There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Oh absolutely. We all want the bad guys to be wiped out. It's doing it that has proved so tricky.
I am not sure that we do. What we really want is for the "bad guys" to repent and reform. It is not possible to wipe out evil by wiping out "evil" people, because the battle between good and evil is an internal one in every individuals soul, and one that never reaches conclusion in this life. We can only wipe out evil by wiping ourselves out.
Indeed, recognising that some of our own motivations and desires are evil is the first step to rooting out the causes of war.
Trident at your service.
You’ll find it just outside Scotland’s biggest city. For some reason they didn’t want it just outside England’s biggest city. They must think we’re more evil than they are.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
A mission Bush failed in completely as the terrorists simply regrouped immediately in Pakistan and spread throughout the entire Middle East.
I think it's fair to say that no-one has ever 'conquered' what we think of as Afghanistan, except possibly the idea of Islam. And even then the Islam of Afghanistan seems very different from that of N. Africa, Bangladesh or Turkey.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Oh absolutely. We all want the bad guys to be wiped out. It's doing it that has proved so tricky.
I am not sure that we do. What we really want is for the "bad guys" to repent and reform. It is not possible to wipe out evil by wiping out "evil" people, because the battle between good and evil is an internal one in every individuals soul, and one that never reaches conclusion in this life. We can only wipe out evil by wiping ourselves out.
Indeed, recognising that some of our own motivations and desires are evil is the first step to rooting out the causes of war.
Trident at your service.
You’ll find it just outside Scotland’s biggest city. For some reason they didn’t want it just outside England’s biggest city. They must think we’re more evil than they are.
Geography is not your strong point I assume.
Boris probably has a GRAND PLAN to expand the Pool of London and turn it into a massive submarine pen and associated support facilities, though.
Do we know who's more likely to vote out of grads/non-grads?
As Foxy noted it's complicated by dual registration for students, so they vote more than is apparent. But broadly speaking both being older and having high educational level correlate with likelihood to vote, which in party terms perhaps cancel each other out.
It's important to remember that few children make a conscious decision to go or not go to university - it's either expected or not expected but everyone around you, though clearly you can opt out of either choice as you approach 18. So any suggestion that non-grads are thick is well off the mark. But it's probably true that exposure to a wide range of thinking at uni makes it hard to maintain knee-jerk populist attitudes - I wouldn't think Sun or even Mail readership is very common in ex-grads. There's peer pressure too - you'll just seem a bit odd if you're a militant Tory at most unis.
What seems to stick with everyone is liberal social attitudes - few students have ever been bothered by gay marriage etc. and that open-mindedness has spread through the population, whereas quite a lot moderate their left-wing views as they get older (sadly).
Is it fair if perhaps provocative to suggest that a lot of groups view students as 'programmable', which is why every group from religions to political to identity politics types target them? Where you put animal rights / anti-nuclear / traditional religion / cults / revolutionary communists (if they still exist) / traditional leftists / hunt sabs / greens / tories / 'rights' for 'x'-ists groups in those categories.
It is well-established that students make philosophical commitments that colour their views for years to life depending on what they meet at University (or even school).
That's how whatever group of whatevers get their future base. The tactic of the edge groups (however identified) is to throw individuals so off balance that they topple for one set of beliefs / values.
Isn't this stuff basic, and that the aim for school/Uni is to give people the skills to deal with the barrage of ideas. Somehow.
Indeed "Taliban" is the Pashtun word for "students"
People do change though. Mao's Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution are now in their seventies, and have changed China beyond recognition, just not in the way that they originally thought.
I was contacted by Ipsos MORI for this poll by landline which we still have at home. I wonder how representative landline samples now are even if they are only part of the total polled.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Oh absolutely. We all want the bad guys to be wiped out. It's doing it that has proved so tricky.
I am not sure that we do. What we really want is for the "bad guys" to repent and reform. It is not possible to wipe out evil by wiping out "evil" people, because the battle between good and evil is an internal one in every individuals soul, and one that never reaches conclusion in this life. We can only wipe out evil by wiping ourselves out.
