The Taliban are back
Kabul has fallen. The Afghan President has fled and so has the US Ambassador. The British Ambassador is staying because he wants to help Westerners to flee the country. Now, after 20 years of blood and money spent on liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban they’re back and control the whole country. Suddenly, our MSM are full of complaints and accusations regarding the failure of our government, of BJ and the Foreign Secretary.
Firstly, having scanned today’s MSM, I note that according to them, all this wouldn’t have happened if only Raab hadn’t been on his summer holidays in some unknown location, only coming back yesterday (paywalled link). The PM meanwhile is getting flak because yesterday he ‘clowned around with Olympic athletes’ (link) before he gave a speech exhorting foreign governments not to recognise the Taliban regime and recalling Parliament for an emergency debate (paywalled link).
Amazing, isn’t it: our MSM chief editors clearly believe that a timely word from BJ and Raab would surely have make the Taliban think twice! Meanwhile, we read that China will recognise the Taliban, with some of their officials ‘posing with Taliban leaders’ while Russia has ‘no plans to evacuate’ their embassy personnel (link). Turkey and Pakistan are set to recognise the Taliban regime as well. I found the reason given by Chinese officials – that they want the fighting to stop – most interesting because from what I gathered from reports in the past weeks there wasn’t much fighting. Instead, Afghans outside the provincial capitals were simply surrendering, as were the Afghan Armed Forces.
Let’s recap: on May 1st 2021 Biden commanded US troops to withdraw. That didn’t make much waves, especially since then and now he’s blaming this withdrawal on his predecessor, a certain Mr Trump, who was talking with the Taliban about such withdrawal at the end of 2019. It’s quite astonishing that Biden was continuing this policy when at the same time he’s dismantling Trump policies, especially domestic ones, at a rate of knots.
Last month Biden told the Washington press that the Afghan Armed Forces which the Western, NATO coalition trained and supplied – the official reason why “we” were in Afghanistan for all those years – would not surrender:
“Joe Biden insisted last month that there’s no way his troop withdrawal from Afghanistan would lead to a Saigon-like situation with Americans emergency evacuated out of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by helicopter. ‘There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of a (sic) embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,’ the president said during a press conference on July 8, 2021.” (link)
‘Events, dear boy, events’ – see how quickly they turned Biden’s words to dust. However, I find it astonishing, to say the least, that suddenly the usual suspects, from a major general to MPs who served in the Armed Forces in Afghanistan, are now full of sound and fury. Did they, with their connections to the military, not know what was going on since May? Did they not expect this to happen?
Perhaps they did warn but our MSM, in their covid-induced brain fog, preferred not to talk about Afghanistan because they had to spend their hordes of daily pixels on government-paid covid propaganda? Oh – let’s not forget that there was the footie and all the outcries about covid passports, ‘super-spreaders’ and such, and there were the Olympic Games: all of that deserved acres of reports!
We were also bombarded with stuff on vaccine passports, ‘casedemic’ graphs, ‘vaccine mass jabbings’ and all that jazz. Who’d have time and space to even think, never mind write about what happened in Afghanistan! Checking back, I found only this one report in the Guardian, published one month ago, on what was happening in Helmand – the province where our troops were based, the place where nearly 500 of our soldiers died.
So forgive me when I find the article by a major general in the DM now a bit superfluous (link) – but it’s good to know that he thinks this troop withdrawal was ‘a betrayal’. Did he not see this coming when Biden started withdrawing US troops in May? If he did – did he raise his voice then but the MSM editors didn’t want to know?
And what to make of the article by the current Defence Secretary Mr Ben Wallace, who told the nation yesterday in the DT that this wasn’t a betrayal, that this wasn’t about ‘our forces’ being ‘too weak’ to withstand the Taliban but that going it alone would make us look like an ‘occupying force’. Oh dear! He does make one interesting point:
“When the US announced their deal and imminent withdrawal, I tried to find others who would fill their place. But to no avail. Weary publics and parliaments in country after country had no appetite. It was made harder by a deal that wrongly suggested to the Taliban that they had won.” (paywalled link)
What a nice, sly little dig at Biden! While we believe – of course we do! – that Mr Wallace was working his socks off en coulisse, our MPs, especially those who served, don’t seem to have been aware of this. Perhaps they don’t have their own ‘sources’? Moreover, the MSM’s ubiquitous ‘sources’ also don’t seem to’ve had an inkling. Astonishing!
