[Relevant documents: First Report of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Session 2022–23, Missing in action: UK leadership and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, HC 169 incorporating HC 685; Oral evidence taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 17 October 2023, on follow-up to the Afghanistan inquiry, HC 1888; and Correspondence with the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, relating to the follow-up session to the Afghanistan inquiry, reported to the House on 19 December 2023.]
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:
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.
It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon, Dr Huq. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing the debate. Like him, I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say as it has been some time since we have had an update on his Department’s policies on Afghanistan. I am aware that the newly appointed Foreign Secretary responded to some questions in the other place at the start of December, but considering the dire situation we know the Afghan people continue to face, I hope the Minister can provide something more concrete in his responses this afternoon. I am sure that he will.
As one of the co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group on Afghan women and girls, I often link in with networks of Afghan women both here and living in their country, including in preparation for today’s debate. Shortly before today’s debate, I spoke to one who will be listening in to hear what the Minister has to say. In fact, I know that they will all be listening with interest, anxious to hear about an action plan. The reality is that women in Afghanistan are living in what can best be described as gender apartheid. Over the past two and a half years, there have been discussions and meetings at different international levels and with different partners, but nothing has improved. Indeed, I would argue that it has got worse.
As the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East said, it is a privilege to be a Member of this place and to serve our constituents. I know that it is a rare and special opportunity to have this occupation. However, I do not often stop in awe at my mere ability to have a job, that I went to university or that my daughter recently completed her secondary education; that I have been able to travel from my home in Fife down to London this week unaccompanied by my husband or father; that when I served in the police, we were not arresting people for having the wrong type of clothing or belief or even for visiting public places; and that when we brought people into custody they did not routinely experience torture and sexual abuse. Sadly, that is life for so many women in Afghanistan, with the obvious exception that there are no women in the police either.
I shall put forward a few random and hopefully connected thoughts that have occurred to me in the course of the contributions we have heard so far. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing the debate, and I commiserate with him on the fact that he paid a high political price in losing the chairmanship of the Defence Committee, which I know he valued greatly, as a result of speaking out on this subject.
I can go part of the way with my right hon. Friend in support of his thesis about engagement, by saying this: no matter how much we detest a particular regime, a time always comes when, if in reality it has established full control over a country, it gets international recognition. That was true for the Bolsheviks, for example: Britain intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to prevent the Bolsheviks from establishing communist control in what became the USSR, but we failed, and, after a few years, that regime had eventually to be recognised. Where I find it hard to go further with my right hon Friend is in the belief that we can somehow manipulate the system to make significant improvements or avert significant threats from an Afghanistan run by the militant Taliban, even if he detects—rightly, I am sure—significant factions within the Taliban spectrum, such as it is.
As too many past speeches will attest, I came to the conclusion over a decade ago that the whole concept of the west trying to engage in nation building from the ground up in countries such as Afghanistan was largely futile, because—and I quote my right hon. Friend, who referred to this country’s democratic journey across the centuries—it often takes centuries for democracy to evolve in a society.
We have no reason per se to feel superiority over countries that we regard as undemocratic today, because we had so much longer than they have had so far to evolve the institutions, values and tolerances in which we have reason to be proud. The fact is that, if we were to go back 400 or 500 years into the history of our own country, we would find religious fanaticism that is not all that dissimilar to what pertains in countries that are subject to what has today been termed radical political Islam. If we then frame the proposition that some completely different society, seeking to impose their more modern values on the England of 500 years ago, could have managed to inculcate those values into a society with a belief that God Almighty was telling them to do one thing and to disregard all alternatives as infidel structures that must be destroyed, we can see that it is pretty unrealistic to think that societies could be transformed with that degree of rapidity.
I am very grateful to the right hon. Member for giving way. He is talking about a situation in which a terrorist threat may emerge in the future. At the height of the UK’s presence in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister of the UK talked about Afghanistan and Pakistan in the same breath and had an AfPak strategy. That was because there was a fear of Islamist intent coming together with the weapons of mass destruction capability in Pakistan. Does the right hon. Member think that those threats have completely dissipated, or would he still regard the federally administered tribal areas and the North West Frontier Province as a threat?
