Taliban

Boris Johnson opens Afghanistan debate to frosty reception

Boris Johnson opened the debate on the situation in Afghanistan to a packed house. With virtual parliament rules now gone, MPs on both sides crammed into the Commons Chamber to take part in the debate. But the large audience didn’t actually help the Prime Minister. In fact, it served to highlight the criticism the government is facing both from opposition politicians and its own MPs. Within minutes there had been critical interventions from Labour and Tory members.  Johnson began his statement by looking back on the 9/11 terror attacks, which saw the UK – along with other allies – join forces with the United States to enter Afghanistan. The Prime

Nick Cohen

Why is Britain refusing to save Afghans who helped us?

Screams for help are coming from Afghanistan, and echoing around the world. Mine comes from British consultancies and charities the UK government funded to run state-building projects in Afghanistan. As a fair number of Conservative politicians and activists read The Spectator, I am publishing them here in the hope that you will alert your leaders to the desperate need for sanctuary for people who have every right to expect help, but are being abandoned. I am not writing it in the polemical ‘this is the worst government in modern British history’ spirit. (There will be more than enough time for that.) Nor is it the moment to say that the

How did US intelligence get Afghanistan so wrong?

It may well go down as the understatement of the year. In a quite extraordinary address to the nation after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the US President made this admission: ‘The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.’ If this were the only intelligence failing of recent years, then maybe a little indulgence could be shown More quickly? Than we had anticipated? As recently as 10 August, US intelligence said that it would take the Taliban up to 90 days to take

The hitch with Hitchens

It hasn’t taken 20 years to work out that Christopher Hitchens was a dud, but this week’s collapse of Kabul obliges us to reexamine the Hitchens back catalog — because Hitchens had an outsized influence on debates about the supersised errors of post-9/11 foreign policy. The briefest of looks exposes the deficits of the neoconservative mind. An even clearer picture emerges of the hubris that led American policymakers, and the West in general, to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the spread of liberal enlightenment, rather than subjecting them to the tests of Realpolitik. Never trust a man whose favorite sport is politics. For Hitchens and the neocons who adopted

David Patrikarakos

Pakistan is the true winner from the Afghan debacle

‘Everyone is getting out – and fast’, the man tells me over a crackling line. He is tired, clearly subdued. A UN staff member, he was in Afghanistan until very recently and is still trying to process what happened. ‘We knew this was going to happen,’ he continues, ‘but everyone was caught by surprise at the speed of the Taliban advance.’ UN staff are now being evacuated to Almaty in Kazakhstan, from where they will make their way to their respective countries. But what about the local Afghans that worked with them? ‘Our Afghan colleagues were given letters of support for country visas in the region: Iran, Pakistan, and India. Some

Western deterrence now looks hollow

The efforts of a 20 year war took only a few weeks to overturn: the Taliban has completed its takeover of Afghanistan. As parliamentarians return to Westminster on Wednesday to discuss the situation, the focal point of the debate should be damage control. One of the major challenges will be restoring deterrence. The withdrawal of troops, which was done hastily and without an organised exit strategy, gave the Taliban the opportunity to make quick advances, often even without the need to use violence. The last few days also saw images of western nations rushing to evacuate remaining personnel. The way these events have unfolded depicts the US and its European

The EU shares in Biden’s shame over Afghanistan

Among America’s self-described foreign policy ‘realists,’ there is a common trope according to which the best way for the United States to get its allies to do more is to show them some tough love – particularly by doing less. That theory has just been put to a test in Afghanistan. It has failed spectacularly. Contrary to the caricature of the protracted conflict in Afghanistan as a distinctly American endeavour, both the combat operations and the efforts at reconstruction were supported by an extraordinarily diverse coalition of countries, from New Zealand, through much of Europe, to Turkey. Of some 150,000 British troops who served in Afghanistan during the past two

Qanta Ahmed

A new world order will emerge from America’s humiliation

When America decided to save Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban, it acted on two major beliefs. The first was that the US had the might, the tech and the ability to reshape Afghanistan — what could a superpower have to fear from a ragtag bunch of insurgents? — the second was a belief that this Kabul project was not about colonialism. History was moving America’s way and all it needed was a nudge. Both theories have now been tested to destruction. The humiliation that America has just inflicted upon herself (and her western allies) will reverberate globally and in a way that emboldens all the wrong people. To

Biden risks undermining America’s moral authority

Joe Biden is facing what will likely be the defining event of his presidency. The gains made in Afghanistan are evaporating in record time under his watch. But Biden doesn’t want to be a foreign policy president. He wants to be the man who ended wars, taking credit for America’s Covid recovery, funnelling trillions of dollars into infrastructure and education while the Federal Reserve’s printing presses are warmed up and there’s still appetite to spend. But like his Democrat predecessor — and the man whom he served as vice president — he has been dealt a different hand. President Obama was loath to see the atrocities taking place in Syria

Steerpike

The nine worst responses to Afghanistan’s fall

The fall of Afghanistan has provoked much comment and soul-searching on both sides of the Atlantic. Along with the usual talking heads and thumping op-eds, the Taliban’s imminent victory has prompted some truly awful takes from some of the less distinguished figures in public life. Below is Mr Steerpike’s guide to some of the most tone-deaf, stunningly crass and just plain sinister responses to the fall of Afghanistan. Stop the War Coalition and Richard Burgon Straight out the blocks with a statement was the hard left Stop the War Coalition, formerly chaired by one Jeremy Corbyn. The group has claimed the withdrawal from Afghanistan as vindication for its cause and called