No, now it’s all ‘our fault’. According to a ‘Tory source’, it’s ‘the “biggest single disaster of British foreign policy since Suez”, the 1956 crisis that saw then prime minister Anthony Eden resign.’ (paywalled link). Another ‘well-placed source’ is stirring the ‘outrage’ pot, telling the DT:
“that Mr Raab had not talked to any of the UK ambassadors in the countries surrounding Afghanistan by Sunday afternoon. The countries listed by the source were Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, Kazakhstan. The source also said that Mr Raab had not talked to the foreign minister of Pakistan, which shares a border with Afghanistan, until Sunday, the day the Taliban entered Kabul.” (paywalled link)
Interesting, isn’t it: apparently there’s not one deputy in the FO who could make such calls when the Foreign Secretary is away, something the MSM don’t seem to find noteworthy. Well – I assume all those possible deputies were WFH, as so many in Whitehall do. That, of course, isn’t a scandal as far as our MSM are concerned!
They are also sublimely indifferent to the fact that presumably military intelligence must have known how this was developing. Thus they don’t ask who in the FO and the MoD knew and who was told. Perhaps their usual ‘sources’ were on holidays, WFH or plain ignorant?
Meanwhile, Tom Tugendhat as well as a Labour peer, a former Defence Secretary and secretary general of NATO, are displaying their outrage over Raab’s absence. See what Lord Robertson said:
“It is stunning that the Foreign Secretary would stay on holiday as our mission in Afghanistan disintegrated. The horrors unfolding with every minute demand focused attention from the top.” (paywalled link)
Which horrors are ‘unfolding’? I’m not aware of reports and images of bloody battles between the Afghan forces and the Taliban. I am aware of reports and images of Taliban soldiers driving unopposed through towns and cities! The strange thing is that all the furious generals, MPs and other MSM commentators simply seem to accept as given that the Afghan Armed forces just vanished – as if that was to be expected. Why is that?
In their editorial this morning, The Times sheds a crocodile tear, writing that ‘The human cost for Afghans, especially women, will be immense.’ (link, paywalled). Well, since the conglomerated international feminists didn’t give a toss about Afghan women twenty years ago why would they do so now? I find it disgusting and shocking that suddenly, with the fall of Kabul imminent, the MSM – here as well as those across the Channel – are shuddering over ‘pictures like from Saigon’ – as if somehow nobody could have foreseen this.
It’s as if the Taliban overwhelmed the country like a major natural disaster against which no defence is possible. Was it really totally unpredictable, like an unpredictable earthquake? Did the intelligence services here and in the USA not have an inkling about what would happen? Did Biden ride roughshod over their concerns so they had them?
Or is it simply the case that, thanks to covid and the economic consequences, there was a secret consensus between those international leaders to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban? You can’t tell me that the G7 at their meeting in June in Cornwall didn’t confer on this! By that time they must have known what was going to happen, even though our MSM were blithely unconcerned.
For me, all the current posturing by the usual suspects, the whispering from ‘outraged sources’, are nought but sound and fury, nothing but propaganda to conceal what the G7 mighty had already decided in June, namely to let the Taliban win and d*mn the consequences. Did they know already, at that time, that the Afghan people would be content to live in an islamic state, run by the Taliban?
But it’s good to see, isn’t it, that now, after the event, some of our representatives have raised their voices, in a disgusting, despicable theatre production created just for us peasants!
KBO!
Photo by newsonline 
One thing everybody forgets is that you can talk til you’re blue in the face, Muslims hateeach other amost as much as us. As in Yemen, Syria, and numerousparts of the Middle East, Infiltration, assisination, dubious elections, insurrection and civil war ensue.
So we don’t need to worry about WHAT will hapen, just WHEN etc. All politics can do now is waste time, money, and find excuses. Our achievement isto arrange an incredibly strong and geographically organised ( If not yet politically organised ) enemy.
Congratulations are in order.
I, think chances are about even, that the place will descend into a bloodbath. There will be several Ayatollohs, thirty or so tribal war band leaders, Several Drug Lords and literally dozens of political/religious/ superior imams types Sombody will announce himself an Emir and the fun can start.with picking a Harem, and appropriating a personal helicopter and Merc.
Dare I say it?
I believe the Americans have been “talking” to the Taliban for quite a long period possibly about some sort of accommodation or power sharing arrangement and the leaving of US forces was a planned event, as was the British, somebody forgot to tell them that Muslims speak with their fingers crossed behind their backs and have taken a rise out of the gullible (or worse!) Biden (friend of China who must have a hand in this somewhere)
After all were’nt the Taliban (Muhajudeen) allies of the Yanks to chase out the Russians.