I absolutely am concerned about the attitude of Pakistan and about the potential for Pakistani nuclear weapons to one day pass under the control of more radical elements than are currently running that country. What should particularly worry us—this is what I think David Cameron had in mind when, as Prime Minister, he talked about Pakistan facing both ways on the question of radical Islam—is the fact that there has been a wish in Pakistan Government circles to see the triumph of the Taliban. The reasons for that are probably more related to Pakistan’s relations with countries such as India, and have too little regard to the other effects that bringing in a regime such as the Taliban’s might have on the stability and security of the international system and the rules-based international order—about which we hear so much although we often wonder whether it exists.
I share the continuing concern of the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). I am far from satisfied that we are in a secure situation. On the contrary, I feel that the withdrawal and abandonment of Afghanistan have given a huge boost to those who say that the western system of society is degenerate and enfeebled, and will surely fail in the face of a radical Islamic alternative.
What do we do about this now? What I think we can do can be summed up in the following way. We will, indeed, have to recognise that the Taliban are in control. Therefore, just as we have a sort of relationship, however adversarial, with obnoxious and hostile regimes in other countries, so we will have to do that with the Taliban. We must not fool ourselves that having a relationship with them will result in any real reduction in the threat that they and their of way life poses, particularly when they have adherents within our own societies. We saw for many years how much damage people who owed a form of allegiance to the Soviet Union could cause, through their fifth columnists in democratic societies. There is an equivalent danger from radical political Islam, too.
I was just going to ask you about that, Dr Huq, but you have beaten me to it, so thank you. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and I will share the time between us.
I say a special thank you to the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood). He is a gallant colleague and friend of many of us. Along with others here, I always honour him sincerely and honestly for his service in uniform. It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). His concluding comments sum up exactly how I feel.
We have to call the Taliban what it is: an evil organisation. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) outlined the case for women and children and what is happening to them in Afghanistan because of the Taliban. If we are to have any influence in Afghanistan, our economic aid—or grant aid, or whatever it might be—has to be conditional on things happening. If I were to take one thing from this debate, it would be that, so I thank the right hon. Member for New Forest East for saying that.
I believe I am well known as a supporter of our armed forces and the war effort in Afghanistan. I have been a strong advocate for those we left behind. I want to make a plea for one person. The Minister will perhaps have an idea of what I am referencing when I mention those left behind who worked with our soldiers and our Government and who have not been able to access a visa to come over here—namely, one of my constituents who served in Afghanistan, who worked alongside a gentleman who we have not been able to get out of Pakistan. We are still awaiting the appeal. This man’s only crime was being a contractor and working with the British Army and administration. He and his family have been under threat since the withdrawal took place. Any strategy or discussion about Afghanistan must recognise and rectify the failings of our previous dealings with them.
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“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.”
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.
Girls are banned from education after primary school. That is fundamentally wrong and I know that the Government—in fact, all of us here—agree with that. Yet the question is, what are we going to do about it? How will we put pressure on the Taliban to get girls back into classrooms? Again, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East pointed out that we know the hypocrisy of senior Taliban members, who send their own daughters to be educated overseas. With the growth of segregated madrassahs, how will we ensure that all students, but especially girls, get access to sufficient secular education?
The continued restrictions on women working are not just a serious abuse of their human rights but a financial disaster, particularly for female-headed households, in the context of an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. There are continued reports of women being arrested and imprisoned without charge, from both formal channels such as the recent UN Secretary-General’s report and the networks I hear from through the APPG. One explanation the Taliban have given for that is that mass arrests are clearing beggars from the streets. Even if that is true, we know that groups of women are being forced to beg because of the dire financial situation they find themselves in, having been excluded from the labour market.
There has been a total crackdown on protests and dissent, and it is clear that a number of arrests are purely politically motivated. It is notable that the Taliban’s own statistics show the prison population in Afghanistan to be well on its way to doubling in size since they took power. Sadly, that is again somewhat inevitable given that it is illegal to shop, work, beg, go to the park, speak an opinion or engage in any way in civil society. I was told in the run-up to this debate that last week women were arrested simply for wearing the wrong type of hijab.
I do not want the Minister just to say that this is obviously wrong—and I am absolutely sure he will not—because we all know it is. I want him to use his time to set out how the Government plan to put pressure on the Taliban. The right hon. Member for Bournemouth East said we should be engaging but, at the very least, what minimum standards should we ask to have met before engagement takes place in the backest of back rooms? I do not see anything that suggests that there is a desire to change. I hope the Minister will confirm that there will be a continued, and hopefully elevated, aid package to the region, but how can aid be used to incentivise those basic standards?
