The UK's national security machinery Contents

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4The NSC and Afghanistan

144.Providing oral evidence in June, Lt Gen McMaster told us that

One of the ways to measure success is the degree to which the Government are reacting to events, or have strategic frameworks in place that allow the Government to try to bend events toward well-defined goals and objectives.229

145.Although the fall of Kabul came after we finished taking evidence for our inquiry, we felt it important to consider recent events in light of their implications for the functioning of the NSC, which existed for eleven of the twenty years that the UK had a major presence in Afghanistan. It is precisely the type of complex, cross-government policy area that the NSC and its supporting structures (including more recently an NSIG) were established to manage—involving the orchestration of many departments and agencies to deliver the Government’s strategy, and coordination with multiple allies and partners. Indeed, we understand that Afghanistan was a relatively frequent agenda item for the NSC over the past decade, including in the past year.

146.Nevertheless, as with covid-19—the case study from our last inquiry on biosecurity—events in Afghanistan raise serious questions about the role of the NSC, its strategy-making ability, the effectiveness with which it directs cross-government operational activity and planning, and the delivery of the Integrated Review. As Lord Darroch, former NSA and Ambassador to the US, has observed, it appears that the UK has “rather passively acquiesced in the foreign policy disaster”, from which it will take “quite a long time” to recover.230

147.Among the most important concerns raised by the trajectory of events in Afghanistan about the functioning of the NSC are:

• The extent to which the Government, since 2001, has articulated a meaningful strategy for Afghanistan, identifying the UK’s unique interests and concerns within an international coalition. In September, the then Foreign Secretary, Rt Hon Dominic Raab MP, publicly questioned whether the UK had ever had clear military objectives, the means to achieve them or a “clear and coherent exit strategy”. Professor Michael Clarke, Distinguished Fellow at the defence think tank RUSI, has observed that while many UK leaders have “pretended” to be enacting a strategy in Afghanistan, in reality “they were operating little more than the UK’s tactics within a US strategy over which they had next to no influence.”231 It is unclear what steps, if any, the Government took to voice opposition to President Biden’s deadline for US and NATO troop departure, either before it was announced or in the weeks that followed;
• The failure to orchestrate a timely, unified operational response to the United States’ decision to withdraw and its timeline for doing so. The Government had 18 months to plan for the final drawdown of NATO troops in Afghanistan. Yet planning only began in January 2021 according to the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), or in April 2021 according to the then Foreign Secretary.232 Press reports and questions raised by MPs suggest that key pieces of planning were subsequently missed or mishandled. These included: a joined-up response between the FCDO and MoD in evacuating UK nationals and vulnerable Afghan citizens; a single scheme for those seeking evacuation, instead of the three currently run by different departments; the failure to identify and verify those eligible for evacuation in advance; the late approval of the Home Office resettlement scheme, which reportedly came on 18 August—three days after the fall of Kabul; and the FCDO’s failure to lay the ground for safe passage of evacuees via third countries in the region;233,234
• The resilience and flexibility of the NSC system, and its ability to handle more than one major policy issue at a time. The Doha Agreement was signed in February 2020 but the NSC did not meet for several weeks thereafter due to the covid-19 pandemic.235 Furthermore, UK Government planning for NATO troop withdrawal did not begin until at least January 2021—and as late as April in some parts of the Government such as the FCDO—despite the original deadline for withdrawal of 1 May 2021.236 It is unclear whether the UK Government was aware of the Biden Administration’s plans to extend the deadline before it was announced in mid-April this year;
• The UK’s strategic constancy. The Integrated Review made only two passing references to Afghanistan, while the attendant Defence Command Paper devoted one short paragraph to the Afghan ‘train, advise, assist’ mission. Suzanne Raine has warned against such ‘flip-flopping’ between counter-terrorism and “state power rivalry” as the driver of UK foreign policy. Both, she said, “require constant, not episodic, engagement”;237 and
• What events in Afghanistan, and particularly the approach taken by the United States, mean for the Integrated Review. Lord Ricketts has commented that its “airy assumptions of British exceptionalism have not survived their first contact with reality”. Press reports suggest Ministers have called for the Integrated Review to be revisited, given its foundational assumption of a globally engaged US. The Government will at least need to consider whether it used its various links with the US to best effect in seeking to influence the Biden Administration over the past several months, and how it might work differently on other priorities in the future. Experts have also debated what events in Afghanistan mean for NATO, with General (retd) Sir Richard Barrons (former commander of Joint Forces Command) arguing it has been shown to be a “very limited concept and a very limited force” without US military power.238

148.Professor Clarke described the situation as a “sobering story for the UK as it embarks on its ‘Global Britain’ future in the 2020s”, with Afghanistan now in a “strategically worse” position than before the 9/11 attacks.239 Noting the lack of “command and control” for cross-departmental planning, former CDS Lord (David) Richards of Herstmonceux concluded that

[the NSC] mechanism is completely broken. It needs a major overhaul to turn it from a nineteenth century talking shop into a dynamic twenty first century cross-government coordination and communications centre […].240

149.The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is devastating on both a human and strategic level. Given both the timing of this crisis—which came after we had finished taking evidence for our inquiry—and the secrecy of NSC discussions, we are left with a number of outstanding questions about the Government’s handling of Afghanistan and the role of the NSC in key processes. We will call the National Security Adviser to provide oral evidence and a private briefing at the earliest opportunity after the conference recess.

