Afghanistan

Richard Graham Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

This has not been the orderly withdrawal that any of us would have wanted. The rapid collapse of the Afghan Government and their armed forces, and the takeover by the Taliban have been more an implosion than a transition. This is not our finest hour. But nor is it our worst humiliation since Suez, for let us not forget that we went in with a UN mandate as NATO and we stopped fighting seven years ago, since when we have been giving support and training to the elected Afghan Government. Our exit is not of our making, but the US Government’s. None of those things was true of Suez.

It is important that we recognise that in order to support the great present and future work that will be done by organisations such as NATO’s Gloucestershire-headquartered Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, and the individual men and women of armed forces units such as 1 Rifles, which is also based in Gloucestershire, and their families. They did so much to prevent international terrorism coming out of Afghanistan for two decades. Now we have to focus on the immediate priorities of getting our own citizens out of Afghanistan safely, helping to get out as many of the most vulnerable of those who helped us while we were there and then organising a generous resettlement programme, about which we have heard very good news from the Prime Minister today. The longer term debate about how we work with different partners across the world, how we work with Islamic states and how we project our values peacefully through organisations such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy must come another day.

In the short term, in order to achieve those three objectives we are going to have to work, however much it grates, with those who are now in power in Afghanistan. Just as we know from recent events that we did not always predict what was going to happen accurately, we should not assume that we know exactly how things will pan out from now. We do not have complete control of the situation, and I believe that we owe to all those at Kabul airport, our diplomats and our armed forces good fortune in managing to extricate ourselves with some honour from this incredibly difficult situation. The future will see a debate that all of us will want to play a part in, but for now let us wish them all good fortune in executing the mission.