Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

I wish to speak in support of this motion to establish a Joint Committee to investigate the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is essential that we learn as much as we can. As the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said in her opening remarks, if we do not learn from our mistakes, we will repeat our mistakes. I do, however, wish to make some comments on the proposed narrow remit of the committee and on its ability to get to the truth.

First, let me turn to the proposed Committee’s remit. It is obvious—from the questions asked during the debate when Parliament was recalled, the questions to the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary last week, and the questions to the Minister responsible for Afghan Resettlement this week—that Members are concerned not simply about a backward-looking review, but about what is happening in the here and now, and how we move forward. However, I recognise that an open-ended inquiry would be difficult, and I am content that working on a timeline up to the completion of the evacuation makes sense at this time. I am also sure that if this Committee is established, many of the practical issues that Members are concerned about can be addressed under an examination of the policy towards civilian resettlement.

I have concerns, though, as does my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), that if the Committee is established to explore UK Government policy on Afghanistan only from the time of the Doha agreement in February 2020, the timeline may be too restrictive. In particular, it is difficult to see how a Committee could fully analyse whether UK Government policy was consistent with the reality unfolding on the ground—based on political and military events in Afghanistan, intelligence assessment, or the actions and comments of our allies leading up to the Doha talks—or, indeed, whether Government planning, including contingency and crisis management planning, was really informed by the actuality of the situation in the country, particularly in relation to the weakness of the Afghan Government and the strength of the Taliban.

Let me explain why I think that is important. The resurgence of the Taliban did not start on the conclusion of the Doha agreement. As early as 2009, President Obama had to send 17,000 more troops to counter that resurgence. The frailty of the Afghan Government did not only become apparent on the conclusion of the Doha agreement; they were described by the US Justice Department in 2018 as

“largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional”.

Notwithstanding the bravery of many Afghan soldiers and police, the failures of leadership were apparent and documented for years prior to the conclusion of the Doha talks. I am therefore not sure it would be possible, if the starting point is as late as February 2020, to fully judge the effectiveness of UK Government planning when many of the problems that plans must have sought to overcome had their genesis long before that.

It is also the case, as the Chair of the ISC said, that much of the information that the proposed Committee members would find most useful is intelligence assessment. Notwithstanding the proposal that he may be on the new Joint Committee, it simply would not be possible for that committee to receive secret intelligence or assessments. However, there is a great deal of good open-source material and other expert opinion regarding the situation on the ground over the period. The fact that the proposed Committee would have the power to compel Ministers to attend means, on balance, that it would be possible to have detailed consideration of UK Government policy on Afghanistan by the proposed deadline of March 2022.