Indeed, recognising that some of our own motivations and desires are evil is the first step to rooting out the causes of war.
Trident at your service.
You’ll find it just outside Scotland’s biggest city. For some reason they didn’t want it just outside England’s biggest city. They must think we’re more evil than they are.
Geography is not your strong point I assume.
Boris probably has a GRAND PLAN to expand the Pool of London and turn it into a massive submarine pen and associated support facilities, though.
I was contacted by Ipsos MORI for this poll by landline which we still have at home. I wonder how representative landline samples now are even if they are only part of the total polled.
Even when landline polls were common, the way the polling companies used last-digit randomisation was fundamentally flawed which is why they were forever re-weighting unrepresentative samples.
I'm just reading one of the DCI Banks books, 'Past Reason Hated', written in 1991. Some major characters in it are lesbian, and the attitude of the other characters towards them would be totally unacceptable nowadays - even in Yorkshire.
Societal attitudes can change very rapidly, as can concepts of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, or even 'good' and 'evil'. And the movement may not always be in directions we currently see as being positive.
Go back and watch episodes of The Bill from the early-to-mid-90s (available on UKTVPlay, FWIW).
They represent what I suspect for many of us in our 40s/50s is how we remember things being in the 70s/80s. It is quite shocking to be presented with the reality.
When I was ten or eleven at school, we used to play a game called 'Bummers in the Bush', which was basically a form of tag using some of the bushes in the playground to hide in and around. Looking back, it was a fairly horrid name, but it was before I knew much about such things. It was just a name, and 'bum' is a funny word to kids.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
The "bad guys" are not easily identifiable and probably don't even exist in that taxonomic sense in Afghanistan. The "Taliban" aren't a coherent bloc; they are overlapping and interconnected networks of tribal coalitions, religious fundamentalists, organised crime, poorly paid mercenaries, foreign adventurers and the agents of the Pakistani, Indian, Russian and Iranian intelligence services.
This is true. However the Taliban are less incoherent than every other faction in Afghanistan, at least amongst the Pashtuns, who are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the one that traditionally and nominally runs the show in that country. Also the Taliban are less egregiously corrupt than the other factions.
In those two respects the Taliban are the "not quite so bad guys".
I don't know what point the Americans decided it was hopeless. I suspect some time ago but they had to get through the presidential election first. The plug was always going to be pulled, with the inevitable damage that would cause. I have a feeling it could have been done with a bit more planning.
They have strong law enforcement, low corruption (relatively speaking) and a strong anti-drugs message.
Some of their policies could be viewed as misogynistic, homophobic and generally not respecting human rights though.
Indeed. The Taliban aren't necessarily more capable of imposing their will on the rest of the country than other groups. They need a degree of consent and not just rely on terror. The slender hope is that they moderate their behaviour in their own interest. But whether they do so is not something the "West" has any agency over.
Incidentally the Taliban make a distinction between consumption of drugs (bad) and producing them, which they tax.
Quite a familiar drug policy to Britons of the Nineteenth Century, who produced Opium to profit from and undermine the Chinese Empire, but discouraged for domestic use.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
Its a stretch to talk about "Afghan culture" at all. There is a Pashtun culture, Tajik, Hazari, etc., etc.. Plus a metropolitan capital. Not convinced a one size Central government can hold such a diverse country together. Whether they are foreign backed or the Taliban.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
A mission Bush failed in completely as the terrorists simply regrouped immediately in Pakistan and spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Nope, on 9/11 the Taliban were in full control of almost all Afghanistan and Al Qaeda had training camps across Afghanistan.
Bush removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Obama completed the job by sending special forces into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden.
Even IS have now been almost completely eliminated in Syria and Iraq.
It is Biden who has withdrawn US troops, it is Biden who is responsible if the Taliban recapture Kabul and it is Biden who is responsible if terrorists return to the country and launch further attacks on western cities.
This failure will be entirely at the door of the Biden-Harris administration
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
Can we have a "Brainwashed vote Labour" thread to balance it up a bit?
It used to be almost a pb meme pre-2010 that Labour only won because it had created a client state of cosseted public sector workers and idle benefits scroungers.