150.By 18 October, the NSA should write to us to answer the following questions:

a)At what point did the Government give its consent to the February 2020 Doha Agreement negotiated by the United States and the Taliban? If it did not agree with this decision, why did it endorse the agreement at the UN Security Council meeting on 10 March 2020?

b)Why did (some parts of) the UK Government only begin planning for the withdrawal of NATO troops and its potential consequences, including the increased likelihood of the Taliban coming to power, in April 2021?

c)What was the role of the NSC and the Afghanistan NSIG in overseeing planning for the implementation of the Doha Agreement? On which dates did the NSC meet to discuss Afghanistan since April 2021?

d)What action did the Government take to anticipate and prepare for the second- and third-order effects of the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan?

e)On which date did the NSC—or another ministerial committee—last revisit the Government’s plans for an urgent evacuation of Kabul, including the processing of asylum seekers (if, indeed, such a plan was in place)?

f)Has the NSC met to discuss the strategic implications of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban? If not, when will it do so?

g)Why is there so little reference to Afghanistan in the Integrated Review? At what point will this be revisited by the NSC, and will the Government be drawing up a new strategy on Afghanistan?

h)What are the implications of the United States’ approach to Afghanistan in the past two years for the future of NATO, and for the viability of the Integrated Review, which is based on assumptions of a globally engaged US?

i)Do events in Afghanistan suggest a US withdrawal from intervention elsewhere (for example in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sinai and Mali); and what are the implications for the UK’s ability to pursue its own objectives in relation to counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency and conflict resolution?

j)What are the implications of the Taliban victory for the UK’s relationship with Pakistan, including the terrorist risk emanating from that country, and the attendant risks of terror attacks in the UK?

The Government should use an annex to the NSA’s letter to provide information that cannot be put into the public domain.

Understanding Afghanistan and planning for the withdrawal of NATO troops

151.In written evidence, KCL’s Dr Lentzos and Professor Goodman said:

Surprised organisations and decision-makers are more likely to miss opportunities for preventing or pre-empting attacks and other threats, tend to be less well prepared for managing the unavoidable crises, and more likely to look ill-informed and out-of-control in the eyes of citizens, taxpayers and voters. They are also less likely to see opportunities to advance peace, security and prosperity.241

152.The Government was clearly surprised by the trajectory of events in Afghanistan since July. On 8 July, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons that “there is no military path to victory for the Taliban”.242 At that time, the Taliban controlled 90 of Afghanistan’s 398 districts, according to BBC analysis. By 16 August, the Taliban controlled all but seven districts and the Government of Afghanistan had collapsed.243 When the Prime Minister addressed MPs on 18 August, he said:

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.244

153.Appearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 1 September, the then Foreign Secretary said that:

• The central intelligence assessment used by the Government “until late on” had proven incorrect in its judgment that there would be only a “steady deterioration” in security following the withdrawal of NATO troops, and that “it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year”. He said this view was widely shared among NATO Allies. However, it is unclear whether Ministers and departments were working from the same assumptions, with both the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary suggesting it had been clear for weeks or “many months that the situation could go very fast”;245
• He personally had warned of “optimism bias” in Whitehall and among allies, particularly in relation to: i) whether President Biden would go ahead with the withdrawal of troops as planned; and ii) the ability of the Taliban to win by striking a series of local agreements in combination with a well-structured insurgent campaign against Afghan forces.246 This speaks to longstanding debates about whether the UK ever understood fully the nature of the power dynamics and relationships in Afghanistan, and therefore the type of conflict it was engaged in;247
• It may be that countries such as the UK and US, which have invested so much in the success of Afghanistan over the past 20 years, were less capable of making a clear-eyed assessment of events on the ground than allies such as France; and
• Notwithstanding the judgment of the central assessment, the Government still undertook contingency planning for the less likely scenarios.248

154.There are hard questions for the Government to answer about what appears to be either a failure to understand fundamental elements of the situation in Afghanistan—specifically, the strategy and strength of the Taliban and, as importantly, the fragility of the Afghan Government and its security forces without NATO support—or a failure to respond effectively to the information available, or possibly both.

155.It is impossible for us to draw conclusions from the fragmentary reporting and speculation currently available in the public domain. Nevertheless, the Government must establish where the root of the problem lay, assessing whether it was one or a combination of:

• an intelligence failure—that is, a failure to gather the intelligence necessary to form a sufficiently accurate understanding of the situation on the ground;
• an assessment and analysis failure—that is, a failure to interpret the available information in a way that provided a sufficiently accurate understanding of the situation on the ground;
• a failure, including by the Afghanistan NSIG, to marshal the vast knowledge and resources on Afghanistan within the UK Government in a way that supported effective ministerial decision-making;
• groupthink on behalf of Ministers and/or senior officials;
• a reluctance by Ministers and/or senior officials to engage fully with the realities of information presented to them and to challenge their own assumptions accordingly; and/or
• a failure of diplomacy to bring forward an alternative NATO coalition on the ground.

The NSA should outline his initial assessment of these matters in the confidential annex of his letter to us.

156.The key to preparing for an uncertain future is to plan in detail for multiple possible scenarios. While no plan survives contact with reality, it is the act of rigorous planning that enables the Government to adapt and respond in a more coordinated way as events unfold.

157.We urge the Government to revisit how it plans for major domestic and international crises, including the possibility of simultaneous crises—as has happened with covid-19 and Afghanistan. As events in Afghanistan have shown, it is essential that the Government has up-to-date and detailed procedural plans for a range of potential scenarios, which both assign tasks and responsibilities across departments, and inform exercises involving Ministers and officials. These plans should cover a range of highly serious, anticipatable contingencies—such as the evacuation of civilians from conflict zones and fragile countries, the emergence of a new infectious disease, a prolonged, wide-area electricity outage, a major global financial crisis and the withdrawal of NATO security guarantees by key Allies. The Government should update us in confidence on its progress against this recommendation in six months’ time, and then on an annual basis.