Afghanistan: UK Government Policy

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mark Logan

Wednesday 10th January 2024 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government policy on Afghanistan.

It is a real pleasure to be opening this debate on the important subject of Afghanistan. I am grateful to see the Minister, whom I know is familiar with the country, having visited there many times, as well as the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West). I have much to cover, so to ensure that others have time to contribute, I make it clear that I will not take any interventions, because doing so would delay my speech.

After dominating our headlines for decades, Afghanistan is now the forgotten country and rarely features in our news or, indeed, parliamentary debates, and a population of 40 million people, not least women and girls, understandably feel abandoned. As I found out on my visit last summer, Afghanistan remains a very raw subject.

I spent some time at the British cemetery in Kabul, which was established in the 19th century to honour some of the dead from the previous British incursions into Afghanistan—the battle between the Oxus and Indus rivers, and the “great game” between Russia and Britain. In that cemetery, there are a dozen or so plaques marking the names, in date order, of the 455 UK personnel—including 54 from my regiment, the Rifles—who lost their lives in the latest war. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families and the hundreds who returned with life-changing injuries. Whatever the operational outcome, we must never neglect our duty of care to our brave veterans.

The war in Afghanistan was bruising for NATO—the most formidable military alliance the world has ever seen—as an entity. At its peak, it had 150,000 troops in the country. They departed demoralised, with many asking the question: what is the purpose of NATO? In August 2021, when Parliament was recalled so that the Government could announce our withdrawal, I said that this signalled the high-tide mark of post-world war two western liberalism. Two decades of state building in Afghanistan cost the United Kingdom £20 billion. It cost the US, which lost over 2,400 lives, $2.3 trillion. As our adversaries, who do not share our values, have observed, we have collectively lost the appetite to stay the course and defend the international rules-based order. The war brought an abrupt end to the post-cold war thinking that the west can impose its values anywhere in the world.

There has been no official UK inquiry about the lessons that might be learned, such as how we squandered the incredible umbrella of security created by our brave service personnel through the absence of a co-ordinated strategy to rebuild, and through total mission creep and strategic contagion. A western boilerplate governance structure completely ignored the complex tribal power bases and, indeed, the lessons of Afghanistan’s history, not least Britain’s previous efforts to run the country in the past. Corruption became endemic in Kabul. Lord Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser, summed it up in his book, “Hard Choices”, where he says:

“We became the problem, not the solution.”

In July 2019, President Trump gave a nine-month deadline to remove all US forces, simply to boost his presidential election prospects. He then struck a unilateral deal with the Taliban that excluded the Kabul Government, with no built-in human rights guarantees for women and children. However, it did see the release of 5,000 prisoners, including many terrorists. Afghanistan’s fate was sealed, resulting in the nation being handed back to the very insurgents we went into the country to defeat.

Just months after NATO’s article 5-approved invasion of Afghanistan, which followed the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, an international conference took place in Bonn, in Germany, in December 2001, to consider the future security and governance of Afghanistan. The Taliban requested attendance, but Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary at the time, told them to go away, saying that the losers do not get to sit at the table. Of course the Taliban did go away, across the border with Pakistan to rearm, regroup and return to fight another day.

I have visited Afghanistan about a dozen times since 2005. I sat in the same swivel chair in the large conference briefing room in Camp Bastion, I have been shown PowerPoint slides on how the Taliban were being defeated, and General Petraeus famously said of Iraq that it is not enough to defeat the enemy; we must enable the local. However, I am afraid that I saw very little evidence of that on any of my visits. I saw very little of enabling programmes or indeed of a strategy to develop workable local governance, and win over hearts and minds.

When President Karzai had to approve a new school headteacher in Lashkargah, and when an enormous turbine delivered by 16 Air Assault Brigade in 2008 to the Kajaki dam to generate game-changing electricity for communities remains in its bubble-wrap for a decade beside the dam, we know that something has seriously gone wrong in our post-conflict reconstruction planning and indeed in the efforts to win over hearts and minds.

The irony is that Helmand is the breadbasket of Afghanistan and beyond thanks to two decades of US investment just after world war two, when the same company that built the Hoover dam created the massive irrigation systems around the mighty Helmand river, which to this day continue to help to grow the crops that feed the nation. That is how to win hearts and minds. However, for 20 years there was no Paddy Ashdown character to co-ordinate efforts.

If we step into the shoes of the Afghan people today, we find that they are war-weary. They have endured four decades of conflict and instability. We have to go back to President Daoud’s time in the 1970s to find a time when it could be said that the country was relatively stable. Today, there is an eery calm, as another phase in Afghanistan’s history plays out.

