Afghanistan

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Lady for what she said and particularly the spirit in which she said it, so let me try to address some of her points. It is clear that what is happening now is a follow-up to what was very largely the withdrawal—the end of military operations—in 2014. The presence since then has been much smaller, but a great deal of good work has continued to be done by British aid workers, the British armed forces and British diplomats.

The right hon. Lady is right to draw attention to the work of educating girls and young women. The whole country can be proud of what has been achieved. I reassure her by saying that this country will not only continue to fund education in Afghanistan and continue to support Afghanistan to the tune of £100 million, but we will also increase our funding for the Global Partnership for Education. We will be making further announcements about that later this month, when the Global Partnership for Education summit takes place here in London.

The right hon. Lady asks the most important question that I think veterans of the Afghan conflict will want to have answered, which is whether we think that the threat from Afghanistan has now been reduced. The answer is yes, we do think the threat from al-Qaeda is very substantially lower than it was in 2001. There remain threats from Islamic State Khorasan and the Haqqani network—of course there remain terrorist threats from Afghanistan—but the answer is to have a peaceful and a negotiated solution and that is what our diplomats will continue to work for.

I would just say to the Taliban that they have made the commitment that I read out to the House, in their negotiations with General Khalilzad. They must abide by that commitment. I am sure they will be aware that there is no military path to victory for the Taliban. There must be a peaceful and a negotiated settlement for the political crisis in Afghanistan, and the UK will continue to work to ensure that that takes place. I believe that can happen—I do not believe that the Taliban are guaranteed the kind of victory that we sometimes read about.

The UK will continue to exert all its diplomatic and political efforts to ensure that there is a better future for the people of Afghanistan, for the women of Afghanistan and for the young people growing up in Afghanistan, and to ensure that the legacy of the 150,000 British serving men and women who went through Afghanistan and, above all, the 457 who laid down their lives, is properly honoured.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

May I first say thank you to the Prime Minister for coming and giving this statement himself? This is an enormously personal issue for me. I did not meet the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) here or in any of the clubs or think-tanks around Westminster—I met him about 20 miles to the west of Garmsir in the desert, as we were fighting side by side against the enemies the Prime Minister has just listed. The achievements he listed were won with the blood of my friends. I can point him to the graves where they now lay.

That legacy is now in real doubt—we know that and we know that it is not just the Prime Minister’s decision and that the US decision to withdraw forces was fundamental here. But can he explain to me how Britain’s foreign policy works in a country like Afghanistan? If persistence is not persistent, if endurance does not endure, how can people trust us as an ally? How can people look at us as a friend?

The situation reminds me not of Vietnam, but of Germany in 1950, at a time when we could have walked away. We could have said, “It is too expensive; it is too difficult to rebuild. Let’s let Stalin have it and see what happens.” But we did not. We stayed and, in doing so, we liberated the whole of Europe peacefully.

Now I understand that it is hard to do that and I understand it demands a lot. The integrated review set out a really impressive strategy and it was not just summarised with the three words, “God bless America”.

[The Prime Minister]

I am sure that the whole House will want to thank my hon. Friend for his service in Afghanistan and for all the good that he did with his fellow serving men and women in Afghanistan, but as I think he conceded in his question, what the UK has been able to do in Afghanistan has not been possible through our efforts alone. We have to work with others, and of course the United States plays a massive role in these considerations.

I wish to reassure my hon. Friend and the House that we are not walking away; I made that point absolutely clear to President Ghani on 17 June. I say to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner)—I should have answered this point—that we are keeping our embassy in Kabul. We will continue to work with our friends and allies, and particularly with the Government of Pakistan, to try to bring a settlement and to try to ensure that the Taliban understand that there can be no military path to victory. There must be a negotiated solution. That is what the British Government will continue to do, and that is very largely what we have been doing since 2014.