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    • Meanwhile, surrendering Afghan National Army soldiers are already being executed by local Taliban commanders, schools for girls are being shut down, and the interpreters and British Council educators that our government have refused to help “because they were contractors, not employees” are running for their lives with their families.
      Looks like my nephew Chris and all the others who were killed or maimed there did it all for absolutely nothing.

  3. @Mike_H

    Sorry for the cruel ripping open of what must be a very raw and painful wound, M. Can’t begin to comprehend how you and your family must be feeling right now.

    Shameful the way Johnson et al are leaving the locals who risked life and limb to help the UK to of the butchers of the Taliban.

  4. By not overturning Trumps decision to get out of Afghanistan Biden has made a catastrophic misstep both politically for himself and, more importantly, for the people of Afghanistan. And he is giving oxygen to al Caeda. Of course occupation of a foreign state can’t go on for ever, but this just feels like far too rapid a decision with no strategic view whatsoever.

    • Strictly speaking, it hasn’t been an occupation for years, if ever. The handful of toops left – a fraction of an aircraft carrier worth – were supporting the local govt. to keep the schools open. Their presence was enough to keep the ‘ban at bay

      My neighbour was working for NATO on the Bagram airbase until recently.

      I agree: Trump is mostly to blame, and Biden for not reversing the decision.

      What a sorry, sorry, mess.

  5. Whoda thunk Afghanistan would end up like this? It’s one of the least surprising outcomes ever. History is very clear regarding Afghanistan (or maybe it’s Pathan tribesmen) to overcome the force of externally-based empire-builders. If you look at a crowd of Afghans you see a fantastic diversity of people (well, men) reflecting it’s disparate communities across the compass. And that’s the point; it’s an accumulation of tribes and conflicting traditions, and the national identity is weaker than it’s faith, which is a more unifying factor. Lackign unity, their Army, even though 5x larger and better equipped, lost. Scary folk “knowing where you live” doubtless means you could be lackadaisical when faced with reprisals, as happened in Norn Ireland, too. The little bits of liberality emerging in Afghanistan will now be crushed even more horribly than they already are. Facing this down is arguably an even more important debate for the socially progressive than gender pronouns.

    (By “crowd of Afghans” … you make the joke, this seems a bit too serious a topic for me to do it.)

  6. Good old Ronnie Reagan must share a large part of the blame for funding the fighters who mutated into the Taliban after the USSR occupying forces fled – just as every invading army has done.

      • To be fair, that was written in 1980 when so much less was known. Bloody awful song, mind. And I say that as someone who thoroughly enjoyed attending an early Upstarts gig in County Durham which was raided by the police, eliciting the response of ‘I smell shite!’ from Mensi.

    • They might have been death-worshipping medieval fascists, but at least they weren’t KARM-YOO-NEEESTS.

      And people say the left have the monopoly on “my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend”.

      I have friends from Afghanistan, they can absolutely never go home, and have to sit here a few streets away from me watching their homeland being turned into a national death cult , like the fucking Wicker Man with iPhones. I am very very fucked off about this.

    • Everybody was droning on about the Cold War then, and yet old Matt J put his finger on what we would be really dealing with for the rest of our lives.

      The world is on its elbows and knees (hurr)

  9. Honestly, I have no idea what to think. Do we say “Never interfere in another country’s struggles, let them sort it out”? Or do we say “We’ve got the guns and ammo and know what’s right”?
    Or do we say “Fuck Afghanistan, there’s a rather larger problem out there – the World’s On Fire!”?

        • This.

          And the logical extension of that is that Pakistan is at permanent daggers drawn with the world’s biggest democracy next door, which is run by a Hindu nationalist government, and both are nuclear powers. The situation has the capability to turn into something extremely nasty.

        • It’s hard not to imagine the Taliban rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of getting hold of Pakistan’s or North Korea’s or some other unstable regime’s nuclear material in order to carry out revenge on the West for their 20 years ‘in opposition’. I used to have faith in Western governments to protect us from that sort of thing. Sadly, the shitshows that have been Afghanistan, Iraq and Western foreign policy in general for the last generation, coupled with the general uselessness of Western politicians, leads me to believe that this is no longer the case.