Wasn’t the original operation a NATO police type operation with quite a lot members including Germany who ratted when the going got tough.
Here’s an idea. Round up all the criminals past and present in Parliament, the House of Representatives and Brussels and put them on a plane to Kabul and just DUMP THEM. Maybe then we can start again with some sensible people here in the UK.
The plain fact is we have a toy town government! There isnt a single member of the current regime that has a slightest hint of ‘statesmanship’ about them! They have pretty much all grown up within the confines of the EU and its straitjacket rules. Not one of them has the remotest experience of real foreign diplomacy! Gavin Williamson famously said on one occasion when the Russians were causing some annoyance that “Russia should just shut up and go away”! The pitiful cry of a weak man who was then and still is in way over his head in the role that he is so obviously unfit to fill! And he is just one of many appointed by perhaps the most fatuous and unpatriotic PM in our history. A man so weak minded and so obsessed with his own persona that he would see his Country ruined rather than make one single decision to save it from annihilation by the globalist community whom he appears to serve.
Afghanistan is and always has been a lost cause. Almost all the. Big powers have tried and failed to install an equitable regime there. It would be better now to pull up the drawbridge; protect Britain and its people from harm and deport all illegal migrants who cannot prove conclusively that they are, in truth, here seeking asylum that was denied them any any other EU country that they must have traversed on their way to Britain!
Indeed Frederica. Weren’t we promised that illegal immigration would be stopped? Instead it has been encouraged in every way possible. One example is the moving of illegals to a posh hotel after they rioted and complained that their perfectly adequate accommodation in a military base was not good enough!
The US might have the world’s best weapons, but it isn’t very good at fighting wars! The Americans were defeated in Vietnam, they’ve been defeated all over the Middle East, they’ve now been defeated in Afghanistan. I gather that the American Ambassador has already left but the British Ambassador has stayed on to help the British and Westerners still trapped there. Good lad.
At least the British and the Australians won the Malayan Insurgency (e.g. War) in the 1950s and the Falklands War in the 70s (even if that doesn’t look as though it’s going to last).
And the US have the best Diversity training, don’t forget!!
According to a ‘Tory source’, it’s ‘the “biggest single disaster of British foreign policy since Suez”, the 1956 crisis that saw then prime minister Anthony Eden resign.
I had to laugh outloud when I read this.
Whataboutery
The Balkans
Iraq
Libya
Syria
I could go on but……….. my main point is
What were the results in GCSE & A Levels this year and last in History!
? ‘Bob’s yur Uncle.? Write a short sentence on where that everyday ( well at least in my age group) comes from.
This country has invested more than enough of British taxpayers hard earned money in protecting the population Afghanistan from other members of their population who do not want us there. And too many of our soldiers, airman and Naval personnel have been either killed or maimed for life, and for just exactly what. As per usual our useless and out of touch politicians call the shots (no pun intended) and send our services out to these far flung parts of the world to protect their citizens from their own kind, whilst spending huge amounts of money that could have been better spent on the citizens of this country. Too many young able bodied and Afghans have stood idly by whilst American and British serviceman have put their own lives on the line to protect them. It is high time the Afghans made a stand themselves to defend their own country against insurgents and militants, but they appear to have no fight within them and have allowed the Taliban to just walk in and take over without so much as lifting a finger. So much for training 300,000 members of the Afghan National Army and providing the weaponry and tanks etc fo them to carry on the battle Well, sorry we have done our best in a difficult situation, but they have little interest, so why should we take any further interest. Too many of their young men have flocked illegally to our shores in dinghies rather than defending democracy in their country. The trouble is they know we have an inherently weak government in power who will allow them to walk all over us, led by someone who should never have been allowed anywhere near the tillers of power.
All that weaponry Colin, could have been used to defend our borders on the English Channel! (Should have been used.)
Pauline……good point. And our service personnel should now be deployed on assisting the inept Border Agency to protect our shores from invasion of foreign aliens who arrive in dinghies and without passports, whose motives for coming here are yet to be ascertained. My fear is that our thoroughly inept government are storing up potential problems for this country in the not too distant future by allowing these people to stay here and allowing them to form an army of insurgents within. Johnson has his head permanently stuck in the sand insofar as the real problems that face this country, the English Channel migrant crisis being one of them. In his warped mind, it is more important to expel C02 of wasted hot air from his mouth talking about cutting carbon emissions than facing up to reality, the old windbag that he is.