As I found out, security is different now, but that is thanks to the Taliban’s daily attacks having ceased. Satellite images confirm that Afghanistan’s opium trade is significantly down, but that is because the Taliban’s black market to fund their insurgency has gone, and farmers are able to grow other crops, rather than opium, and take them to market without fear of running into the Taliban’s improvised explosive devices.

Whether from the people of Afghanistan or indeed from the Afghan diaspora here in the UK—the Pashtuns, the Hazaras, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, many of whom I have engaged with—there is no clarion call for regime change. That prompts a very difficult question: if the Afghan people are not calling for regime change, should we continue to punish them because the Taliban are in charge?

There are no easy options here, but the challenges that this fragile country now faces remain immense, and the Taliban know it. First, there is the economy. It was mostly US funding that propped up three quarters of Ashraf Ghani’s budget, in order to keep the country going. That funding has now gone. Varying estimates suggest that Afghanistan now has about two years before its economy collapses. In 2019, the UN estimated that around 6 million Afghans were considered to be in need of humanitarian aid. Today, that figure is estimated to have risen to 28 million. Meanwhile, China is eyeing up Afghanistan’s rich mineral resources and could easily turn the country into a vassal state.

Secondly, there is the demise of human rights. The brave demonstrations on the streets of Kabul by women who sought to retain their basic freedoms to work and study are dispersed by gunshots. Only a few days ago, that happened again in Kabul. It is just one example of how the Taliban are rowing back on the initial assurances given to women and girls when they gained power. The latest example is denying schooling to 11-year-olds, preventing 11-year-old girls from going to school, and preventing women from working in certain trades. Such diktats offer understandable, absolutist grounds to rule out having any truck with the Taliban until these conditions are removed.

Finally, there is the renewed threat of terrorism. As Afghanistan becomes ever more unstable, terrorism is once again allowed to incubate—most worryingly in the form of ISIS-K, which is increasingly active in the country. Senator Lindsey Graham warned in 2019:

“If we abandon Afghanistan out of frustration and weariness, we pave the way for another 9/11.”

Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, recently warned of the uptick in radicalisation that we are now seeing and that could impact the UK, saying that it is “unparalleled”.

This all leads to the difficult question: if our current strategy of condemning from afar is having no effect and if Afghanistan is on a worrying trajectory where international aid could be so pivotal, is it time to better understand what is happening in the country and within the regime that is leading to the increase in restrictions? I say that because the Taliban, as I discovered, are far from one cohesive identity. There are clearly tensions within the regime that was once united with the principal goal of violence against the Kabul Government and NATO. No doubt it remains an ultra-conservative movement with the most ruthless interpretation of sharia law in the world, but there are differences of view between Kandahar, where the reclusive leader Akhundzada is based, and Kabul, where the practical realities of holding the country together are grappled with.

The hard-line political messaging is abrupt and, rightly, internationally condemned. An example involves women denied university and school education. “How does any woman have access to a female doctor?” I asked, and how can women continue to work in Ministries, at the airport and with non-governmental organisations, including the United Nations, as I witnessed? The response was that licences are quietly issued, allowing those women to continue to work in such necessary professions.

Saad Mohseni, an Afghan media entrepreneur, set up TV and radio companies across Afghanistan a few years ago, when NATO was there. They all continue to operate today and now broadcast a range of educational programmes for children. Many urban areas now have access to the internet, and Zoom lessons are commonplace for all manner of subjects and all ages.

Let us be clear: this is so sub-optimal. It is, though, tolerated by the Taliban who are running the Ministries in Kabul, quietly maintaining some of the gains that have been secured over the last 20 years. But ironically the Taliban leaders in Kabul, understanding the rules on schooling, send their girls to school in Dubai. Clearly, the duality between Kandahar and Kabul is unsustainable in the longer term. One side or the other will eventually need to give. Are we really going to watch from afar this latest phase in Afghanistan’s history play out, or is there a more cognitive, proactive approach of engagement and influence?

In his excellent book “The Return of the Taliban”, Hassan Abbas, a professor at the National Defence University in Washington, suggests that about 40% of the Taliban are signed up to the full religious ideology. But for the majority of people in Afghanistan, it is either the military and fighting lure that encourages them to support it, or simply a social one—a bond extended through family and tribal loyalty. Many of the rank and file receive little religious training. They do not understand the sharia law obligations; they simply join the Taliban because that is what happens in Afghanistan. When a force looks like it is going to win, everybody then sees the changing winds and joins sides with it.