        • Yes. The leadership of Pakistan, whatever rhetoric they spout, are up to their elbows in blood over this. The Afghans have “Thrown off their shackles” apparently, and the job’s been celebrated by the distribution of sweets. The leaders of a quarter of a billion people in an islamic republic gleefully celebrating the rise of a hotch-potch of murdering zealots.

          • If you follow it back, the Taliban is basically Pakistan’s creation, much as Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies for Iran. For all Johnny Talib’s bullshit about chasing foreigners from the land, Afghanistan is just as much an occupied country now as it’s ever been.

  10. I have met 2 people who have been in Afghanistan. An ex colleague who served there in the marines and an Icelandic chap who was there as an employee of the UN.
    They both said the same thing – the allied troops and the UN personnel often failed to win the hearts and minds of the tribesmen because negotiations would often be of a transactional nature. Ie the tribal leader woukd offer supoort in exchange for say a generator. When the generator didnt turn up the trust disappeared -“a common theme apoarently. Notwithstanding this the Afghan government had 18 months to prepare for the transition and have been found sadly lacking.
    20 years of our presence has achieved next to bugger all Maybe a lesson for future governments?

    • The generator found it’s way to the tribe-next-door’s leader’s house. Baksheesh. There is no Afghanistan in the sense that the west understands nation states. Outside of a handfull of cities it’s a very large space, sparsely populated but chock full of tribalism and familial feuds. It always has been this, and hasn’t been altered by countless billions being poured into a corrupt patriarchal chaos. It’s going to get much worse now that the patriarchal chaotic leadership consists not of self-serving individualists with an eye for a dollar, but by beardy-weirdy, dope smoking, ill educated men with big fuck-off guns lead by beardy-weirdy swivel-eyed religious nut jobs. With big fuck-off guns.

  11. It’s a tricky one. You can see the logic in pulling troops out. It’s not our country, no amount of training of the so called Afghan army is going to succeed. Numerous occupiers of all nationalities over the years have failed. Should we stay another 20 years?

    And yet we could have stayed if we’d really wanted to. The Korean War finished in the 50’s but there’s still 20.000 US troops there peacekeeping. At what point do you stick or twist?

  14. From an article in the Grauniad about an educated woman’s last day in Kabul before the Taliban arrives. It would seem that apart from the awesome poer of fanaticism, a lot of the men are ust happy to go back to their repressionist ways:

    “Meanwhile, the men standing around were making fun of girls and women, laughing at our terror. “Go and put on your chadari [burqa],” one called out. “It is your last days of being out on the streets,” said another. “I will marry four of you in one day,” said a third………
    All I could see around me were the fearful and scared faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women, who do not like women to get educated, work and have freedom. Most devastating to me were the ones who looked happy and made fun of women. Instead of standing by our side, they stand with the Taliban and give them even more power.”

    • And this demonstrates perfectly why prolonged intervention is pointless: you can’t impose the value set of one country (or group of countries) on another. What we see as a humanitarian tragedy is obviously welcomed by much of the Afghan population. Look at the centuries-long struggle against racism in the US and Australia, and how hard it is to change values even in wealthy, well-educated countries. There is literally zero chance of ‘converting’ the Afghan population to a more socially-progressive society within even several lifetimes. Many/most of them don’t want it.

      I think all that other countries can do is offer safe refuge for those whose lives are at risk and then erect an economic and military barrier around Afghanistan to contain the damage.

  15. I don’t think Biden had any other realistic option. That war was lost pretty much from the start.
    No point in postponing the inevitable any longer.
    The US and UK went in with no plan other than destroying the government and driving Al Quaeda out. Wrecked the country and had no ideas at all for what happened after.

