Will Boris be hurt by Afghanistan withdrawal?

Afghanistan is not “a far country about which we know little,” Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP and veteran, said in his speech to the Commons in a special debate convened following Taliban’s swift takeover of the country. In his seven-minute-long intervention, he put forward a bleak vision of present British-Afghan relations. The British had made promises and broken them. Worse still, he noted, the leader of our closest ally, the United States, had cast aspersions on the bravery of the Afghan national army: “Those who have not fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have.”

He emphasised the multiple obligations we have built up over time to the Afghan people and emphasised that we have failed to meet them. The moral force of Tugendhat’s speech, his sense that the withdrawal has been poorly conducted, is widely shared. Although the British public is pretty evenly split in recent polling conducted by YouGov over whether it was right to intervene in Afghanistan in the first place, 42 per cent of those polled believe it was wrong to pull the troops out now, compared to 28 per cent in favour.

On a special episode of the BBC’s Question Time programme on Afghanistan, every single audience member appeared to be absolutely furious with the government and furious at our conduct in the last few months. The questions were variations on a theme – why didn’t we have a plan? What did our soldiers die for? What’s being done to help the women at the mercy of the Taliban? Why were we beaten up so badly?

I overheard a couple of guys in the pub talking in precisely those terms – raised voices, frustration. Before the scenes in Kabul of the last few days, talk of Afghanistan and Taliban gains might have been met with a shrug and a sigh. And yet, the events that followed the withdrawal have certainly shifted that sense of resignation into something new.

There is not a town in England, and especially, the north of England, where a family did not have a son or daughter serving in “Afghan” over the last two decades. Many will know a family who has lost someone to that war, been wounded or psychologically scarred for life. And the costs of our long war have fallen to already struggling parts of our country. Over the last few decades, recruits have generally tended to come from Britain’s most deprived regions, according to data from the Child Rights International Network (CRIN).

Politicians who are perceived to treat the issue lightly or without proper seriousness or with regular half-arsed platitudes will find there is a great deal of sensitivity out there about Afghanistan which can quite easily translate into genuine anger. Minister of State for the Middle East and North Africa James Cleverly, who appeared on the BBC Question Time special on Wednesday, normally a composed and efficient media operator, found himself blindsided repeatedly by just how aggressively audience members reacted to the mere suggestion of spin and equivocation.

If Biden and Trump are ultimately responsible for this debacle, then a little of their shabbiness seems to be rubbing off on the Johnson administration. At a packed special session of the Commons, Johnson looked a diminished figure in comparison to eloquent contributions from veteran MPs like Tugendhat and ex-PM Theresa May.

“War is a world, and not an event,” wrote the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich after she returned from reporting on the Afghan-Soviet conflict in the eighties. This week’s activity on the British political scene pales into insignificance before that world, the terrible experiences of the Afghan people, its pain, how their country suffers, and the experiences of millions of Afghans who live all over the world because they cannot live at peace in their own country.

The British involvement in Afghanistan extends beyond the last two decades. In 2002, the Royal Engineers built a bridge in the countryside between Kabul and Bagram and called it “Dundas Bridge.” It was named after James Dundas, who was awarded the VC for his exploits in the Bhutan War of 1864-65. He was killed in 1879 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War by a faulty mine (a grim foreshadowing of the many British soldiers killed by IEDs and mines in the last 20 years). He is buried in a cemetery in Kabul. We have been there, in one way or another, for a very long time. 2021 is unlikely to be the last year in which we beat another hasty retreat.