Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Stewart Malcolm McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I thank my right hon. Friend and I will come on to that point shortly.

As we work through this process, those MPs who have particularly complex cases will ultimately be contacted directly by the ministerial team—they will be phoned by a member of the ministerial team—to update them on the progress of those cases and, where necessary, to establish further information to allow us to process them.

A crisis of this magnitude demands a wider strategic response from the international community, as my right hon. Friend said. The UK is very much leading in that response. We are galvanising actions around four key priorities: first, preventing Afghanistan from ever again becoming a haven for global terrorism; secondly, preventing humanitarian disaster and supporting refugees; thirdly, preserving wider regional stability; and fourthly, holding the Taliban to account for their conduct, including their record on human rights. We will be at the UN General Assembly next week to take forward those priorities with our international partners. Working with the international community, we must set credible tests to hold the Taliban to the undertakings that they have made.

Turning to the motion before the House, I note that there is already a comprehensive range of scrutiny of the Government on the issue. The Select Committees on Foreign Affairs and on Defence have already launched inquiries on Afghanistan; further scrutiny will no doubt come from the House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations and Defence, and possibly from other Committees of this House or the other place. It is not clear what additional value a Joint Committee of both Houses would add.

The motion states that the proposed Joint Committee would

“consider…Government policy on Afghanistan from…February 2020 to…August 2021”.

In fact, the Government’s policy on Afghanistan during that period has been clear and there have been many opportunities to question Ministers and the Government on their approach.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

Will the Minister give way?

[James Cleverly]

No, I will conclude, because otherwise I would steal time from hon. Members who wished to contribute to the debate.

The motion proposes that the new Committee

“consider…intelligence assessments made of the…situation in Afghanistan”.

The Intelligence and Security Committee already has statutory responsibility for oversight in that area; it is the proper vehicle for such scrutiny.

The motion then stipulates that the Joint Committee would scrutinise eligibility for the ARAP scheme, but the eligibility criteria have been known to every Member of this House for months and there is no need for a Joint Committee to debate them now or in future. Of course, the overriding challenge that we have faced has not been eligibility per se, but the difficulty of implementing a scheme in the rapidly changing and deteriorating security situation that we have observed in Afghanistan.

Thanks to our brave servicemen and women, no terrorist attack has been successfully launched from Afghanistan against this country in the past 20 years; I am grateful that the hon. Member for Wigan recognised that point. It is painful to watch what has gone on in Afghanistan, but we should remember that 10 million more children have been educated and 8 million landmines have been cleared because of our intervention. In the new reality that we face in Afghanistan today, it will be challenging to preserve those gains—of course it will—but we must do all we can with a concerted new international approach.

The Labour party supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. As yet, we have not seen the Opposition putting forward a credible alternative set of policies or strategic approach to this incredibly challenging issue.

As I said, the relevant Select Committees are already looking into the recent events in Afghanistan and providing scrutiny, as they should. The motion would therefore create an unnecessary process and would inevitably duplicate the work of those Committees and divert the Government’s resources from what should be our priority: addressing the needs of those people currently in Afghanistan whom we need to help. I therefore urge hon. Members on both sides of the House to reject the motion.

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

The Scottish National party supports the motion. I am very glad that the Opposition tabled it, because there is a great deal to learn from the debacle, the failure, the ignominious defeat that we have seen in Afghanistan. We have expressed a preference for an independent judge-led inquiry and we are still very open to that option, but let us consider the motion that stands before us.

I would quibble slightly with the scope of paragraph (1)(a)(i), which would start the timetable from the Doha agreement; we think that previous events need to be properly considered in the round. I would also quibble with paragraph (1)(a)(ii), because I think that there would be quite a lot of overlap with the Intelligence and Security Committee, a point that has been dealt with already. Nevertheless, we support the motion. While taking due cognisance of the Committee inquiries already under way, we think, as Labour does, that the matter is of such significance and magnitude that it must be properly ventilated.

There is a lot to learn from the past few months. One thing that has struck me personally is that, in all our discussions and urgent questions on Afghanistan during and since the emergency recall, not a single person—on either side of the House, actually—has said sorry. Four hundred and fifty-six service personnel lost their lives. We have not said sorry to the veterans and their families. We have not said sorry to the Afghans who believed our promises and whom we collectively—all of us—failed. We have not said sorry either to our taxpayers, who funded this to the tune of many billions of pounds. There is a real need for more collective humility on all of this. I myself am sorry, because I think we have all let the people of Afghanistan down, and I think we need to learn the lessons from that.

I have to say, even to the Minister, that while I pay tribute to the intelligence personnel, the defence personnel and everyone else involved in Operation Pitting—and to everyone who has spent time in Afghanistan keeping the people of the country safe—to present Operation Pitting and recent events as some sort of herculean triumph is out of tune with the reality of the situation. I pay tribute to all those who have achieved so much over recent months, but we must learn the lessons of this collective huge failure. I would counsel a little more humility from the Government Benches and a little less hubris when we are discussing this issue.

There are also lessons for the conduct of the House’s business, because the responses that Members received from the Government were not as they should have been. We are reasonable people. We understand that things were stretched, we understand that things were unprecedented, and we understand that things were moving very fast. We would have taken all that in the round, but it was particularly galling to have a breezy assurance from the Prime Minister and former Foreign Secretary that everything would be dealt with, and that everyone would receive a response “by close of play”.

There is a world of difference between a response and an answer, and the inquiries of many Members, on all sides of the House, were not properly dealt with and still have not been. That is something of which the House should take due cognisance. I think that the distinction between those words was cynically abused by the Prime Minister himself—not by this Minister, who is far more credible on the issue. I think that there has been a collective failure of government. It was suggested earlier that the duty of the House is not necessarily to understand the administration of government. I thought that that was precisely the function of the House. We fear that there has been a failure of collective responsibility in this regard.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

When the Minister was on his feet, I hoped to ask him this question. I myself have tried to obtain a copy of the call logs for each Minister for each day during the month of August, so that we can map what Ministers were doing as the Taliban were advancing across Afghanistan. The Department refuses to publish that information, which it holds. Does my hon. Friend agree that, if the Department will not even do that, it explains why we in the House believe that greater transparency, not less, in government and ministerial actions is what is needed?

[Alyn Smith]

My hon. Friend has made a very sensible point. I would add gently to the Government that perhaps there would not be a call for a specific inquiry if we felt that the inquiries had been dealt with properly thus far.

What we need to do, as a priority—all of us—while learning lessons is get people out and make people safe. I pay tribute to the work that has been done on that, but we need more. The House needs to scrutinise the ARAP scheme itself, but we also urgently need the details of the new scheme so that our constituents can be informed. We in the SNP already think that it needs to be expanded. We do not think that 20,000 is remotely sufficient for the scale of the trouble ahead.

We would also like clarity on the actual timescale. If, as we have heard, “in the coming years” means more people coming in, does that mean that, if 20,000 people apply in the first few months of next year, the scheme will close—in which case it is wholly insufficient—or does it mean that there is a quota for how many people can actually get in? These are basic questions that are as yet unanswered, so we need more details urgently.