Afghanistan: The key questions for Dominic Raab as he faces MPs over Taliban takeover

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3 years ago

August 31, 2021

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The Foreign Secretary will be questioned by MPs later on how the government intends to deal with the fall-out from the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

Parliament is still on its summer break, but an emergency session of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee will take evidence from Dominic Raab this afternoon.

Here are some of the key questions he could be asked:

What is being done to get the remaining UK nationals and eligible Afghans out of the country?

The foreign secretary has said the number of British nationals still in Afghanistan was in the “low hundreds” and acknowledged it would be a “challenge” for them to leave.

Mr Raab said it was not possible to put a precise figure on the number of Afghan nationals still in the country who may also be eligible for resettlement in the UK.

The foreign secretary has been keen to emphasise that evacuation efforts so far have seen 17,000 British nationals, Afghans who worked with the UK, and other vulnerable people removed from Afghanistan.

But MPs will likely press him to put an estimate on how many have been left behind – Labour have suggested there could be a further 7,000 Afghans with a claim for resettlement.

The government has said it is working with neighbouring countries to ensure people who are able to flee Afghanistan via its land borders can still apply for resettlement to the UK from third countries.

MPs will want to know what work, if any, is now being done to make those cross-border journeys viable, as well as what has been done so far to ensure effective processing in third countries is possible.

What is the latest security assessment of the Taliban takeover?

The prime minister has said any future diplomatic recognition of the new Taliban government would depend on the regime preventing Afghanistan from “becoming an incubator for global terror“.

But the suicide bombings at the airport in Kabul, US airstrikes on alleged ISIS-K cells, and reports of al Qaeda figures regrouping all suggest extremist activity in the country already presents a tangible counter-terrorism challenge .

Questions are likely to be asked about how internal tension within the Taliban itself – between senior leaders previously involved in the Doha talks with the US, and more traditional hardliners – could exacerbate an already worrying security picture.

With the Taliban now in possession of significant amounts of military hardware left behind by the Afghan army and withdrawing US troops, as well as sensitive documents not destroyed when western embassies were abandoned, MPs will want to hear the latest security assessment in terms of Afghanistan itself and also the impact on the global terror threat.

Yesterday Mr Raab refused to rule out the possibility of the RAF joining US airstrikes against terror cells in the country.

How does the UK government intend to deal with the Taliban?

When it comes to security, humanitarian or human rights issues in Afghanistan, the UK government has said it wants to work with the international community to have a “moderating influence” on the Taliban.

But apart from the tacit acceptance that there will need to be some form of engagement with the Taliban, there remains little detail on how this will be done in practise.

The indications so far suggest the government hopes to use the prospect of humanitarian aid and diplomatic recognition of the new government to encourage the Taliban to refrain from returning to some of its most extreme practices, but there will likely be questions about how sanctions may also be needed to exert influence.

Will the UK reassess its relationship with the US?

When he announced this emergency committee hearing last week, chairman Tom Tugendhat made a point of saying the UK’s diplomatic dependence on the US should be reconsidered in light of events in Afghanistan.

He described the Taliban takeover as the “biggest foreign policy failure since Suez and highlights once again the importance of building up networks of allies, not having a single partner”.

In January the Lords Select Committee on International Relations published a report which warned the US withdrawal was likely to have dangerous consequences that ministers appeared not to have properly assessed.

The report claimed the UK government had “shown little inclination to exert an independent voice on policy in Afghanistan” and “instead has followed the lead of the US and has been too reticent in raising its distinctive voice”.

Mr Raab is likely to be asked whether the failure to persuade the US to limit or delay its withdrawal from Afghanistan was the result of a lack of influence, or a lack of effort.

Was this a failure of intelligence, planning or both?

During interviews yesterday Dominic Raab accepted there had been a failure of military intelligence when it came to forecasting the speed at which the Taliban might take over the country.

He said “the best central assessment was that you would see a slow deterioration from the end of the drawdown in September and that Kabul would not have fallen for several months”.

But the foreign secretary is likely to be asked whether this is a sufficient explanation for the chaotic nature of the evacuation in recent weeks, which left ministers forced to accept the reality that some people would not get out.

In July senior military figures wrote a joint letter in The Times which warned of a lack of urgency in efforts to resettle Afghans who had worked with UK forces out of the country.

How culpable is Mr Raab and his department?

The Foreign Office, Home Office and Ministry of Defence have all been heavily involved in the evacuation efforts, and briefing wars have erupted between them over which department and which ministers are most responsible for failings that have taken place.

But Dominic Raab has come in for more personal criticism than any other minister, with opposition parties demanding he resign or be sacked.

He has acknowledged that “in hindsight” he should have returned early from his holiday on the Greek island of Crete on the weekend Kabul fell to the Taliban, but MPs will no doubt question him on the consequences that may have resulted from that decision.

He has argued his decision to ignore advice to call the Afghan foreign minister on the Friday before the capital fell, which he instead delegated to a junior minister, made no difference because the advice to make the call was “quickly overtaken by events”.

But MPs on the committee will likely want to probe this further, not least due to wider issues about how many other ministers and senior civil servants were absent from Whitehall in those critical days.

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Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch to be crowned Tory leader today – but whoever wins contest faces daunting task

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Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch to be crowned Tory leader today - but whoever wins contest faces daunting task

The next leader of the Conservative party will be announced today, following a run-off between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.

The winner will replace Rishi Sunak as the leader of the opposition, after he led the party to a crushing election defeat in July, losing almost two thirds of its MPs.

