. It would have been one thing to have gone in, attacked al-Qaeda and pulled out, but once we were committed, once we had made a statement of intent, our honour was on the line.

Let me quote, rather unwontedly, that sly and calculating former President, Richard Nixon. This is what he said in 1970, justifying what we would now call a surge, seen as a prelude to withdrawal from Vietnam:

“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”


Who can doubt that he was right? How do the decision and the events of last week look from Beijing or Moscow, the two great illiberal powers having just conducted a massive set of joint exercises in north-western China? How does this look from Taiwan or even Pakistan? If you are an up-and-coming young officer cadet, do you want to train in the US or in China? Might you start thinking of learning Mandarin? Has it not emboldened every tinpot tyrant from Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, partly because they are no longer in awe of the English-speaking powers?

We have become very blasé about the world through which we have lived. We can be anti-colonialist and dismissive in an attitude bred from decades of peace and security. But as that world reaches its close, we may soon have the opportunity to regret what has passed.