  17. Thing is, for all the understandable dismay, for the most part no one really has any idea as to what to actually do. Keir Starmer, for example, says something should be done – ” We can’t turn our back on Afghanistan” but stops well short of saying what and how beyond “we should stand by them” and suggesting a meeting at UN level.

  18. The various US foreign policy big wigs’ oft-repeated claims that this is “nothing like the fall of Saigon” are right.

    This is 100 times worse.

    Footage now emerging of stowaways clinging to the sides of planes and falling to their deaths.

    Absolutely heartbreaking

  19. I will be interested to see what happens in the Panjshir Valley.

    I flew via Kabul on the first flight from Delhi after the Najibullah regime was toppled in 1991. Ariana Air – Afghanistan national carrier – I never realized how much I was taking my life in my hands. The flight was full of macho frontline correspondents who would have stamped on a backpacker like me. We got turned round once and had to return to Delhi before we finally made our connection in Kabul – very steep approach through the mountains, escorted by heavily armed Afghans to the waiting lounge for the connecting flight to Prague.

    After that, I followed the stories about Ahmad Shah Massoud, the lion of Panjshir, with interest. A moderate Mujahadeen who believed in democracy and distributed power sharing across the very different ethnic groups who control different territories across the largely mountainous country, He opposed and outwitted the Communists, the Soviets and the Taliban in the Panjshir Valley. Then he was assassinated 2 days before 9/11 – so there was no clear leader for the US to work with when they invaded in search of Bin Laden.

    His son seems to be willing to take on his mantle. Who knows if that could temper/challenge the extremism of the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime?
    https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/panjshir-valley-taliban-afghanistan/31407634.html
    https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/ahmad-massoud-look-to-local-leaders-to-save-afghanistan/

  20. Can someone please explain to me simply why Pakistan’s current leader – the suave, worldly, well educated, apparently reasonable, not excessively religious and widely respected (if only for his cricketing abilities) Imran Khan – should hold any truck with the Taliban? He has welcomed their return to Afghanistan as “breaking the shackles of cultural slavery”. Or would he be first up against the wall if they subsequently took control of Pakistan? He seems to be the embodiment of all they would despise.

    • I don’t know. Perhaps he’s just power hungry – I looked at his wikipedia page earlier, and it was big red blank with a swastika on it, so someone thinks that (it’s now been taken down and gone back to his normal entry.)

    • Realpolitik, surely? It was under the very different President Zia that the US/Saudi Arabia linkage was made to channel training and resources to religious extremists (who would later become the Taliban) in the fight against the Soviets. Khan has to manage the state of Pakistan and the instability of the region as he finds it if he is to be a successful leader. I imagine there is an unsteady balance of power and tribal interests in Pakistan almost as much as in Afghanistan.

    • Indeed, although I believe there is currently a Parliamentary committee enquiry on-going that is specifically looking in to how UK aid to Pakistan is used.

      They also have close aid and development links with China too. Playing the field, I think.

          • Elaborating on my earlier post as to how badly JB has played his hand…

            He could have. if not reversed, then at least clearly distanced himself from, the orange bufoon’s Afghan policy as he has done many times before this year.

            He failed to do so.

            He could at least have expressed his gratitude to the allies who’ve stuck by the US in its role as “global policeman” these god knows how many years.

            He failed to do so.

            He could have made some acknowledgement of the sacrifice of the roughly 60,000 Afghans who’ve died fighting the Taliban these last 20 years.

            He failed to do so.

            Wonder how many years – more like decades – his indecisiveness and insensitivity has set back US foreign policy?

            More importantly, wonder who’s going to want to rely on or stand with the US next time it steps into some international conflict?

            • He could have listened to the US military on the ground as regards the Afghan army’s will and ability to stop any Taliban insurgance.

              He failed to do so.

              He could have insisted proper plans were put in place for the evacuation of foreign workers, their Afghan collaborators and others in immediate danger (instead of simply assuring everyone that a Taliban takeover was far from inevitable and stressing his faith in the Afghan military).

              He failed to do so.

