The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s foreign policy: a lethal vacuum
The prime minister told parliament on Wednesday that Britain was prepared for the fall of Kabul and also that it could not have been foreseen. Those two things cannot be true simultaneously. Both were false. The pace of events after US forces were withdrawn might have caught western governments by surprise, but the withdrawal itself has been on the international timetable since February 2020.
That it was agreed by Donald Trump is not an excuse for his successor’s misjudgements. But nor are Joe Biden’s actions a justification for Boris Johnson’s complacency in failing to plan a response. As recently as July, the prime minister asserted that the Taliban had no military route to victory.
None of the fallen Afghan government’s allies comes out of this calamity well. For Britain, humiliation is compounded by a leader who looks painfully unequal to the seriousness of the moment. No one who is familiar with Mr Johnson’s record would expect humility, but he might have summoned some gravitas. Instead, his Commons speech was a disjointed sequence of dissemblances, deflections and platitudes. Britain’s Afghan policy is now an empty promise not to abandon people to tyranny or allow the Taliban to export terrorism. “We must help the people of Afghanistan to choose the best possible future for themselves,” Mr Johnson said, without saying how.
There is a commitment to grant refuge to 20,000 Afghans, of whom 5,000 will be admitted in the first year. Those figures, woefully inadequate given how many need sanctuary, seem arbitrarily chosen. The threshold is set by moral cowardice. To admit that duty demands a much higher figure would mean facing down the rightwing tendency that vilifies asylum seekers and foments particular hostility to arrivals from Muslim countries.
As for the wider strategic plan, it is a void. That is not a problem specific to Afghanistan. The prime minister treats the rest of the world as a resource for rhetorical points to score in domestic battles. That has been most conspicuous with Brexit, where Mr Johnson’s approach has been defined by strategic myopia, trading real influence for symbolic sovereignty. Euroscepticism is one part of the delusion that is “Global Britain” – a fantasy that merges imperial nostalgia with illiteracy in the economics of modern trade. It was obviously an empty slogan even before cuts to the international aid budget
proved the point.
“Where is ‘Global Britain’ on the streets of Kabul?” Theresa May’s question in the Commons yesterday was a well-aimed attack on the man who had served as her foreign secretary without distinction. As Keir Starmer observed, the only time Mr Johnson showed interest in Afghanistan was when flying there to avoid a Commons vote on Heathrow airport expansion. Self-serving parochialism is now the governing ethos of the UK. It is the lead that others follow, including a foreign secretary who was on a beach in Crete as the Taliban closed in on Kabul. Conservative MPs who are qualified to speak with insight on international matters are banished to the back benches, as Wednesday’s debate demonstrated.
Cynical gamesmanship and disregard for facts are the criteria for promotion by a prime minister who values those qualities because they have carried him to the top. But he cannot now disguise the lack of substance. It is too late for him to acquire the skills needed to navigate the Afghan crisis and good judgment cannot be faked. When events demand stature, Mr Johnson always shrinks to the occasion, and the vacuum where leadership should be diminishes Britain in the eyes of the world.