Boris Johnson is missing in action over Afghanistan

Does the prime minister agree with the US withdrawal? Does he disagree but is powerless to stop it? Or doesn’t he know? John Rentoul wants to hear from him

In this file photo from March 2020, British troops with Nato-led Resolute Support Mission forces travel in Kabul, Afghanistan (AP)

It might be thought that the prime minister would have something to say about Britain’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, condemned by many in his own party as a national humiliation. But so far, Boris Johnson has let Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, do the talking, and Wallace sounded pretty embarrassed this morning.

“I did try to bring together the international community and I’m afraid most of the international community weren’t particularly interested,” Wallace told Sky News. Most of the international community has already pulled out of the Nato-led mission, ironically named Resolute Support, leaving just the US, the UK and Turkey.

Once Joe Biden had made his decision, there was nothing we could do, Wallace seemed to say. “Going it alone does not work,” he said in another interview. “It would be a repeat of the 1830s.” At least he knows his history.

But President Biden’s decision did not come out of the blue. As vice president under Barack Obama, Biden opposed an increased deployment to Afghanistan. When he ran for president himself, he said he would bring the troops back, although there were only 3,500 by then. Perhaps Wallace and Johnson didn’t believe him – after all, Donald Trump had said the same thing and didn’t do it.

All the other countries contributing personnel to Resolute Support, however, took Biden at his word and most of them have pulled out in the past few months. It seems extraordinary that Johnson has hardly spoken about Afghanistan since he became prime minister.

Indeed, his policy seems to have been to do nothing and wait for the inevitable crisis. He didn’t seem to agree with the American pullout, or he might have withdrawn British forces beforehand, as most other countries did. He didn’t seem to disagree with it, not even trying to persuade Biden to make it more gradual. The British government seemed to have no policy at all.

This is the one position that I do not understand. I understood Tony Blair’s argument, 20 years ago, that the US and its allies should not simply go into Afghanistan, topple the Taliban and regard the job as done, as Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, wanted. I thought Blair was right to make a commitment to the Afghan people to stand by them for the long term. And I thought he was right to work with the US as much as possible and to persuade the US leadership to work with allies rather than going it alone.

Equally, I can understand the view, expressed in these pages by Mary Dejevsky yesterday, that 20 years is the long term, and that if a Nato-led intervention cannot create a viable non-Taliban Afghan state in that time, then it never will. However, I don’t agree with it. I think it was possible to support the Afghan government for the foreseeable future with a minimal deployment. What is happening now is proof that political support and a small number of foreign troops was enough to keep girls in school and people relatively safe in much of the country.

However, I also accept that one of the weaknesses of liberal interventionism is that it depended on support from the electorates of Nato countries that was weak and erratic. Public opinion in the US has supported pulling the troops out of Afghanistan for most of the past 20 years. A YouGov poll in Britain this week found that 44 per cent support the withdrawal; 26 per cent oppose it; and a significant proportion, 30 per cent, say they don’t know.

But if Johnson is with the 44 per cent, can he not say so? Could he justify the rout, and the betrayal of those Afghan people who are afraid of the Taliban and who were relying on the support of their allies? What does the prime minister have to say to his own MPs, Johnny Mercer, Tom Tugendhat and Tobias Ellwood, who are with the 26 per cent? Perhaps he agrees with them but has no leverage with the US administration. Or is the truth that Johnson is with the 30 per cent and doesn’t know what he thinks?

Wallace did not strike an impressive pose in his interviews this morning, making it clear that he doesn’t think the withdrawal is a good idea but that Britain has no choice but to join the US and other allies, now that it turns out they really mean it. But at least he had the courage to come to the microphones and explain the difficult position in which he finds himself.

Where, though, is the prime minister? This is a significant moment in British foreign policy and Boris Johnson is nowhere to be found.