              • Seems to me he either had intelligence analysis which should have told him this would probably happen and chose to ignore it, or didn’t have decent analysis but when ahead anyway. Either way around he made a bad call. He could have easily held off and blamed the previous idiot for not lining things up.

              • In other words, stay there?

                I don’t know what the right answer is. The smart people I know who have worked there is that there is, in fact, no right answer and no good trade-offs to be made

                • Given that there were only about 2,500 US troops still in country, it’s impossible to know if that would, in the medium term, been enough to stiffen the resolve of the Afghan Army for long enough to keep the beardies in check well into the longer term.

                  I would imagine that the scenario has been war-gamed to oblivion, and that the conclusion was that it would take so long (at least another generation) to reach the point where the internal military forces were sufficiently robust to do that job, and that the US would have to accept the need to continue to throw enormous chunks of cash at the problem for decades to come. Given that the average American is unlikely to be able to even point to Afghanistan on a globe, that doesn’t look like a winning domestic strategy. Especially as the orange idiot would be on the sidelines in years to come telling everybody that he had cut such a great deal with the Talibs that they could have cut their costs long ago and invested in good solid American jobs in coal mining instead. What a winner!

                  • People have been trying to occupy Afghanistan without success for over a hundred years. I think it’s dreadful and we should do the right thing by those who have helped us and are now at risk….but….but….there are a number of countries in the region with awful governments, dreadful human rights records, restrictive “unenlightened” (in our terms) social norms. Every time the West interferes it seems to make it worse. We can’t occupy all of them. You can see why walking away looks like a reasonable option.

                    • I agree. But 2,500 personnel in a place the size of Afghanistan does not constitute an occupation. And yet, while they were there, giving the local army some sort of backbone, the beardies stayed away from the cities.

  29. Given the way the Tories tend to round on their own and Bojo’s cataclysmic approval ratings after trying to dodge isolation a few weeks back, don’t thin he’ll be PM for too much longer

    • It’s got nothing to do with him, but to a lot of folk it looks like he’s shat on the British Army. The government simply don’t have the freedom to condemn US policy so they inevitably end up being tainted by what’s happened. No UK government would ever have come out of this looking well. Raab might as well have stayed on the beach.

      • Agree with you re Bojo and Afghanistan.

        My point was more that when Boris decided to try and wriggle out of doing isolation a few weeks back, he took one liberty too many and his premiership finally reached its tipping point.

        Instead of greeting Bojo’s latest slap in the face with an indulgent shake of their heads and a mock-exasperated “bloody Boris!, UK voters now started shaking their fists and growling “BLOODY BORIS!”.

        • I’ve long said I don’t think Alex Johnson will finish this year as PM. I think I am wrong about that now, but I still don’t think he will lead the Tories into the next election (which in turn I suspect will be next year, as the “vaccines and got Brexit done” election – before the negative consequences of Brexit and the Covid response are too obvious to deny). Narrative is Johnson has done his stint, (maybe “his health suffered from Covid” and “he has a young mistress – sorry I meant family”), time to hand over to a “builder” not a “changer” (Sunak?)

  31. There’s a programme on tonight on C4, “Foxy’s War” featuring one of the blokes from the C4 series Who Dares wins. It’s Foxy returning to Afghanistan after his tours of duty there. Must have been filmed in 2015 or so and is full of optimism for the people and country. It’s heartbreaking to be honest.