On the topic of fantasy and children, I got my wife a board game version of Jumanji for her birthday. We then thought we'd have a 'Jumanji night', so we put on the Robin Williams movie which the kids had never seen, which is still a great movie (as most Robin Williams movies are).
As the credits rolled my wife went to get her new board game out coincidentally just as my daughter said "its a good thing that game isn't real" - she then saw her mummy holding the game and screamed and ran up the stairs to her room.
May sound like a cruel practical joke, but it wasn't intended that way. She could laugh about it afterwards.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
A mission Bush failed in completely as the terrorists simply regrouped immediately in Pakistan and spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Nope, on 9/11 the Taliban were in full control of almost all Afghanistan and Al Qaeda had training camps across Afghanistan.
Bush removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Obama completed the job by sending special forces into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden.
Even IS have now been almost completely eliminated in Syria and Iraq.
It is Biden who has withdrawn US troops, it is Biden who is responsible if the Taliban recapture Kabul and it is Biden who is responsible if terrorists return to the country and launch further attacks on western cities.
This failure will be entirely at the door of the Biden-Harris administration
The training camps weren't eliminated they were relocated.
Killing Bin Laden over a decade later didn't "finish the job", since the rest of them survived.
If as you ignorantly pretend the training camps were eliminated then why aren't the Taliban fighting today untrained amateurs easily defeated by an Afghan army with two decades of western training?
It's easy to understand why "graduates" tend to vote Labour. In too many cases they have mortgaged their lives for a crap degree at a crap university with nothing to show for it except a sad, fading selfie with a mortarboard. The beneficiaries of this scandal are the legion of social science and arts academics who live high on the hog thanks to their students' borrowed money and would otherwise be unemployable. It's not immediately clear how a vote for Labour offers salvation for the unfortunate victims, but they probably think it's better than doing nothing.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I was contacted by Ipsos MORI for this poll by landline which we still have at home. I wonder how representative landline samples now are even if they are only part of the total polled.
Potentially it's okay, because I'd expect landline use to strongly correlate with age, and so the demographic targets will ensure that they have to reach people without a landline to reach enough people in their 30s.
However, if landline use anti-correlates say with being a citizen of nowhere, then it's possible this wouldn't be corrected for in the construction of the sample, and that might introduce a systematic bias.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
Fair points - but the adult literacy rate was 18% in 1979. It's well over double that now.
Another measure. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26747712 In 2001 no girls attended formal schools and there were only one million boys enrolled. By 2012 the World Bank says there were 7.8 million pupils attending school - including about 2.9 million girls.
You’ll find it just outside Scotland’s biggest city. For some reason they didn’t want it just outside England’s biggest city. They must think we’re more evil than they are.
Before we moved to Canterbury in 1984 my family lived in Berkshire, 10 miles from USAF Greenham Common, and 5 miles from the HM's Atomic Research Facility at Aldermaston. We too kept saying "if Berkshire were in England, or in the Home Counties, those evil bastard English would never have put these dangerous nuclear things here".
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
A mission Bush failed in completely as the terrorists simply regrouped immediately in Pakistan and spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Nope, on 9/11 the Taliban were in full control of almost all Afghanistan and Al Qaeda had training camps across Afghanistan.
Bush removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Obama completed the job by sending special forces into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden.
Even IS have now been almost completely eliminated in Syria and Iraq.
It is Biden who has withdrawn US troops, it is Biden who is responsible if the Taliban recapture Kabul and it is Biden who is responsible if terrorists return to the country and launch further attacks on western cities.
This failure will be entirely at the door of the Biden-Harris administration
The Taliban tolerated Al Qaeda, but most of the 9/11 gang were Saudi, not Afghan. It's evident that Bush didn't 'remove' the Taliban from Afghanistan. Incidentally, AIUI, the Taliban originally received substantial funding for the CIA and from a shadowy 'Christian' Texan organisation which regarded opposition to 'Communism' as more important than religious affiliation.
