UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Can we make something clear? The last speaker seemed to equate al-Qaeda with the Taliban. The Taliban have never threatened us, but al-Qaeda certainly has. If we want to understand Taliban thinking, we should note what was expressed recently by a commander. He said that war is dreadful and horrid:

“It creates nothing but widows and disruption. But jihad is different. It is our moral obligation to resist you foreigners. One year, a hundred years, a million years, ten million years—it is not important. We will never stop fighting. At Judgement Day, Allah will not ask, ‘What did you do for your country?’ He will ask, ‘Did you fight for your religion?’”

That shows the precise nature of the conflict, and it is not a conflict that can be won.

[Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman should reflect on the Taliban’s relationship with the events of 9/11. While they did not directly threaten us, they provided the wherewithal and the facilities for al-Qaeda to threaten us, and they did not do anything to try to rectify the situation when they had the opportunity to do so.

[Paul Flynn]

The situation now is that the Taliban are not in power because of al-Qaeda, as the Taliban well know. The Taliban already control at least half the country, and al-Qaeda has not been allowed in. There is no problem here; this is a false argument. We have created this myth that, somehow, if we pull out, al-Qaeda will have an area in which to operate. It already has Pakistan in which to operate, and Somalia and Yemen.

I take the point about how our soldiers will perceive what is said in the House, however. I, like most Members, have had the torment of trying to say to constituents who have lost loved ones that they died in a cause that was just and honourable. It is no reflection on the quality and bravery of our troops to say that this war has been, certainly since 2006, a grave error. There were people in this House and in the military—one military person resigned over this—who said in 2006 that our going into Helmand then was stirring up a hornet’s nest. At that point only two British soldiers had died in combat, but now the figure is 334 and the rate is accelerating; the 200th soldier to die, who came from Gwent, died last August. The bloodiest year so far for British troops in Afghanistan was 2009, but if things continue as they are, 2010 will be far worse. The rate at which British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan is now four times that of our United States counterparts.

The whole operation is continuing and there is no possible outcome that will be just and honourable. Both Governments have been in denial. We have heard optimism, and nothing but, year after year and in debate after debate, when they have told us that we have turned the corner. The Deputy Prime Minister used the same expression the other day, saying that things are going well now and we just have to hang on. We have turned so many corners that we have been around the block half a dozen times in Afghanistan, but we are still in hell and the situation is still getting worse. We believe in the possibility that the Afghan national army can take over, but it is mainly drug addicted and it routinely oppresses its own people. In one incident, 300 members of the Afghan army were guarding a convoy when they were attacked by seven members of the Taliban and they fled, with their commander saying, “Why should they sacrifice their lives and kill fellow Afghans in order to defend a corrupt leader from a different clan and to promote the policies of a foreign country?” Indeed, one is entitled to ask that.

The Afghan police service routinely extorts money from its own citizens. When the police went into the village of Penkala, the local elders came forward and said, “Last time they came here, they practised bacha bazi on our young boys.” That refers to the routine ritual sexual exploitation of young boys. They also said, “The Taliban were here before. They were wicked people, but they were people of principle.” The Afghan police are a criminal police service. Many of them are not paid, so they are expected to get their money in this way.

[Angus Robertson]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that in addition to all those problems, massive challenges are affecting the Afghan Government and Afghan authorities at a national level? Those organisations are the ones that we are supposed to be supporting. A financial scandal is currently engulfing Afghanistan, and it involves the elites around President Karzai. Is the hon. Gentleman content that our brave young servicemen and women are dying in support of those elites?

[Paul Flynn]

No, I am certainly not, and the hon. Gentleman is right in what he says. Minister after Minister has said, “We are going to tackle corruption; the corruption is impossible and we must do something about it.” When we ask them what we must do, nobody has the slightest idea. What we are doing, and what we are trying to do, is fight corruption with our sort of ethical corruption; we have taken corruption and bribery and put it on an industrial scale. The Americans are moving in with pallets piled high with bubble-wrapped stacks of $100 bills; our way of working in Afghanistan is based on our own variety of corruption.

Afghanistan is a country where there is not going to be a happy ending. We are never going to get the tribal groups to work together and we are not going to get the warlords to behave reasonably. These warlords have committed atrocities and they now have their members sitting in the Afghan Parliament. We went in with this idea that there was a simple solution, possibly a military one, but we know that that is not possible.