  32. A different viewpoint from just about everyone else’s expressed so far.
    From the Facebook feed of Nicholas Stockton, former Senior Advisor at United Nations OHCA:

    While I share the widespread anxiety being expressed for the future of Afghan women and girls, I’m less sure that the departures of US and NATO forces and aid workers is a cause for much regret, indeed, it may be the best thing that has happened to Afghanistan for many many years. During my time as an independent consultant and later with MSF and the UN, I witnessed the manner of the military occupation of Afghanistan from close quarters on many occasions. It was conducted almost entirely by remote means from within fortified garrisons. US forces rarely ventured outside their heavily defended compounds and the great majority would never have set foot inside an Afghan village or house during their entire deployment. Foot patrolling happened rarely if at all. That is why, although each and every casualty was tragic, it is quite remarkable that the US and its allies have sustained just 3,500 combat deaths during this 20 year long war. This was an occupation administered by local partners and a war conducted by drones and proxy forces. Absolutely every effort was made to enable US troops to carry on life as if they were at a home base and literally nothing was purchased from local producers and traders. The only economic value to Afghanistan of the US led occupation was derived from salaries paid to translators, numbering a few thousand at best. In 2003 I was hired by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit to review the practise of “strategic coordination” between the international aid agencies and foreign military contingents. To start with I attempted to understand the programme strategies of the major players. It became abundantly clear that I was on a fools errand. There were no “strategies”, merely short term and totally uncoordinated flag-waving aid distribution operations. Nothing had changed in that respect since I had visited Afghanistan with the UN Strategic Frameworks initiative in 1997 while the country was under Taliban rule. At that time, the operational UN agencies “strategic” objectives referred only to the pursuit of their individual mandates, leaving a gaping hole where one might have expected to find a collective endeavour aimed at improving specific life chance indicators of Afghan people. Revisiting Afghanistan in 2018 in the context of the UN’s “Transformative Agenda” initiative, it was apparent that no collective goals had been agreed in the succeeding 15 years. Aid programmes were still pursued with a single-minded determination to generate the maximum possible profile for the donors and income for the operational agencies. With MSF I travelled extensively in Afghanistan, visiting variously Lashkar Gah, Kunduz, Khost, Mazar and the outer reaches of Kabul. Everywhere I went, the international aid system was derided for being little more than an exercise in creating photo opportunities for visiting foreign politicians. More or less nothing of value permeated the scandalously corrupt layer of so called “local partners”, many of whom are now amongst the throngs understandably seeking to escape the country. In short, the international “nation building” and “peace-building” efforts over the past 20 years have actually achieved nothing of utility for Afghanistan. Self-aggrandising claims by the aid system has generated widespread frustration, much anger but considerable income for aid workers. Delivery costs, especially of the military regional development teams were astronomical, with huge profits captured by private contractors and armies of consultants delivering pointless reports (I know, I was one several times over in Afghanistan). Meanwhile, the largest economic sectors in Afghanistan, opium and international smuggling, have been vilified publicly but embraced privately by Afghanistan’s new politicians, who together with foreign military and aid workers have earned the near universal opprobrium of the great majority of Afghans. The tragedy for Afghanistan was always too much foreign interference, ours being no more effective, sustainable or locally valued than the Soviet chapter was. Our neo-colonial models of global governance and state intervention continue to foment more war, more poverty, more inequality and more fragility. Western nations will now quickly mop up all the Afghan doctors, nurses, engineers and coders that it has trained during the past 20 years to fill some of the gaps that our own education systems are failing to produce, without a second thought about human capital asset stripping that this will represent for Afghanistan. We do know how to profit from overseas chaos. Indeed, we specialise in it. We should not forget that the Taliban emerged from the Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar in Pakistan. When they first overran Afghanistan, many aid workers rejoiced at the prospect of the Talib rule of law being implemented in the judicial vacuum created by the warlords. Well, we were wrong then and maybe we will be wrong again. I have listened to some very wise Afghan women activists saying “this is not the time to run. This is the time to take the Taliban at their word and seek to negotiate our future”. I’m not massively optimistic, but better this than yet another round of self-serving western military and aid hubris.

    Food for a lot of thought. Some very interesting points made.

    • You really have to defer to people like this who know rather than jump in with your own hot take about a complex area you believe you are suddenly an expert in. That’s my view at least.

    • That’s a harsh and realistic read. It sounds like a complete cluster-**** across the board as regards the aid effort.

      I’m not sure why he describes the western presence as an ‘occupation’, which it never was, especially in comparison to what went on in Iraq.

