That this House has considered the situation in Afghanistan.
May I begin by thanking you, Mr Speaker, and all the parliamentary staff for enabling us to meet this morning? Before I turn to today’s debate, I am sure the House will want to join you, Mr Speaker, and me in sending our condolences to the family and friends of those killed in the appalling shooting in Plymouth last week. Investigations are of course continuing, but we will learn every possible lesson from this tragedy.
I know that Members across the House share my concern about the situation in Afghanistan, the issues it raises for our own security and the fears of many remaining in that country, especially women and children. The sacrifice in Afghanistan is seared into our national consciousness, with 150,000 people serving there from across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, including a number of Members in all parts of the House, whose voices will be particularly important today. So it is absolutely right that we should come together for this debate.
As someone who opposed this nation-building intervention, I believe that it now brings its responsibilities. Will the Prime Minister assure me that, in addition to getting our nationals out safely, and in offering a generous welcome to the many refugees, all necessary resources will be given to those Afghans and others who helped the British Council in its work, including the promotion of women’s rights? Many are in fear of their lives—of retribution from the Taliban. The Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme is slow-moving at the moment. Will he commit the necessary resource, because the window of opportunity is narrow and no one must be left behind?
We have got the point. May I remind Members that if you are going to intervene, you have got to be short. If you intervene more than twice, you will understand why you have gone down the list—if there was one. [Laughter.]
I thank my hon. Friend. I can assure him that, as I will be saying in just a few moments, we will be doing everything we can to support those who have helped the UK mission in Afghanistan and investing everything that we can to support the wider area around Afghanistan, and to do everything that we can to avert a humanitarian crisis.
It is almost 20 years since the United States suffered the most catastrophic attack on its people since the second world war, in which 67 British citizens also lost their lives, at the hands of murderous terrorist groups incubated in Afghanistan. In response, NATO invoked article 5 of its treaty for the first and only time in its history, and the United Kingdom, among others, joined America in going into Afghanistan on a mission to extirpate al-Qaeda in that country, and to do whatever we could to stabilise Afghanistan, in spite of all the difficulties and challenges we knew that we would face. And we succeeded in that core mission.
Does the Prime Minister agree that we are ceding back the country to the very insurgency that we went in to defeat in the first place, and that the reputation of the west for support for democracies around the world has suffered? There are so many lessons to be learned from what happened over the last 20 years. Will he now agree to a formal independent inquiry into conduct in Afghanistan?
As I said in the House just a few weeks ago, there was an extensive defence review about the Afghan mission after the combat mission ended in 2014, and I believe that most of the key questions have already been extensively gone into. It is important that we in this House should today be able to scrutinise events as they unfold.
As I was saying, we succeeded in that core mission, and the training camps in the mountain ranges of Afghanistan were destroyed. Al-Qaeda plots against this country were foiled because our serving men and women were there, and no successful terrorist attacks against the west have been mounted from Afghan soil for two decades.
May I take the Prime Minister back to his remarks in the House on 8 July, when he referred to the assessment that he had made? There has clearly been a catastrophic failure of our intelligence, or our assessment of the intelligence, because of the speed with which this has caught us unawares. Can he set out for the House how we may assure ourselves that in future years no terrorist attacks put together in Afghanistan take place here in the United Kingdom?
I think it would be fair to say that the events in Afghanistan have unfolded faster, and the collapse has been faster, than I think even the Taliban themselves predicted. What is not true is to say that the UK Government were unprepared or did not foresee this, because it was certainly part of our planning. The very difficult logistical operation for the withdrawal of UK nationals has been under preparation for many months, and I can tell the House that the decision to commission the emergency handling centre at the airport—the commissioning of that centre—took place two weeks ago.
If I can just make a little more progress, I will certainly give way in a moment.
Alongside this core mission, we worked for a better future for the people of Afghanistan. The heroism and tireless work of our armed forces contributed to national elections as well as to the promotion and protection of human rights and equalities in a way that many in Afghanistan had not previously known. Whereas 20 years ago, almost no girls went to school and women were banned from positions of governance, now 3.6 million girls have been in school this year alone and women hold over a quarter of the seats in the Afghan Parliament. But we must be honest and accept that huge difficulties were encountered at each turn, and some of this progress is fragile.
I pay tribute to our ambassador and the diplomatic team in Kabul and our armed forces on the ground, who have been evacuating people in extraordinary circumstances. One of the consequences of the rapidity of the collapse of Kabul is that many people have been left trapped, unable to access the airport and unable to evacuate, including many of those who should be coming to this country who served us bravely in that country and many women who are particularly at risk. Many of us across the House will have experienced chaos in the last 24 to 48 hours in communicating information through to the ground to get some of those people out of the country. Can the Prime Minister give us some assurances about how we can get that information through so that we can get those brave people out of there, including many whose lives are at risk right now in Kabul?
The hon. Gentleman raises exactly the right question. I spoke this morning to Ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow as well as to Brigadier Dan Blanchford, who is handling the evacuation. It would be fair to say that the situation has stabilised since the weekend, but it remains precarious and the UK officials on the ground are doing everything that they can to expedite the movement of people—those who need to come out, whether from the ARAP scheme or the eligible persons—to get from Kabul to the airport. At the moment, it would be fair to say that the Taliban are allowing that evacuation to go ahead, but the most important thing is that we get this done in as expeditious a fashion as we can, and that is what we are doing. I am grateful not just to the UK forces who are now out there helping to stabilise the airport, but also to the US forces.
The combat phase of our mission ended in 2014, when we brought the vast majority of our troops home and handed over responsibility for security to the Afghans themselves, and we continued to support their efforts. Even at that stage, we should remember that conflict was continuous and that, in spite of the bravery and sacrifice of the Afghan army—we should never forget that 69,000 of those Afghan army troops gave their lives in this conflict—significant parts of the country remained contested or under Taliban control. So when, after two decades, the Americans prepared to take their long-predicted and well-trailed step of a final extraction of their forces, we looked at many options, including the potential for staying longer ourselves, finding new partners or even increasing our presence.
Will the Prime Minister share with the House what assessment UK intelligence services made of the relative fighting capacity currently of the Afghan army and the Taliban, and will he tell us what representations the UK Government made to our US allies with regard to their timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He asks for a commentary on the respective military potential for power of the Taliban and the Afghan forces. It is pretty clear from what has happened that the collapse of the Afghan forces has been much faster than expected. As for our NATO allies and allies around the world, when it came for us to look at the options that this country might have in view of the American decision to withdraw, we came up against this hard reality that since 2009, America has deployed 98% of all weapons released from NATO aircraft in Afghanistan and, at the peak of the operation, when there were 132,000 troops on the ground, 90,000 of them were American. The west could not continue this US-led mission—a mission conceived and executed in support and defence of America—without American logistics, without US air power and without American might.