Mo Mowlam: The harsh truth about Taliban asylum rights

The High Court's finding yesterday against the Home Office rules stripping asylum claimants of their right to benefits is a terrible indictment of this country's approach to asylum.

So, too, is all the fuss this week about asylum being given to Taliban refugees. For both occasions – the Taliban question even more in its way than the outcry against the High Court ruling – shows how little we understand what granting asylum really means, or how little we are doing to prevent victimised people from needing it.

Yes, the Afghanis concerned were only recently fighting against our own troops; the same fighters who had been oppressing the Afghan people whom we have now "liberated". Understandably, in the present atmosphere of war, illegal immigration and terrorism, this story was presented as something of a scandal.

Looking at it, I was struck by something more shocking than the fact that we were letting these people into the UK, it was that we had to. Under the Geneva Convention on Refugees we cannot return refugees to a country where there is a well-founded fear that they will face persecution or death. And it has been accepted that these people, the Taliban, do face a well-founded fear of persecution or death if they return to Afghanistan.

When we fought the war against terrorism by invading Afghanistan, one of the arguments made to justify the war was that the Taliban was a harsh and immoral regime. They oppressed women by insisting they wore a burkha and could not go to school, and they didn't even allow any music.

Admittedly, the main reason for war was to stop them harbouring al-Qa'ida, and to capture Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. To achieve our war aims we worked with the existing opposition groups, such as the Northern Alliance. In addition, much was said about the importance of rebuilding the shattered country which had for years been suffering occupation, civil war and warlordism.

But now we know that we failed. Afghanistan is again a country to which it is unsafe for certain Afghanis to return because they will face a well-founded chance of being persecuted or killed. This is a country which is now being run by our allies in the war against terrorism. Where American troops are still posted, and where a pro-Western government was established.

Of course, it is not just the fact that we are having to accept refugees from Afghanistan that proves that the nation-building of the West after the war has failed. We are seeing Afghanistan again return to lawlessness, the heroin trade leaping back into life, and the warlords reasserting their power. There have been reports that al-Qa'ida are back. Our former allies, such as the brutal General Dostum, have perpetrated acts of great cruelty against the Taliban that they caught. I am still horrified by the reports of them killing prisoners of war by sealing them in metal containers and roasting and suffocating them in the sun.

If this was happening in Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, I am sure it would be raised as a moral reason for war. But it is happening in a country where the United States and Britain claim to be bringing something better.

So what does this tell us about what will happen in Iraq? Will we be seeing former Saddam henchmen, torturers perhaps, turning up on our shores, demanding asylum because they face the prospect of persecution and death in their own country? Will the United States and British troops that are left in Iraq after the war be able to stop such bloodletting? If Saddam's regime is as hated by his own people as we are being led to believe, there must surely be a fierce reaction from those same people against their present oppressors. It would only be natural.

I have expressed my opposition to the war with Iraq many times, the last being on the march in London last weekend. There are many reasons why I do, but now that war looks inevitable, we must start looking to what Iraq will be like after such a war.

Tony Blair has now introduced morality into the debate about war, with a quantity theory of death to prove that it is better to topple Saddam because the war will kill fewer people than he will, over time, if he remains in power. Apart from this being a dangerous precedent for conducting foreign affairs (are we going to audit all oppressive regimes around the world to see if we should invade?), it is also difficult to calculate with any accuracy.

Rather than look at this issue in such theoretical terms, I think it better to look at actual events. Afghanistan provides a clear example of the results of regime change and conventional warfare against the forces of terror. It proves that it has done nothing to stop terrorism, and that successful regime change is very hard to achieve. Iraq is a much bigger country than Afghanistan, both in terms of area and population. But like Afghanistan it is riven with ethnic and religious divides.

Keeping the peace and creating a just and fair future society is going to be almost impossible to achieve in Iraq by British and American forces. Those Taliban asylum-seekers arriving in Britain at the moment tell us a lot about what we need to understand about the consequences of war.

The author was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1997 to 1999