Afghanistan

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on Afghanistan.

[The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)]

Following the shocking attacks of September 11 2001, NATO allies invoked article 5 of the Washington treaty. An attack on one was an attack on us all. In Afghanistan over the two decades since, NATO has shown extraordinary resolve in a country where the soldiering is tough and operational success is very hard won. Some 150,610 UK service personnel have served in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. Hundreds of our troops have suffered life-changing injuries, and 457 of our young men and women have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our country. I pay tribute to their service and their sacrifice. They will not be forgotten.

I served in Afghanistan on two tours—the first, to Kabul in 2005; and the second, to Sangin, in 2009. My battalion lost 13 men on that second tour, with many more killed in our wider battlegroup. I have friends who will walk on prosthetic limbs for the rest of their lives, and I know people who suffered severe mental pain that tragically caused them to subsequently take their own lives. Like every other Afghanistan veteran, when I heard NATO’s decision last week, I could not help but ask myself whether it was all worth it.

We went into Afghanistan to disrupt a global terrorist threat and to deny al-Qaeda the opportunity to use that nation as a base for mounting further international attacks. In that mission, we were successful. By fighting the insurgency in its heartlands in the south and east of the country, NATO created space for the machinery of the Afghan government to be established and strengthened. Afghan civil society flourished. Schools reopened and girls enjoyed education just as boys did. There is a vibrant and free media. Women are not only valued and respected but are working in Afghan academia, healthcare and politics. Over 20 years we have developed and then partnered the brave men and women of the Afghan national security forces. They are now a proud army with the capacity to keep the peace in Afghanistan if empowered to do so by future Governments in Kabul.

Those of us who have served very rarely get to reflect on an absolute victory; only in the most binary of state-on-state wars can the military instrument alone be decisive. But two generations of Afghan children have now grown up with access to education. The Afghan people have tasted freedom and democracy, and they have an expectation of what life in their country should be like in the future. The Taliban, apparently, have no appetite to be an international pariah like they were in the late ‘90s. Our endeavours over the past two decades have created those conditions and have given Afghanistan every chance of maintaining peace within its own borders. We will continue to support the Afghan Government in delivering that, but our military could not stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, and so we will leave, in line with NATO allies, by September. Nothing in the future of Afghanistan is guaranteed, but the bravery, determination and sacrifice of so many British soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen has given Afghanistan every possible chance of success.

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[Mr Ellwood]

Sending our troops into conflict is the biggest decision that any Prime Minister has to make. The strategic objective must be clear, yet we now withdraw from Afghanistan, after enormous cost and human sacrifice, with the country heading towards another civil war and the Taliban on the ascent. I have visited the country many times. This cannot be the exit strategy that we ever envisaged.

Our nation and our military deserve answers. I request a Chilcot-style inquiry so that we can learn the lessons of what went wrong. How did we squander the relative peace of the first four years? Why were the Taliban excluded from the peace talks in 2001—a fundamental error that could have brought stability early on? Why did we adopt an over-centralised western model of governance? Why were we too slow in building up Afghan security forces, up to a paltry 26,000 five years after the invasion? Why was Pakistan allowed to harbour and train the Taliban for so long? More widely, did the ease of the initial Afghan invasion lead to an over-confidence by the US for it to then invade Iraq, meaning that we had to fight on two fronts? Should we take responsibility for the Taliban’s emergence in the first place after the US abandoned Afghanistan once the Soviets had left? Where was the British thought leadership—our situational awareness that might have influenced US strategic thinking? As we have learned in Northern Ireland, you cannot defeat the enemy by military means alone.

If we depart completely, a dangerous part of the world becomes more dangerous as the Taliban assumes control of the bulk of the country and once again gives sanctuary to extremist groups. Our brave military served with honour, but they were let down by poor strategic judgments that if politicians today do not understand and learn from, will impede our confidence to step forward and stand up to extremism and authoritarianism in the future. There are so many questions and it is the Government’s duty to respond.

[James Heappey]

I thank my right hon. Friend for calling for this urgent question. I do not entirely share his analysis of what would have happened next. The relatively benign, by Afghan standards, security situation in the country at the moment is not the norm; it is the consequence of the accommodation that the US and the Taliban had come to last year. That means, in effect, that there are three options for the international community. One is to prepare for a fighting season this summer once the 1 May deadline expires. The second is to come to a new accommodation with the Taliban that effectively removes all of the political imperative to reaching a solution. The third is to agree that, effectively, the military mission is done and that what remains now is a political one, and the way to accelerate that is to force the hand and agree to leave as we have done.

My right hon. Friend asks some great questions about the route to being in Afghanistan and the prosecution of the campaign thereafter. I think that those of us who have served, as he has done, take some solace from the way that these things are considered deliberately after the event. It is not for me to agree to such an inquiry right now, but one would hope that the lessons would be learned. I do not necessarily accept all of his analysis of how the campaign has played out, but obviously we have reached the point where the military mission has effectively culminated and what remains is a requirement for politics. To keep our people there indefinitely with 1 May approaching does not seem to me to be the right use of the military instrument.