I opposed the merger of the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office, and indeed secured an urgent question on the issue back in 2020, but its stated purpose when it took place was that the UK’s presence on the international stage would be more effective when both foreign and international development policy worked together. I hope the Minister can demonstrate that they are and prove the initial doubts wrong.
For some Afghans, however, it is not possible to stay in their home country, such is the risk of persecution. Some two and a half years since the fall of Kabul, people are still hiding in fear of their lives in an unsafe third country, waiting to be told they can travel to safety. I welcome the restarting of flights from Pakistan in the light of the threat of expulsions from that country, but it feels like the threat of expulsions was what got things moving again.
Why is it that, after all this time, applications still do not seem to be being progressed? Barely a week goes by without MPs receiving emails begging us to take up the cases of people who feel abandoned by the British Government. They are not our constituents, and without a scheme like Homes for Ukraine, which provides a local link, there is simply very little that we can do. Most recently, I received one yesterday, as I am sure many other Members did, from a young person who said they acted as an interpreter to the British Army. Why are they still waiting, and what are the Government doing to speed things up?
My concern, and that of many, is that the Afghan relocations and assistance policy has purposefully or inadvertently minimised the number of people able to seek safety by limiting automatic eligibility to those who were directly contracted by the British Government or armed forces. The use of local contacts or contracts is not uncommon, and just because the Government might want to say, “Well, they didn’t directly work for us, so we deem them not to be at risk,” that does not mean that the Taliban will not see such an individual as somebody who assisted us and seek reprisals. I am also told—I hope the Minister takes this away and passes it on to his colleagues—that the process to apply for assistance under ARAP’s case-by-case consideration is complicated and opaque, and narrow in who it covers. A review of its effectiveness and, at the very least, how it is communicated, would be very welcome.
I want briefly to touch on two more resettlement issues before concluding. First, will the Minister provide an update on when the second phase of the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme pathway 3 will open? Without a meaningful timeframe, the scheme has in practice stopped. If that is the case, the Government should be honest about that to the House.
The second issue is the campaign of the Linda Norgrove Foundation to bring over a group of female medical students to finish their studies in Scotland. I have spoken to the foundation, and I am sure other Members have too. Securing visas that will allow those students to enter the country but crucially, given their financial circumstances, pay home student fees is the final hurdle to getting those women over to Scotland. That is not just the right thing to do to send a signal about how serious we are about girls’ right to education; it is also deeply practical. The UN’s most recent report warned of a medical brain drain out of Afghanistan. If we think long-term, we only win by helping to equip future generations of doctors, particularly female doctors.
Finally, I turn back to the APPG on Afghan women and girls. It was set up a little over a year ago to help lift the voices of women being silenced at home and too often left out of the conversations about them elsewhere. Government policy about Afghan women has to include Afghan women, and it must include a range of Afghan women from all regions and tribes. I have had the privilege of meeting some of those women, and I am grateful to them for giving up their time to me. What can the Minister say about committing to an inclusive political process in which the Government use the expertise available to them here and their influence at an international level to make sure Afghan women are included in high-level negotiations? That must go beyond round tables where they have input; it must be more collaborative than that.
We are here to consider the Government’s policy on Afghanistan, but I want them to think instead about their policy in relation to the people of Afghanistan—to women, children, the LGBTQ community and the Afghans who worked for British or NATO forces or in the former Government. Too often, Foreign Affairs is abstract—the time and energy involved is a zero-sum game with new crises taking away official focus, as the people of Afghanistan know too well—but the gender apartheid, the gross human rights abuses and the humanitarian and economic disaster faced by the Afghan people are not abstract. I urge the Government to put that at the centre of their response.
I have therefore felt, and argued for over a decade, that what we needed with a country such as Afghanistan was not an approach whereby we would be able rapidly to bring it into the modern world, but that we should be able to contain the threats that it posed to us—for a very long period, if necessary—until, by its own evolution, it came to develop the sorts of values that would result in those threats ceasing to exist. That option has now been taken away from us by President Biden’s catastrophic decision to abandon everything and effectively betray all the people in Afghanistan who had put their trust in the NATO countries that had tried, over-ambitiously, to develop Afghan society.
What I feel very strongly, which came out so well in the remarks that the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) made about Afghan women, is that we may have pursued an unrealistic and utopian policy towards Afghanistan, but, in doing that, we created obligations to those Afghans who sought to travel along the route with us. We must not abandon them.