“Inept” or deliberately using the illegals to cause us problems? As you say using the military would solve this issue and quickly.
He’s fully signed up to Agenda 21 isn’t he.
Indeed he is signed up to it. A very dangerous PM in a long line of them unfit for purpose.
I think we might have done better quietly training 300.000 girls and ladies how to kill, and maim at midnight..and throw the stones the other way… Just to mke their men as scared of their womenfolk as we are.of ours
Training the men has always been daft. They like the status quo.of Islam. Another good American idea. They keep coming up with these ideas and our politiciams who cannot even think, copy them. Every time. Straight into the mire. They cannot resist the lure of tainted American money.. Exactly like Drug money and Afganistan
What Afganistan needs is more lawyers.
Correct!
I have no words to describe that article by Ben Wallace, but his brain’s utter disconnect with the real world was evident, on every level, in the last para.
“We shall be clear with the Taliban that hosting Al-Qaeda committing war crimes and atrocities will not be tolerated and will prevent them ever being given international recognition. And we, alongside our allies, reserve the right, the capability and the determination to act against imminent threats to our national security.”
I thought, “Phew! Thank Heavens! That’ll have them shaking in their boots!”
What an embarrassment our politicians are nowadays, to us and to themselves. And they have little credibility bemoaning totalitarian regimes when they themselves have become one.
By the way – what allies? The UN is a third-world-despot-lead cesspit; The US has a brain dead president; the EU only fights its own citizens; Canada sucks up to China which itself is probably cock-a-hoop at another opportunity; and NZ and Oz are in isolation more afraid of a generally mild flu than their own shadow.
“What an embarrassment our politicians are nowadays,”
Did you vote for one of them? Shall you do so again when the opportunity is presented?
Do you NOT BELIEVE that if we continue to do as we’ve always done, we are probably going to get what we’ve always got?
Michael D……..the answer is, most definitely not.
Michael D Well said. Never ever voting LIB/LAB/CON/GREEN is the only way to get ahead of the racket that is British party politics. Just ignore them, vote for a challenger party and bring some competition to the political marketplace.
I didn’t, as it happens. Shall [sic] you provide us the answers to your questions?
Phil O’Sophical…..ah well, he is probably talking about our ‘friends and partners’ in the European Union, the maniacal phrase that out great leader (not) bangs on about every five minutes………..
It seems to me Viv, that we have now reached a moment where reality may become apparent to all the real culpits of Big Government including the media and institutions. Maybe they don’t realise ( Having gone to comprehensives ) that all the hellholes of the world are places where we abandoned the population to people who blamed the obvious ( Us ). It may now become apparent to these twits, that we are now in trouble,and that the countrys cohesion has virtually gone.
They (?), need to get through their thick heads that ISLAM is not a charity… The entire Commonwealth is under threat….. And its all down to SLOPPY IDEAS.
You don’t believe it. ?
Ignoring all the places where our tradition of never talking about religion or politics has turned and bitten the daft twits.
Look at Nigeria ? Look at E Africa where our ” Influence was so important .!.. Look at Rhodesia, All these places where where ” liberal ” has destroyed. The only thing understood is a big stick and when lefty ideas undermine it . Reality seeps in.
We need bigger sticks and no foolish religions or ideologies for babies comforting. A big army. and big police force.and zero twittishness… Support our friends never our enemies.
Get real.
To fight Big religion with ignorance and state combined, is only done with a bigger stick, or prosperity. Maybe ? Maybe we need something different.. Has anyone tried it ? Some variation of communism ? old China?, Old Japan ?. Can technology beat it ?No…Beauty ?.Macron ? No. !
One thing is certain Westminster and whitehall have no clue Nor do I
Our Civil Service. With experience of governing these people as their masters, Of asking their help during wars, of Granting their unprepared politically hemoraged independence, of total unconcern for millions slaughtered in the name of Wilsons Zimbabwe,of continued demands made of them for support for our commonwealth of nations food surpluses,
All this weight of huge minds gathered in the files of centuries old committees, available after a short scramble and deployed by 478,000 surgically focussed minds, processed to a fine edge by a laptop.
Aren’t ready.
TG Spokes…..Committees, that old chestnut again. I wondered when that word would raise its ugly head once again. However I suppose we have to be grateful for small mercies, as UKIP hasn’t been blamed for all of the ills of the world including Afghanistan the mind of Mr. Stokes today….Maybe tomorrow though. What would Henry II thought of it…….