It's easy to understand why "graduates" tend to vote Labour. In too many cases they have mortgaged their lives for a crap degree at a crap university with nothing to show for it except a sad, fading selfie with a mortarboard. The beneficiaries of this scandal are the legion of social science and arts academics who live high on the hog thanks to their students' borrowed money and would otherwise be unemployable. It's not immediately clear how a vote for Labour offers salvation for the unfortunate victims, but they probably think it's better than doing nothing.
The contempt for the young runs strong in you. University applications are at an all time high.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
A mission Bush failed in completely as the terrorists simply regrouped immediately in Pakistan and spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Nope, on 9/11 the Taliban were in full control of almost all Afghanistan and Al Qaeda had training camps across Afghanistan.
Bush removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Obama completed the job by sending special forces into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden.
Even IS have now been almost completely eliminated in Syria and Iraq.
It is Biden who has withdrawn US troops, it is Biden who is responsible if the Taliban recapture Kabul and it is Biden who is responsible if terrorists return to the country and launch further attacks on western cities.
This failure will be entirely at the door of the Biden-Harris administration
The training camps weren't eliminated they were relocated.
Killing Bin Laden over a decade later didn't "finish the job", since the rest of them survived.
If as you ignorantly pretend the training camps were eliminated then why aren't the Taliban fighting today untrained amateurs easily defeated by an Afghan army with two decades of western training?
The training camps for Al Qaeda were eliminated from Afghanistan and it was from them that 9/11 was planned.
The training camps was an issue with Al Qaeda, it was just the Taliban allowed them when they were in control.
The Taliban were never eliminated but pushed out of most of the country and with just a small presence left in their heartlands.
All that could now be reversed due to the Biden-Harris withdrawal
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
"If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them." - unless they have those vote thingies.
Plenty of countries with a dictatorial regime had a cosmopolitan capital surrounded by relatively unchanged broader culture - Iran comes to mind.
Get rid of the dictatorship and guess what?
Another major factor in all this was the Islamic revival - as the various attempts at modernisation/socialism failed in various countries, religion moved into the void formed.
The Taliban have made it quite clear that their government will implement sharia law. That probably has a significant amount of support among the Afghan population, if not all. Sharia law is abhorrent to most of us in the West. But since it follows from the culture and religion the Afghans are attached to - aided by support from Pakistan - there is not a lot we can do about it.
Whether Afghanistan could have developed into a democratic state with an Islamic culture but without the awfulness of sharia is a question to which I have no answer. The evidence from other countries in the region - at least at this time - seems not.
Or, if it does, it requires a much better government and much more long-term support than the West was prepared to give.
At any event, it is all a colossal waste - of investment and lives - and a tragedy for the Afghan people, women above all. And, potentially, a risk if it becomes a breeding ground for anti-Western terrorists again.
Generally speaking, it appears that attempts by a foreign power to "civilise" another country by force are doomed to failure, aside from virtually wiping out the native population and replacing it with your own (e.g. the Americas). It appears that the motivation to do so has to come from the people themselves, as our own history also attests. Perhaps the best that we can do is to refuse to deal with authoritarian leaders while, at the same time, offering whatever support we can to the general population. Stopping our supply of weaponry to Saudi Arabia might be a good start.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
A mission Bush failed in completely as the terrorists simply regrouped immediately in Pakistan and spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Nope, on 9/11 the Taliban were in full control of almost all Afghanistan and Al Qaeda had training camps across Afghanistan.
Bush removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Obama completed the job by sending special forces into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden.
Even IS have now been almost completely eliminated in Syria and Iraq.
It is Biden who has withdrawn US troops, it is Biden who is responsible if the Taliban recapture Kabul and it is Biden who is responsible if terrorists return to the country and launch further attacks on western cities.
This failure will be entirely at the door of the Biden-Harris administration
The Taliban tolerated Al Qaeda, but most of the 9/11 gang were Saudi, not Afghan. It's evident that Bush didn't 'remove' the Taliban from Afghanistan. Incidentally, AIUI, the Taliban originally received substantial funding for the CIA and from a shadowy 'Christian' Texan organisation which regarded opposition to 'Communism' as more important than religious affiliation.
