John Baron MP: First priority is to save lives

MP says strategic lessons must be learnt

During yesterday’s emergency session on Afghanistan in the House of Commons, John said,

“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?”

The Prime Minister responded that the Government is doing all it can to support those who helped the UK in Afghanistan and to avert an humanitarian crisis.

Later, John said,

“The fundamental error that we made here is that we allowed the initial, limited and very successful mission of expelling al-Qaeda in 2001 to morph into a much wider intervention of nation building, which meant fighting the Taliban. That was unnecessary, given that the 2001 intervention had proved that we could achieve our goals of combating terrorism through limited interventions.”

“As one of the few Conservative MPs at the time to oppose the wider intervention and to vote against it, I suggest that the mission was born of ignorance, was over-ambitious and, from the very start, was thoroughly under-resourced. If we are not prepared to put in the resource to see this through to the end, we should not be surprised at the sort of exit shambles that we have recently seen.”

“I pay honour to our service personnel. They did their job in buying time – it is up to the politicians to come up with the solutions – and they achieved their missions. They can be proud, and we can be proud of them.”

“While the priority now is to save lives, the scale of the error is such that the many bereaved families and service personnel who are still paying the price of this intervention, including those of the eight fusiliers killed from my regiment, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, and the 30 or so wounded from the regiment who are living with life-changing injuries, deserve an apology from the Prime Minister on behalf of previous Governments, even though the exit strategy was not of No. 10’s making. I think that that is the very least we can do. They can be proud, we can be proud of them, but I think that an apology is certainly due.”

Afterwards, John said,

“The strategic lessons are many. To those few who may still believe that the UK and US have a right to intervene in sovereign countries in an attempt to re-make the world in our image, I would say we have proved thoroughly unreliable allies. Even though I opposed this intervention, we have clearly deserted Afghanistan in its hour of need. What message does that send out to the world?”

Notes to Editors:

• For a full transcript of John’s speech, please visit: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-08-18/debates/A86142BD-A204-4BC8-BBC0-ACA7BAD7E9F0/Afghanistan#contribution-5B985E4F-EDE3-4E5E-9D4D-4D9EAAD7E6E6.