On the question raised by the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), may I say that although we praise the bravery of the troops and weep for their sacrifices, especially in respect of those who receive little attention—those who have been maimed in battle and will suffer the wounds for the rest of their lives—that is no excuse for saying that as so many have been killed, more should be killed to justify those deaths? Those deaths were avoidable and the fact that this House did not oppose the expedition into Helmand province in 2006 is responsible for them; this is not down to anybody else. We should have said at that time that it was not plausible to suggest that we can go into Helmand—that is so for the very reasons that the Afghans say. They are fighting us because we are the ferengi: we are foreigners. Every generation of Afghans has fought against foreigners.

In 2001, a member of the Russian Duma slapped me on the back and said, “Oh, you Brits have succeeded in capturing Afghanistan, very clever. We did it in six days and we were there for 10 years. We spent billions and billions of roubles, we killed 1 million Afghans and we lost 16,000 of our soldiers. When we ran out, there were 300,000 mujaheddin in the hills ready to take over, just waiting their turn. It will happen to you.” It has happened throughout history; no army has gone into Afghanistan, conquered it and occupied it. The task is impossible.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Flynn]

No, I cannot, because I have given way twice.

If we want evidence that the Government are in denial, we should recall the attempt to stop the reading of the names at Prime Minister’s Question Time, when the House is well attended and the media attention is on us. This was shifted and the names were read twice, once on a Monday and once on a Thursday. When the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary visited Afghanistan to demonstrate our strength, they proved our weakness. When they came back to the Dispatch Box and gave their reports to the House, they did not mention the only important thing that happened on their mission, which was that they were unable to fulfil their engagements. They were supposed to visit three sites, but they were unable to visit the principal one because of the strength of the Taliban. However, to admit that, and thus to tell the truth at the Dispatch Box about the fact that their trip exposed our vulnerability and our inability to guarantee the safety of our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, would have been to admit that the situation is getting worse by the day. This has been going on for a long time, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense.

There is a welcome sense within this House—I am not making any point about a date on which to withdraw—that we know that we are going to withdraw. An exit strategy is in place and that changes the mindset. Nobody will talk any longer about continuing for 30 years, or about conquering the Taliban or the people of Afghanistan. The people of Afghanistan know that we are getting out. The Parliaments in Holland and Canada debated this issue—they had the opportunity to do so and to vote on it before we did—and they decided to bring their troops out. The opinion of our nation is the same: 70% of the country wants to see the troops home by Christmas. That cannot happen, but we need to get them home in a way that is going to guarantee as much peace as possible for the Afghans in the future. We have to choose whether we have a Dien Bien Phu exit or a Saigon exit—that was an exit prompted by the disgust of the population at the body bags coming home. Such an exit would be carried out in panic and would leave the Afghans at the greatest possible peril. We may be able to reach some agreement with these various groups. They are not saints and it will be very difficult to get any stable set-up, but that must happen and we know that we are going to do it in the near future—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order.

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[Dr Fox]

I have taken several long interventions, and I am aware that this is the House’s debate, not the Government’s.

[Paul Flynn]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is a new procedure. It is a special privilege to have Back-Bench business today, and we are rightly confined to speeches of eight minutes. What is the limit on Front-Bench speeches?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Front-Bench speakers have been notified of how many people wish to take part in this debate, and it is clearly up to them if they want to take interventions. The Secretary of State has pointed out that he has taken a number, some of which were rather lengthy.

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[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I find this a very powerful, very troubling and very worrying motion. It states:

“That this House supports the continued deployment of UK armed forces in Afghanistan.”

If one were to remove the word “continued”, there is nobody in this House who would oppose the motion. Every Member, day by day, feels more admiration for what our soldiers achieve, more respect for the sacrifices that they have made and more pride in what they represent for our country. But the danger of the motion is that it is black and white: it sets up an opposition between the terms “increase” and “withdraw”, and between “engagement” and “isolation”. It creates a world in which people are tempted to say, either, “Afghanistan is the most important country in the world, the central, existential threat,” or, “It doesn’t matter at all.”