        • The American presence reached a height of 140,000 grunts while they were pushing the Talibs back into the hills, but by the beginning of this year it had dwindled to 2,500. That’s 2,000 less than they had previously reckoned they needed just to support the Afghan army in the medium to long term.

          At present, the US has around 50,000 troops stationed in Japan, 35,000 in Germany and 25,000 in South Korea. Are those also occupations?

              • Why do you think the Taliban have taken the country back so swiftly and comprehensively. Rightly or wrongly, they had more popular support in the place than the American-backed government did.
                There is more to occupation than troops and weapons. There might have been only a couple of thousand American troops there at the end but the US held the purse strings and the Afghan government did Washington’s will at every turn. For money.
                Once it looked like the money was about to stop coming, as soon as they could, the American-trained Afghan National Army dropped their guns and went home in droves, rather than fight the Taliban. Exactly as predicted. Most only signed-up in the army because it seemed a better-paid option than civilian life at the time.

  33. Given the speed with which he’s taken to giving car crash interviews, it’s beginning to look as if Joe Biden pays as little attention to his advisers as his predecessor.

  34. Steve T and VV’s comments about corrupt transactionalism and Mike H’s posting of the Nicholas Stockton text (excellent) find echoes and similarities in a report/paper part-wriiten by Professor Mary Kaldor in 2018.

    I hadn’t really heard of Mary Kaldor until I heard her being interviewed by Sheila Fogerty on LBC. She made so much sense that I wanted to find more of her thoughts on Afghanistan. Although written about life in the country under the previous Karzai government, I doubt the underlying statements about competing logics of the corrupt political marketplace, reactive extremist religious populism and (perpetually undermined) civicism ring any less true today than then.

    According to Biden, the US presence in Afghanistan was “never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.

    [Its] only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland”

    From now on, “We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence. If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan.”

    There never was any US intention to promote values of civicism, so the political marketplace and the extremist religious populism which reacted to it flourished, and will continue to flourish.

  35. Another interesting article on the situation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/afghanistan-us-taliban.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqohkQFUaCibSRdkhrxqAwvHBz7w1gH7lMCGTDCtZivgcB4mK8kGLZbZmY5F7-QWnc-J7Ee1lQu1unKgYNlZxSgKsr9zflZ4MKHhp9MfpVz5sms-XB-x9-2_jZyzoeOl2lLax5RzaPGf6SeeIhy1aUQVmoZNhdV-p0HYalOySQqMuhI4Ijbp2DYt6RDwDeCCAo_Lrbhx6M96GZRrcgRIkD6AbAXqA2I7BtM9TNVlaGlnET3tg4GYj6d46OdwfP633LBRIa9N8rqwOm_wWhdr6fht6eQNj&smid=url-share

  36. With the US about to effectively abandon the thousands of Afghans gathered outside Kabul Airport and focus on getting
    military personnel and essential equipment out by the 31/8 deadline Biden declined to try and extend, the next few days
    look set to be horrific.

    • The head of the CIA has reportedly met with the head of the Taliban in Dubai and basically, the Taliban have absolutely refused to extend the deadline and have also forbidden any more Afghans from trying to leave. Those still outside the airport would appear to be f**ked. Currently the Americans are operating air traffic control but would probably not be able to after the deadline.
      There seems to be no prospect now of extending the deadline without restarting hostilities.

    • Up to 60 fatalities now -10 of them seemingly US soldiers.

      Be interesting to see how Biden will respond to the attack – apparently by ISIS.

      Hard to see what the bombers hope to achieve by this awful, awful atrocity.

      • I doubt that the Taliban leadership are very happy about that.
        They’ve made a point of distancing themselves from ISIS in the past.

        I doubt the bombers had much more in mind beyond reminding the USA that they’re still around and still gunning for them.

  38. I see that we have safely expedited a plane-load of cats and dogs, while desperate families are left behind. What the actual fuck. Remind me why we are morally superior to the Taliban?

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