Written by Angelique Retief our Research & Policy Officer
The people of Afghanistan are now facing more fear and devastation after decades of violence and we at BSWN heartbroken that as a country we aren’t doing more to help. The U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said that the U.K. will waive border rules to allow Afghan asylum seekers to enter the U.K. without a passport. While this is to be welcomed, resettling 5,000 people this year is not enough. It is the bare minimum that the UK and the US should do after a war on terror that cost over 70,000 civilian lives, lasted 20 years and took a week to disintegrate. We urge the government to commit to offering protection to more people immediately and we believe, along with our colleagues at Bristol City of Sanctuary and many others, that it is our moral duty to do all we can to provide refuge to the people currently fearing for their lives.
The profits of war
We are told that these wars are to fight terrorism and the flames are stoked by comments which discuss cultures such as those in Afghanistan as barbaric but as advocacy group, Public Citizen, assert “entrenching US forces in Afghanistan was the military-industrial complex’s business plan for over 20 years. Hawks and defence contractors co-opted the needs of the Afghan people in order to line their own pockets”. The profits of two of the biggest defence contractors over the past 20 years for example, saw a 1236% return (Lockhead Martin) and 1196% return (Northrop Grumman). Talking about these numbers in the Intercept, John Schwartz said that the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan upon the US’s departure would suggest that the war was a failure, but that these numbers suggest that this would be incorrect because from the perspective of these companies, this war was a huge success. This clearly highlights the issues with the current economic and ideological systems underpinning this situation which clearly illustrates that while humanitarian disasters are socialised to everyone, the profits of the war are privatised to a few.
The cost of war
After 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan, as the US and the coalition embark on the last stages of withdrawal, the costs of the long war are coming under increasing scrutiny. 457 British lives lost (this excludes the hundreds of British serious casualties and thousands of hospital admissions), £37 billions of UK money wasted, never mind the number of Afghani’s who lost their lives. Nearly 50,000 Afghan civilians were killed. So far in 2021 alone, The U.N. mission in Afghanistan reported in its Afghanistan Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict midyear update 2021 that there were 1,659 civilians killed and 3,254 wounded. Since 2016, there have been around 63, 000 applications for asylum in the UK from Afghan nationals although only around half of these applications have been successful.
Biden said that the aim of the US in Afghanistan was never around nation building. It is this short sightedness which is exactly the problem with international aid efforts around the world. It is a common fact of international aid that it is short term, and its attention is concentrated only on the symptoms of poverty rather than the root causes. It is the reason that following natural disasters or wars, inevitably there will be a spike in violence because it provides such a fertile atmosphere for the growth of extremism. As U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy said in his statement on Afghanistan: “refugees are human beings, not poker chips to be traded and bartered”, but this seems to be exactly what is happening.
The situation in Afghanistan highlights the issues in the Nationality and Borders Bill as proposals would see the people potentially criminalised and entitled to less protection in the UK.
Humanism, not isolationism
This is about change in the rhetoric about refugees and asylum seekers in general. We cannot on one hand offer asylum to 20,0000 Afghan refugees and at the same time criminalise those who are saving the lives at sea. We invite you to sign Bristol City of Sanctuary’s STATEMENT that calls for welcome, not hostility; for protection, not punishment. What Afghanistan has demonstrated is the volatility of nation states, particularly in the current context of climate change and natural disasters. In the face of this volatility and unpredictability, we need a humanist approach to people, borders and immigration not isolationism and protectionism.