BORIS Johnson faced jeers from Tory backbenchers during Wednesday’s debate on the Afghanistan crisis after he claimed that most “key questions” had already been answered - just four minutes in.
The Prime Minister, who faced fierce criticism from top figures within his own party over the UK’s shambolic withdrawal from the Asian nation, was speaking for just the third time during the debate which was scheduled to go on for over seven hours.
Johnson made the claim in response to a question from Tobias Ellwood, a former Army officer and current Tory MP who chairs Westminster’s defence committee.
Ellwood asked: “Would he [Johnson] agree that we are actually ceding back the country to the very insurgency that we went in to defeat in the first place, and the reputation of the West to support democracies across the world has suffered?
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“There are so many lessons to be learned from what happened in the last 20 years [of Western military intervention in Afghanistan]. Will he now agree to an independent formal inquiry into the conduct in Afghanistan?”
Ellwood’s question was met with audible approval from the Tory backbenchers.
Johnson then answered: “As I said in the house just a few weeks ago, there was an extensive defence review about the Afghan mission after the combat mission ended in 2014, and I believe that most of the key questions have already been extensively gone into.”
The Prime Minister’s claim was met with jeers from the Tory backbenchers, with Ellwood (below) visibly surprised.
It is unclear exactly which defence review the Prime Minister was referencing. A comprehensive defence review was published in 2015, but it mentions Afghanistan just nine times, with five of those mentions appearing across just two paragraphs.
The Ministry of Defence has been asked if there is another more extensive review to which Johnson was referring. A House of Commons library “guide to previous British defence reviews” makes no mention of another review into Afghanistan in particular.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister went on: “It is important that we in this house should today be able to scrutinise events as they unfold.
“As I was saying, we succeeded in that core mission and the training camps in the mountain ranges of Afghanistan were destroyed. Al Qaeda plots against this country were foiled because out serving men and women were there. No successful terror attacks against the West have been mounted from Afghan soil for two decades.”
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