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Afghanistan

Never a hippy, no. People came back from Kabul with those ghastly, smelly goatskin coats, which then sat in a cupboard and destroyed many student lodgings, as I remember. At the time, Kabul was a very civilised and beautiful city, and the King was moving towards a much more modern society, certainly in the urban area of Kabul although perhaps not in the rural areas. However, Afghanistan was never an entirely united country. As I understand it, it was always a fairly loose confederation, for want of a better word, of tribal areas. That is certainly what it appears to be now. I fear that in the constitution that has been created, assisted by the UN and others, we have perhaps tried to make Afghanistan into one centralised country. I do not have any great insight, but that seems to be turning into a difficulty. As has been mentioned already, it appears that the Pashtuns, who used to be called Pathans, resent other tribes lording it over them. I wonder whether we in Britain or in the UN can or indeed should aim to have a centralised Government in Kabul, as appears to be the case at the moment. It certainly does not seem to be working. To stick with history, what was remarkable in the first and second Afghan wars was the way in which having foreigners in the country succeeded dramatically in uniting all the tribes against the foreign invader. I fear that we are seeing that problem to a certain extent now, which is why it is so important that the Afghans take over responsibility for law and order. As we have seen both in history and recently, Afghanistan is a place of shifting loyalties. Loyalties are not laid down as we might think. People do not say, "My gosh, I'm an Afghan and I'm going to support the Afghan Government." That is self-evidently not the case, which was true in 1840 and has been subsequently, so we should be realistic about what can happen there. I do not know whether hon. Members have read the autobiography of John Masters, who wrote "Bhowani Junction" and other books. It is called "Bugles and a Tiger", and I recommend it to everybody. Apart from anything else, it is a rattling good read. As an 18-year-old officer, he went out in command of a platoon of English troops to the North West Frontier, where in 1935 British troops were still being flayed alive by the Pathans—the Pashtuns—who did not see much of a border across the Durand line. It is worth remembering that that was in the lifetime of people who are around today. When we went into Afghanistan, we perhaps should have remembered the other half of the quotation about where angels fear to tread. Finally on history, we can examine what the Soviets did. Of course it was a communist revolution that brought down the King and the Soviet invasion that led to the current chaos, destruction and poverty in Afghanistan.