Afghanistan

Mark Francois Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

The visions on television sets the other day very much were redolent of 1975. No matter what Secretary of State Blinken said, the parallels with the Americans’ departure from Saigon were shocking, but also very true. My point is that the way we withdraw matters almost as much as the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan—I will return to that in a moment. The chaotic, ghastly departure, the way that people were falling off aircraft in their determination to get away, and the helicopters shipping people out, say terrible things about the values that we hold and those we wish to protect. This is a shame on all of us, not just America, but also the whole of NATO and here for us in this House.

We know that US support for the military in Afghanistan had evaporated and there was pressure to leave, but there was a better way. The US non-partisan Afghanistan study group came forward and said that over the past 18 months the US had suffered no casualties at all. It had withdrawn directly from the frontline, and the same for the UK. We were giving support, help and aid to those on the frontline, including the 70,000 members of the Afghan forces who died and of whom we should be incredibly proud today.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

The Prime Minister reminded the House that the Afghans lost 70,000 men whom we helped to train and whom we fought alongside, even though some of them were not paid for many months because of endemic corruption in Kabul. Does my right hon. Friend agree that to imply, as some have, that they basically ran away, when for 10 years and more they had done precisely the opposite, is shameful?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

There is no question but that is an infamous statement to make. Those men and women lost their lives trying to uphold what we had brought to Afghanistan, and we should be proud of them. I say to the American President—the Government and even the Opposition leadership are perhaps reluctant to say this—that he has no right to use excuses and base them on people who have lost their lives, and done so bravely. The withdrawal of air support was critical at that moment. The moment that went, the Taliban got a green light and knew they were going to go in and that the Afghan forces could not be supported. That was a critical decision. It was done in a hurry, and it was wrong.

As I said earlier, the Afghanistan study group said that there was no need for this precipitative departure by America. It could have kept a number of forces there at a much lower cost, supporting those on the frontline, and we could have supported it in doing that. I ask my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, did we at any stage demand that the US Government review their decision? Did we say to them that this was wrong, or that we must find a way to support what we have started in Afghanistan? I am proud of what our troops achieved and I know they will feel deserted at this point. I did not serve in Afghanistan, but I served in Northern Ireland and I know what the feeling is. However, I say that today those who died rise in glory because they gave something to the Afghans—hope. We must find a way of ensuring that it is not dashed.

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[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

Winston Churchill said:

“Wars are not won by evacuations.”—[Official Report, 4 June 1940; Vol. 361, c. 791.]

The debacle we have sadly just witnessed in Afghanistan was more akin to the fall of Saigon than the miracle of Dunkirk. There is no hiding from the fact that we have just suffered a most grievous defeat. Our 150,000 veterans fought bravely in the noble cause of a better life for the ordinary people of Afghanistan. It is not their fault. We now have 457 compelling reasons for learning from this. I support the call from the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Chairman of the Defence Committee for a Franks-style inquiry to learn what went wrong.

Another war leader, Napoleon Bonaparte once said:

“The moral is to the physical as three is to one”.

When NATO needlessly withdrew key enablers on which the Afghan army still relied for protection, their morale rapidly collapsed. This was a NATO mission, which began as an article 5 request when the United States suffered a terrorist Pearl Harbor on 9/11. They asked for our help and we gave it.

Twenty years on, whether we blame President Trump for a bad deal with the Taliban or President Biden, who, remember, on 8 July told the American people,

“There’s going to be no circumstances where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan”,

the buck stops with him—oh yes, it does. But we are not blameless in Britain either. Our own National Security Council was caught completely flatfooted, although the Defence Secretary, to his eternal credit, did, perhaps with a soldier’s instincts, appreciate what was going to happen and sought desperately to assemble a coalition of the willing among European nations, only to discover they were anything but willing to prevent what happened next.

What do these events mean not just for Afghanistan but for the security of the strait of Hormuz, the Baltic states, Ukraine or even Taiwan? NATO has been the cornerstone of our security for more than 70 years, and it has just suffered a strategic defeat for the first time in its history. I am terribly sorry, as an Atlanticist all my life, that President Biden’s deeply isolationist speech on Monday was extremely worrying. If the midterm results in the United States are more important than the security and freedom of the free world, we had better work out pretty quickly what global Britain means, because it seems that global America just fell off its horse and died.