The older generation, many of whom held leadership roles back in the late 1990s and were content to be globally isolated, now lean upon the younger, Kabul-based, more tech-savvy generation to run the state Ministries. Those Ministries have changed little in function since 2021, but they know that their stability comes only with greater international engagement. That is why Kabul is growing ties with Doha, the Emirates, Turkey, Russia, China and so forth. Afghanistan certainly has changed from what it was in the ’90s. It is a more populous, more complex country, with complex needs and a desperate request for international support.

I dared to suggest this summer, and I repeat it today, that given the dangers that are looming, we re-evaluate our strategy. We should answer the plea of Roza Otunbayeva, the UN head in Afghanistan, and engage. She stressed in her formal report to the United Nations General Assembly in September last year that engagement does not mean endorsement, nor any form of recognition. The Taliban in Kabul recognise that there is $9 billion of frozen assets. That could easily be used to provide conditionalities in improving rights for women and girls if we used it more cognitively.

Other respected voices are also coming to the same position. Thomas West, the US special envoy in Afghanistan, says that we should engage. By the way, the United States has given $2 billion since 2021 compared with our £100 million a year. Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur for Afghanistan; Ms Fawzia Koofi, the former Deputy Speaker of the Afghan Parliament; the UK’s former ambassador, Laurie Bristow; General David Petraeus; Rory Stewart; General Sir David Richards; General Sir Nick Carter; and distinguished journalists Christina Lamb and Kathy Gannon all have extensive experience and understanding of Afghanistan. They are all saying, “Let’s engage.”

[Mark Logan (Bolton North East) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Ellwood]

I will not, if my hon. Friend does not mind, because I want to finish, but I look forward to his contribution.

As I mentioned, most tellingly, it is the Afghan people who desperately need our help and want us to engage. Let me end by speaking about the value of education. My brother was a teacher and educationalist. It was his death—he was killed in the 2002 Bali bombing by an al-Qaeda affiliate—that prompted me to visit Afghanistan so many times, to understand what we were doing to counter terrorism. My brother spoke passionately about the importance of teaching people how to think, and the dangers of simply being told what to think.

The UN head Roza Otunbayeva has raised just $0.5 billion of the $4.5 billion that she needs to honour the humanitarian programmes on the ground. Education restrictions on 11-year-old girls are a concern of course, but her bigger worry is that half of all children under the age of 11—boys and girls—are getting no education whatsoever. The schools and buildings did not exist, and do not exist, to teach them. That means that unless the international community helps soon, half of the next generation of Afghans will be open prey for radicalisation —the next generation of extremists—as they are lured into a false belief that their violence will be rewarded with a fast track to paradise.

It is Charlie Wilson all over again, abandoning a country that turns into an incubator for terrorism. We should not make that same mistake again. As the saying goes, we may have lost interest in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has not lost interest in us. We now have a duty to develop a strategy of engagement that moves from our current position of punishing the Afghan population for the Taliban’s takeover. Our approach to Afghanistan at the moment is not just incoherent but ineffectual. Our financial support is down to just £100 million, as I said. An economic, humanitarian or terrorism crisis is looming. Afghanistan’s threat is not just to the country itself but to the region and beyond. Let’s make sure Afghanistan and its people are not forgotten. It is time to engage. It is time to reopen our embassy.

My experience this summer was bruising. It made me reflect on this place, on Parliament, and more specifically on the conduct of Parliament. On a good day, we match that accolade of being the mother of all Parliaments. We have pioneered that important democratic journey across the centuries that is now emulated across the globe. Yet on a bad day, we are an exemplar of how shallow, discourteous and intolerant we can be of each other. Politics has always been a contact sport—I understand that—but by and large it remains civil, respectful and professional. Parliamentarians should be encouraged to show political curiosity and passion for an issue, cause or interest, and yes, advance or even challenge current thinking and dare to look four or five chess moves ahead and ask, “What if?” However, if we lose the art of disagreeing or offer latitude when a colleague miscommunicates a serious message, as I did this summer, and it is replaced by a “Gotcha!” culture deliberately encouraging a media storm, that is indeed a sad day for Parliament.

Political curiosity is what this place should be about. It should be encouraged and respected, otherwise MPs simply will not stick their heads above the parapet. That cannot be good for democracy and will certainly not inspire the best in our nation—the next generation—to consider following in our footsteps. We need to keep the bar high. Thank you, Dr Huq. Once again, I am grateful to have the opportunity to debate this important issue today. I will listen with interest to colleagues and to the Government’s response.