Afghanistan Update

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and join him in paying tribute to those who have served in Afghanistan. We remember in particular the 456 service personnel who died and those who have suffered life-changing injuries.

I too believe that Afghanistan is a better place as a result of our efforts. We have achieved this through co-operation with our NATO allies. Nevertheless, a further commitment of 440 personnel is significant, and it is our duty to probe this. Noble Lords will understand that 440 on the ground will involve many times that number, as personnel are trained, deployed and rested.

It is appropriate to pause at this point. We will be sending people into harm’s way, and we civilians do not really understand what that is like. This place is enriched by the number of people who have done that; we even have one who has been in harm’s way. Afghanistan is a dangerous place, and NATO personnel were killed in the early days of these training missions. I wonder whether the Minister can give us a sense of the risk involved by telling us how many NATO personnel have been killed since the end of NATO ground operations, which I believe was at the end of 2014.

I shall now turn briefly to the Chilcot inquiry, if I may. I am told that it contained 2.4 million words, but I felt that it really had only two key recommendations: first, that the decision to commit military personnel should be taken by due process; and secondly, that before taking the first step one should have a plan for the second and subsequent steps.

On the first step, can the Minister explain the process by which the decision was made? Who was involved? Was the FCO or DfID part of the decision? Was the Prime Minister? What criteria were set to measure success? How were the risks to our troops’ lives assessed? Can the Minister assure us that the risks are indeed minimal, and that there are no scenarios in which our people will be drawn into combat operations?

Secondly, how long will the deployment last? Is there an end date, or at least a set of criteria to measure success and, hence, lead to withdrawal? Have all scenarios been considered?

We all hope and pray that the mission is successful but, sadly, history is littered with limited military interventions turning into full-scale war. Can the Minister assure us that in no circumstances will that be allowed to happen? I have complete faith that our people will be able to help the Afghans fight more effectively, but could the Minister give us more detail on the training that will be provided? Will it be complemented by softer essential skills such as policing, particularly with respect to corruption, and governance? Will the further input to produce those skills come from the FCO and DfID, or will our allies provide the resource?

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and I echo the words of the Secretary of State and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, on the commitments that this country has made to Afghanistan and the tributes paid to the service men and women who have given their lives in Afghanistan.

This is clearly a serious decision that is being announced today. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, pointed out, 440 service personnel is a significant number. It increases the personnel that we currently have in Afghanistan by two-thirds. It is noticeable that the decision has been made, we are told, in response to a NATO request, at the time of a NATO summit and on the eve of a visit by the President of the United States. What is not clear is when the request was made. When was the United Kingdom asked to make this additional commitment and when was the decision actually taken? Is the confluence of timings just ahead of the NATO summit intentional? Is it intended in any way to send a signal to the President of the United States that the United Kingdom at least is keeping up to its NATO targets?

There is a whole set of other issues associated with the nature of the contribution and some of the key decisions that need to be considered, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, has pointed out, have not necessarily been answered in the Statement. How long is this additional deployment intended to be? We have been told that about half the troops are due to be deployed in August 2018 and the rest by February 2019, but we are not told how long this is intended to last. The more deployments that we have, the more questions there are about the sustainability of deployments and the pressures put on Her Majesty’s services. While we pay tribute to the service men and women who are deployed to Afghanistan and everywhere else around the world, there is a question of the impact that this will have on forces morale. Is the Minister content that the resources are there to ensure that this additional deployment can be managed? Can he tell us a little bit more about what the Government’s exit strategy might be?

Finally, the Secretary of State commented that this shows our commitment to NATO, which,

“must remain the cornerstone of our defence”.

Nobody in your Lordships’ House would disagree with that, but does the Minister think that the President of the United States feels similarly? What discussions might the Prime Minister have with the President to try to ensure that, by the end of this week, the United States’s commitment to NATO is strong as that of the United Kingdom?