There are two central questions. How much does Afghanistan matter? And what can we do about it? We have heard Members from both sides of the House make eloquent arguments about the significance and importance of Afghanistan, and it matters in five main ways. They should not be trivialised, because Afghanistan does, in a sense, matter.

First, Afghanistan matters in terms of counter-terrorism and 9/11. It was the place from which the 9/11 attacks were planned. Secondly, Afghanistan matters enormously in terms of narcotics. It produces the majority of the world’s heroin. Thirdly, Afghanistan matters for us and our credibility. For nine years we have pinned our reputation and that of our allies to this adventure. Fourthly, as people have said, Afghanistan matters to Pakistan. There is an extent to which Afghanistan will have an influence on that state, which, as we have heard, is nuclear-armed, unstable and has jihadist elements. Finally, Afghanistan matters to its own people. Nobody in the Chamber wants the Taliban to take over, and nobody is in any doubt that they represent a brutal, horrendous and cruel form of government—utterly discredited from 1996 to 2001.

[Paul Flynn]

With the help of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), I have just checked the record for 2001, when I intervened on the then Minister and said that there was no chance of reducing the flow of heroin from Afghanistan, which then stood at 90% of the world’s production. The current figure is still 90%. What improvement has there been?

[Rory Stewart]

I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for his intervention, because it leads beautifully on to the second part of my speech. What can we do about the problem? Neither he, I, nor anyone in the Chamber doubts that there is a problem, but what can we do?

The answer has been gone over again and again, and General McChrystal has an answer in his report. What have we done? Broadly speaking, over the past nine years we have had successes in health, education, counter-terrorism, rural development and urban regeneration. We have had a series of other things, which we like to describe as challenges—in counter-narcotics, as the hon. Gentleman said, in counter-insurgency when fighting the Taliban, in the rule of law, in governance, in anti-corruption and in state building. And we have come to the conclusion that we have a talisman, a way of dealing with Afghanistan and a new solution, which is in that report and is called counter-insurgency warfare strategy.

We must wish the surge all our best. We have embarked on it and are committed to it, and that is where we are going. So let us hope that it works—however, there is a very real reason to believe that it may not, within the time frame that General McChrystal anticipated or predicted. In other words, when at the end of this year General Petraeus reviews the strategy, and when in the middle of next year President Obama begins the draw-down of troops, it is unlikely that we will have achieved McChrystal’s two main conditions: sufficient pain inflicted on the Taliban for them to wish to go to the negotiating table; and, on the other hand, the creation of a stable, effective and legitimate state.

It is not the place of this House to talk about why those things are not possible, and we do not have time to talk about why we did not succeed. The central element is nothing to do with the British or American troops; it is to do with the Afghan Government. General McChrystal has said from the beginning that the only way we will win in Afghanistan is with a stable, effective, legitimate Afghan state. Without that, we are not going to win, and such a state is not emerging. Does that mean we can do nothing in that country? No—we can do an enormous amount, but we cannot crush the Taliban and create a stable, effective, legitimate Afghan state.

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[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I cautioned against our initial deployment in Afghanistan and I have been critical of policy since, so I speak in this debate as a sceptic about our mission generally. There can be no doubt in the Chamber that the preparations for our mission in Afghanistan defied all the lessons of history. We fundamentally underestimated the task at hand and we under-resourced it accordingly. We have been playing catch-up ever since. Having served as a platoon commander in South Armagh during the 1980s, I have no doubt that our troops in Afghanistan suffered from equipment shortages, including helicopters, and from low troop density levels. History will prove that to be the case.

Part of the problem with our involvement in Afghanistan is that we have had a series of over-optimistic assessments, and people have rightly become cynical about what Ministers say at the Dispatch Box. All those assessments have proved to be false dawns. It is incumbent on leadership to assess the situation realistically, and we have failed to do that in the past—but that is the past, so what of the future? I congratulate the coalition Government in that we now at least have a more realistic assessment of the situation, but I still think that it is too optimistic.

The Prime Minister said on 21 June that we had to succeed militarily, economically and politically, but that is not the case. Militarily, we are as far from winning against the Taliban as we ever were. Recent reports suggest that the Taliban has expanded into even more territory. Our involvement ignores the lessons of history on counter-insurgency campaigns. For example, in Malaya and other successful counter-insurgency campaigns, we had control of the borders, a credible Government, the support of the majority of the people and a large number of troops relative to the local population. None of those conditions exists in Afghanistan, but we continue to believe that somehow we will win.