When I hear about the idea of our having a strategy towards the country, I think of our options as extremely limited. The strategy that we ought to have had is one of containment, whereby we would make it perfectly clear that we had intervened militarily once and would not get sucked in, but that, if there were to be any sign of further terrorist activity aimed at us or our allies, we would not hesitate to intervene militarily again. In that case, we would again make it clear that we would not get sucked in, but would continually keep the threat of counter-action available while avoiding seeking to transform the society in a way that was wholly impractical.
Let us by all means face reality, but let us reassert that we know that this combination of politics, regime and religious extremist ideology is a total threat to us. We will do everything in our power to protect ourselves. Any aid and support that we give to the Afghan Government, as we will eventually have to call it, must be contingent on something in return at every stage. That will probably be in relation to the saving of groups, whether they be women’s groups or former military personnel to whom we owe obligations. That is the saving of people whose lives were changed by our intervention, and who have a right to look to us to help to protect them against the ghastliness of the regime that has sadly re-emerged and taken control of their country.
There is a reason why I say that in my introduction, because I also want to make a comment as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for international freedom of religion or belief, as Members know well. To return to the point that the right hon. Member for New Forest East referred to, if we are to help, it should be conditional on human rights, so that people can worship their God in whatever way they wish. I am a Christian, but I speak up for others—hon. Members know that. From a human rights perspective, it is clear that things are not as we would like to see them. Any discussion of Afghanistan and the role played by our Government and our nation must have the good of the ordinary people of that country at heart.
Open Doors is an organisation that I support. I appreciate the information that it shares. It tells the story of what it is like to be a Christian woman in Afghanistan. It is difficult to read. The hon. Member for North East Fife referred to how difficult it is for women. For a Christian woman it is even more difficult because of what they believe. I want to quote this lady—her name has been changed because that is the best thing to do. Open Doors states:
“Even prior to the Taliban’s seizure of power in August 2021, living as Christian carried enormous risk, particularly for converts. But the militant group’s takeover has made conditions even more dangerous for our Afghan family, forcing them to flee the country or go deeper underground. One person who knows all too well the dangers of following Jesus in Afghanistan is Gulshan.”
Her name has been changed to Gulshan.
“Relatives of hers have been killed for their faith, whilst her Christian neighbours have disappeared.”
She has no idea where they are. She does not even know if they are still alive.
“She hopes and prays they are safe somewhere.”
I hope so as well.
“‘It is our great desire to join with our brothers and sisters and worship God together, but now this is not possible,’ says Gulshan. ‘We can only meet our pastor in the dead of night, so no one can identify him or us.’ She and her family also face the threat of starvation, due to food shortages in the country.”
I think that is the issue that the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East was trying to hit on. But we have to make the aid that we give conditional, so that we can try to change things by subtle means.
Open Doors goes on:
“Despite everything she is risking, Gulshan knows that she is following a faithful God. ‘Our faith is in Christ, and will remain so until our last breath. Dear God, help us to find a straight and smooth path in our lives.’”
I and others in this Chamber are great believers in prayer, and we know that those prayers can make a difference. We understand that. Also, God gives us as MPs in this House a physical role to play, and part of that physical role is what we do to energise change. That is where I am coming from.
I am mindful of your direction, Dr Huq, so I will conclude by returning to the gentleman I mentioned in my introduction, Mohammad—I will only give his first name because I do not want to disadvantage him or his security in any way. Mohammad has been abandoned by us—that is the best way to describe it—after helping British forces for years. Our policy must be with women such as Golshan, a Christian woman. It must be with the woman that the hon. Member for North East Fife referred to. It must be with the young girls who are not receiving any education, healthcare or opportunities. They should not be brought up until they are nine or 10 and then abandoned. Our policy must be for the young girls who are not receiving an education. It must be for the young men who have been trained to fight before being trained in a trade, or even to read and write.
Our policy must focus on how we can work with the envoys from all our allied countries to bring about change. We all agree that we need change; it is how we achieve that change. The right hon. Member for New Forest East captured my thoughts very well. If it is true that the new Taliban regime is different, then this will be easily tested. The facts are there. I believe there is no evidential base at the moment; we just need to look at the treatment of women and girls, and at how the nation is being rebuilt and not torn down. If that is happening—we do not see any evidence of that, by the way—then I would urge Government to do what is internationally acceptable to help them achieve this. Just think of all those today who we will never meet in this world, but who need us to be their voice in this place.