Katy Balls

Boris faces a backlash from Tory MPs over Afghanistan

After the Taliban took over Kabul and announced victory in Afghanistan, a scramble is underway by diplomats and many Afghans to flee the country. There are videos overnight of distressing scenes at Kabul airport where crowds have assembled in an attempt to get out. The US embassy has since issued an advisory to American citizens and Afghan nationals not to travel to the airport until notified. As the chaos unfolds – and both UK and US estimates on the likely speed of the Taliban advance prove embarrassingly wide of the mark – anger is building among MPs over the government’s handling of the situation. Dominic Raab has flown back from

Marine A: the shambles that shamed us

Like it or not, and many in high places will loathe it, what we may now call The Blackman Affair is not going to go away. It will be recalled as a shambles and a glaring miscarriage of justice. Also remembered will be the ferocious, self-serving and vindictive role of the establishment in permitting this injustice to occur. Posterity will say that a Royal Marine sergeant on an exhausting assignment in Northern Helmand, Afghanistan, in the late summer of 2011, shot and killed a Taliban terrorist who, though undoubtedly dying and wholly unsaveable, was not yet quite dead. A more expanded account might add that a nearby corporal, secretly filming

The Lahore attacks are just the latest atrocity in a war on Christians

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of

Could the Taliban become a useful ally against Islamic State?

For the better part of a decade, Nato forces fought a bitter war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of thousands of troops – including 453 members of Britain’s Armed Forces – and left thousands more seriously maimed by roadside bombs and other devilish devices. So it is perfectly understandable that anyone who has had the least dealings with this ugly conflict, from politicians to the families and friends of those who participated, should recoil in horror at reports that senior members of the Taliban are now actively participating in negotiations that could ultimately see them become members of the Afghan government. The Nato mission to Afghanistan,

What Afghan soldiers really think – the same as us

‘The NATO Commander in Eastern Afghanistan has said that this year 54 foreign bases have already been closed…’ Last December Channel 4 aired a documentary entitled Billion Dollar Base: Deconstructing Camp Bastion, the predominating ‘takeaways’ from which were a) what phenomenal amounts of money we’d spent on our eight-year operation in and around Helmand Province, and b) how unimpressed the Afghan brass were by what ‘little’ we were leaving behind. I found myself watching most of it through gritted teeth; but it was hard, nevertheless, not to have some sympathy for the incoming Afghan soldiery. A new documentary film has now taken up that very story. Tell Spring Not to

Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake, review: a Carry On Up the Khyber view of Afghanistan

We all need stories ‘to help us make sense of the complexity of reality’, intones the sensible sounding voice of Adam Curtis at the start of his new documentary about Afghanistan, Bitter Lake. But stories told by ‘those in power’ are ‘increasingly unconvincing and hollow’. What a relief then that Curtis has raided the archives of BBC News on our behalf for footage of the west’s 13 year engagement in Afghanistan to construct his own more than two hour long story. His conclusion: the crisis in Afghanistan is all the fault of the witless Americans! The problem all began on a US warship parked in the Suez Canal in 1945

From Sydney to Peshawar – Islamic extremists are civilisation’s common enemy

Yesterday it was Sydney. Today it is Peshawar. Yesterday a coffee shop. Today a school. Yesterday a lone gunman. Today a gang of them. If anybody wondered about the global and diffuse nature of the challenge that Islamic fundamentalism poses, the last 24 hours have given another demonstration of the problem. Yet what is amazing, after all these years, is how unconcerned many people remain with working out what is going on. How could the Taliban have chosen to attack a school in Peshawar? Why did Boko Haram steal the Nigerian schoolgirls? Why did the Sydney attacker fly that flag? Why do Isis fly theirs?  The Western world in particular seems

Farewell to Afghanistan (for now)

Britain has ended combat operations in Afghanistan. The war did topple the Taleban, but it hasn’t got rid of them. It has improved some things in Afghanistan – better roads, better education, better newspapers – but the country is still corrupt, bankrupt and dangerous. When Britain and America decided to go into Afghanistan in 2001, The Spectator ran an editorial entitled Why We Must Win. This is not a war against Islam, but against terrorists who espouse a virulent strain of that religion, a fundamentalism that most moderate Arabs themselves regard as a menace. This is not even a war against Afghanistan, but an attempt to topple a vile regime.

Pakistan’s ISI accused of subverting media freedom

Media freedom is under attack in Pakistan, declared Hamid Mir, one of Pakistan’s most prominent journalists. He had six bullets pumped into him by bike riders in Karachi on 19 April. TV anchor, Raza Rumi, was similarly attacked in Lahore in late March. In May 2011, investigative reporter Saleem Shahzad was murdered following his allegations of links between the Pakistani military and al-Qaeda. These are just three of the many Pakistani journalists who’ve been victims of a wave of threats and violence in recent months and years. Even foreign journalists covering Pakistan from inside the country dare not write about certain issues for fear of being killed, or that their