[Paul Flynn]

A further example of the optimism expressed by Government was in the Defence Secretary’s contribution, when he mentioned how well things were going with our allies. However, he could not bring himself to acknowledge that Canada and Holland, which both made great contributions in blood and treasure to this war, have decided to pull out.

[Mr Baron]

I agree, and it reveals a wider problem of differences over strategy.

The second aspect mentioned by the Prime Minister was the economy, but there is scant evidence that progress has been made in that area. The economy is not in a good state. The trouble surrounding the Kabul bank is one illustration of that, and another is the fact that the some 9 million unemployed people in Afghanistan can earn in two months working for the Taliban what it would take them a whole year to earn if they earned the average national wage.

Politically, the situation is even worse. The Kabul Government of President Karzai is completely discredited. The elections were marked by fraud and violence. He is now trying to extend his term of office and local people are increasingly fed up with the high civilian casualty rate, partly caused by aerial bombardments. All that plays into the hands of the Taliban. The US Department of Defence, in its latest report to Congress, made the point that the most powerful weapon that the Taliban have is their propaganda machine. They ruthlessly exploit rising discontent. Kabul is depicted as a puppet Government and the west as an occupying force trying to impose its will. We in the west must better understand this point. High civilian casualty rates exponentially increase hostility. That might not force Afghans actively to support the Taliban, but it will certainly stop them opposing anyone who wants to kill those who have killed their loved ones.

It is interesting to note, looking around the globe and back in history, that communism has survived the longest in those countries that have engaged militarily with the west. One thinks of Cuba, North Korea, China and Vietnam. We are not winning the hearts and minds of local people because we cannot—we are an occupying force killing their brethren.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of our involvement in Afghanistan is that our mission has suffered from a lack of clarity of purpose. We have had mixed messages. As recently as last year, the then Prime Minister said that we were in Afghanistan to keep the streets of London safe from terrorism, but almost in the next breath he threatened President Karzai with withdrawal should he not clean up his act. Those statements do not stand well next to each other. Even today, there is not that much more clarity.

If we are in Afghanistan to protect the streets of London and of our allies from terrorism, why are we setting a deadline and timetable? It simply does not make sense. Surely, if the mission is as important as is stated, our withdrawal should be dictated by the achievement of the objective, not arbitrary time lines. The Foreign Secretary has confirmed to me in this place and in Committee that we will be withdrawing in 2015 regardless of whether we have achieved our objectives. That simply does not stand up.

At some point, the solution will have to involve an understanding with the Taliban and the tribal warlords. It will have to reflect the reality on the ground and involve a loosely federated state in which power is devolved to the provinces. That does not prevent a small but mobile force of special forces from being on hand to disrupt al-Qaeda activities should it return, but the war, as currently constituted, cannot succeed.

The inconsistency of our strategy perhaps reveals that our presence in Afghanistan is as much about Pakistan as about Afghanistan. However, given the stated objectives and the diminished presence of al-Qaeda, we need to reassess the situation, enter into talks that make for an orderly withdrawal and move on.

I am afraid that, as an ex-soldier, I do not buy the line that by withdrawing, in an orderly fashion, we are somehow letting down our troops and wasting their sacrifice. Our troops have done everything we have asked of them, and we can all be proud of their achievements, but by and large they are a stoic bunch and believe that it is incumbent on the leadership to assess a situation realistically, because by doing so we stand more chance of achieving our objective and perhaps saving lives. Needless effort and sacrifice will be saved over the longer term. We cannot win this war as it is currently constituted, and a leadership that acknowledges that will save lives.

Perhaps this debate will encourage us to rethink fundamentally our foreign policy more generally. For the sake of mankind, I hope that the days are coming to an end when military intervention is seen often as a first option. Military action should always be the last recourse. It is ironic that we went to war in Iraq and even the ex-M15 chief now agrees that it increased the terrorist threat in this county, and yet we are now involved in another war to try to counter that terrorist threat. I will therefore be voting against the motion.