Indeed TG. A mess that will be difficult to sort out, even if governments wanted to.
I second that proposal.✋?
Once again, the MSM just stares at the events of the last few days and whines. The preferred object of whining is women (and what about the wells?). This almost begs to repeat the famous question to Albright whether the dead 500,000 children in Iraq were worth it: Were the 100,000 to 250,000 dead civilians, all the wounded, all the destruction, all the current refugees worth it?
And then:
– three British invasions of Afghanistan between 1839 and 1919: didn’t work.
– than: Soviet invasion 1979-1989: didnt work
– last: Nato invasion 2001-2021: didn’t work.
When will they understand that this is not the right way (but neither are sanctions)? When will all the leaders of the so-called values-West be brought to justice?
“When will all the leaders of the of … values-West be brought to justice?” – I guess it depends on whose values you are talking about. Under the Yanks+Brits the farmers grew opium so that the CIA could import it to the west. Under the Taliban they will have to grow something else. So who was defending whom from what? I do suspect that these leaders will shortly be brought to justice, but perhaps for the right reasons rather than the wrong. That would be a change for the better!
Their is only one solution for terrorists; their total destruction followed by close monitoring for any resurgence. The guilty ones amongst the responsible governments should also be jailed with a lengthy sentence.
What a madcap venture costing thousands ofAmerican and hundreds of British lives for what….,? Let’s not forget the USA and Britain were big buddies with the Taliban when the Russians stupidly got themselves involved in Afghan politics.
Sorry, Muhajadin of which the Taliban were associated with.
I’ve read that the Taliban have freed around ten thousand Jihadis from prisons in Afghanistan and many are expected to turn up in the US via its wide open southern border. You’d have to be very naive to believe that a good number of these Jihadis won’t be turning up in Britain in little rubber boats; that is as aside from the one that are already here and already on their way.
The way I see it is this: Afghanistan is just the beginning, it is widely known that these Islamic extremists wish to bring down the West. Our borders have been compromised, the West is virtually bankrupt, our armed forces depleted and the process of invasion is well advanced; we have never been more vulnerable.
I think that these Muslims are going to succeed in bringing us down, not least because in Britain we don’t have one single political leader worthy of actually being called a leader. No one politician that will stand up for the British people and lead us in the fight that is becoming increasingly inevitable with each passing day.
Not one so-called refugee should be allowed to enter our country after this. Now we have too many young men feeding off the taxpayer here, all of whom pose a potential threat. The blame for it lies squarely and fairly on our own government.
JT – There is nothing new under the sun. The American government of the day turned on resident Japanese in America all those years ago simply because they were Japanese. Is that what you are proposing now? I wonder how Pastor Martin Niemuller might have described that today.
If everything boils down to ‘who has the biggest guns, wins’ – I reckon we are well and truly stuffed. The “I am right, you are wrong” bully boys have it.
It is not nationality the matters but adherence to Islam. Muslims cause problems in every non-Muslim country where they have a significant presence. They can’t even live peacefully with different factions of Islam.
One way we, the ordinary populace, might have had a chance of surviving would be by resembling the taliban fighter in today’s picture; armed to the teeth and prepared to do whatever is necessary. Not in the same cause of course, but to defend ourselves and our offspring. Not only from the muslim
threat , but from our own rotten Establishment who not only don’t defend us but are attacking us and setting terrorists on us like savage dogs. While they, the prime movers of these evils, themselves escape punishment.
Instead what UK citizens do we have? Preponderantly weak muzzled mutts, the “cankered products of a calm world and a too-long peace.” Meaning they’ve had their freedoms on a plate too easily for too long.
BTW I didn’t set out today to have a dig at my own nation, but I’m despairing , having just walked round a shop where I was the only one unmuzzled.
All too true. Not sure our enemies need to do anything that might make us pull together to fight a common foe because the destruction that Biden is achieving is exceptional by cancelling US fuel energy self sufficiency, cancelling border security, turbo charging inflation with trillions in hand outs and boosting the self flagellation about distant historical morality and inspiring a brand new reverse racism. Boris’ green and dinghy diver lunacy is doing similar stuff here. Actual enemy action may bring his eye back on the ball so surely best for our enemies to quietly let us self destruct?
Shame we can’t import Trump to rule us.
Lindsay, you could be right there about Boris. Probably his chief worry about the Taliban is what position they might take on climate change.
Ralph that’s funny!
Her’s another one.
Charles 111 will be wondering whether to Defend their Faith.