His successor faces the daunting task of rebuilding the Tory party after years of division, scandal and economic turbulence, which saw Labour eject them from power by a landslide.

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Voting by tens of thousands of party members, who need to have joined at least 90 days ago, closed on Thursday. Both candidates have claimed the result will be close.

The Conservatives do not disclose how many members the party has, but the figure was about 172,000 in 2022, and research suggests they are disproportionately affluent, older white men.

Both candidates are seen as on the party’s right wing. Kemi Badenoch, 44, is the former trade secretary, who was born in London to middle-class Nigerian parents but spent most of her childhood in Lagos.

After moving back to the UK aged 16, she stayed with a family friend while taking her A-levels, and has spoken of her time working at McDonald’s as a teenager.

Having studied computer science at Sussex University, she then worked as a software engineer before entering London politics and becoming MP for Saffron Walden in Essex in 2017.

Ms Badenoch prides herself on being outspoken and has said the Conservatives lost because they “talked right and governed left”. But her critics paint her as abrasive and prone to misspeaking.

At the Conservative Party conference, a crucial staging post in the contest, she began her speech which followed three other male candidates by saying: “Nice speeches, boys, but I think you all know I’m the one everyone’s been waiting for.”

Her rival Robert Jenrick, 42, has been on a political journey. Elected as a Cameroon Conservative in 2014, he was one of the rising star ministers who swung behind Boris Johnson as prime minister and was later a vocal supporter of Rishi Sunak.

But he resigned as immigration minister in December 2023, claiming Sunak’s government was breaking its promises to cut immigration.

The MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire says he had a “working-class” upbringing in Wolverhampton. He read history at Cambridge University and worked at Christie’s auctioneers before winning a by-election.

After a long ministerial career where he was seen as mild-mannered, he is said to have been “radicalised” by his time at the Home Office and has focused his campaign on a promise to slash immigration and leave the European Convention on Human Rights to “stand for our nation and our culture, our identity and our way of life”.

He has put forward more policies than his rival, but attracted criticism for some of his claims – including that Britain’s former colonies owe the Empire a “debt of gratitude”.

A survey of party members by the website Conservative Home last week put Kemi Badenoch in the lead by 55 points to Mr Jenrick’s 31 with polls still open.

James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary and seen as a more centrist candidate was knocked out of the race last month. One of his supporters, the Conservative peer and former Scotland leader Ruth Davidson, has predicted neither Mr Jenrick nor Ms Badenoch will stay as leader until the next general election.

She told the Sky News Electoral Dysfunction podcast: “I’ve now voted for Robert Jenrick, who I don’t think will win. I struggle to believe that the person that’s the next leader of the Tory party is going to take us into the next election in five years’ time and I struggle to believe that they’re going to leave the leadership at a time of their own choosing.”

Henry Hill, deputy editor of ConHome, said the contest which Tory officials decided would take almost three months, has not led to enough scrutiny – because the MP rounds of voting took so long.

“We know much less [about them] than I think we should”, he said. “The problem with this contest is the party decided to go really long, but at the same time, they confined the membership vote – with just the final two – to just three weeks, and ballots dropped halfway through that process.

“We had months and months with loads of candidates in the race, but also that was the MP rounds and you’d think the MPs will have a chance to get to know these people already. For the actual choice the members are going to be making, there has been barely any time to scrutinise that.

He added: “I think the party remembers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak taking weeks to take lumps out of each other in 2022 and wanted to avoid that. But it means the two campaigns haven’t really been attacking each other and that tends to be how you expose people’s weaknesses.”

After 14 years in government under five prime ministers, it is not since David Cameron in 2005 that the party has elected a leader to go into opposition – with a long road until the next general election.

Veteran ex-MP Graham Brady, who served as chair of the backbench 1922 committee, told Sky News that the position was more hopeful than after the 1997 landslide.

He said: “The biggest challenge for a leader of the opposition in these circumstances is just to be heard, to be noticed. I came into the House of Commons in 1997 at the time of that huge Blair landslide.

“We worked very, very hard in opposition during that parliament, and at the next general election [in 2001], we made a net gain of one seat.

“Now, there is a huge difference between now and 1997. The Blair government remained very popular and Tony Blair personally remained very popular through that whole parliament and beyond. And in 100 days or so, Keir Starmer has already fallen way behind.

“So I think we’ve got a great opportunity. I don’t think we’re up against an insuperable challenge, but it’s a big challenge.”

Kate Fall, now Baroness Fall, worked with Lord Cameron in opposition and later in Downing Street when he was prime minister in the coalition government. She said the next leader needed to keep the party “united and disciplined”.

“The first thing is to think about why we lost. The second thing is what do we have to say? Then they need to be agile, they need to be reactive, but pick their fight, not fight over everything. They also need to get out and about,” she said.

Lord Cameron travelled around the country holding question and answer sessions called Cameron Direct. “When you’re prime minister, you can’t do that as much as you like. But as leader of the opposition you can get out, talk to people, we thought it was very trendy to have a podcast and so on.”

She says this week’s budget gives the next leader “an ideological divide” to get into, but warns that the next leader must not risk alienating former Tories who switched to Labour and the Lib Dems.

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The leader of the opposition will cut their teeth at weekly Prime Minister’s Questions sessions opposite Sir Keir Starmer and respond to set piece events such as the budget.

They will need to get the party’s campaign machine ready for the local elections in England in May 2025, Scottish elections in 2026 and the next general election expected in 2029.