Though probably what made it so easy for the Taliban to be overthrown in 2001 was that the warlords had turned against them because the Taliban suppressed opium production, slashing their incomes. I think now the Taliban are quite happy to keep the other tribes onside by a pro-opium production policy. In the end that will take far more lives than terrorism in the West, and the failure to build a non opium economy the biggest failing of the puppet regime.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
The "bad guys" are not easily identifiable and probably don't even exist in that taxonomic sense in Afghanistan. The "Taliban" aren't a coherent bloc; they are overlapping and interconnected networks of tribal coalitions, religious fundamentalists, organised crime, poorly paid mercenaries, foreign adventurers and the agents of the Pakistani, Indian, Russian and Iranian intelligence services.
This is true. However the Taliban are less incoherent than every other faction in Afghanistan, at least amongst the Pashtuns, who are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the one that traditionally and nominally runs the show in that country. Also the Taliban are less egregiously corrupt than the other factions.
In those two respects the Taliban are the "not quite so bad guys".
I don't know what point the Americans decided it was hopeless. I suspect some time ago but they had to get through the presidential election first. The plug was always going to be pulled, with the inevitable damage that would cause. I have a feeling it could have been done with a bit more planning.
They have strong law enforcement, low corruption (relatively speaking) and a strong anti-drugs message.
Some of their policies could be viewed as misogynistic, homophobic and generally not respecting human rights though.
Indeed. The Taliban aren't necessarily more capable of imposing their will on the rest of the country than other groups. They need a degree of consent and not just rely on terror. The slender hope is that they moderate their behaviour in their own interest. But whether they do so is not something the "West" has any agency over.
Incidentally the Taliban make a distinction between consumption of drugs (bad) and producing them, which they tax.
Quite a familiar drug policy to Britons of the Nineteenth Century, who produced Opium to profit from and undermine the Chinese Empire, but discouraged for domestic use.
You could argue "consumption of drugs (bad) and producing them, which we tax (good)" is the self-same policy as that of the UK and other countries for alcohol.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
Can we have a "Brainwashed vote Labour" thread to balance it up a bit?
It used to be almost a pb meme pre-2010 that Labour only won because it had created a client state of cosseted public sector workers and idle benefits scroungers.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
Fair points - but the adult literacy rate was 18% in 1979. It's well over double that now.
Another measure. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26747712 In 2001 no girls attended formal schools and there were only one million boys enrolled. By 2012 the World Bank says there were 7.8 million pupils attending school - including about 2.9 million girls.
2001 would have been shortly after the Taliban, which was an 1990s invention by some twisted combination of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States (remember them?), had closed all the girls' schools.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
The Taliban have made it quite clear that their government will implement sharia law. That probably has a significant amount of support among the Afghan population, if not all. Sharia law is abhorrent to most of us in the West. But since it follows from the culture and religion the Afghans are attached to - aided by support from Pakistan - there is not a lot we can do about it.
Whether Afghanistan could have developed into a democratic state with an Islamic culture but without the awfulness of sharia is a question to which I have no answer. The evidence from other countries in the region - at least at this time - seems not.
Or, if it does, it requires a much better government and much more long-term support than the West was prepared to give.
At any event, it is all a colossal waste - of investment and lives - and a tragedy for the Afghan people, women above all. And, potentially, a risk if it becomes a breeding ground for anti-Western terrorists again.
Generally speaking, it appears that attempts by a foreign power to "civilise" another country by force are doomed to failure, aside from virtually wiping out the native population and replacing it with your own (e.g. the Americas). It appears that the motivation to do so has to come from the people themselves, as our own history also attests. Perhaps the best that we can do is to refuse to deal with authoritarian leaders while, at the same time, offering whatever support we can to the general population. Stopping our supply of weaponry to Saudi Arabia might be a good start.
Yes. I also wonder what value the West gets for the amount of money it gives to Pakistan. It is at least as culpable as Saudi Arabia in the spread of Islamist ideology and as a breeding ground for terror.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
I personally think it’s a waste of the 450 British deaths to let Kabul fall to the Taliban again but it’s too late now. There’s no appetite for war in the west.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
I personally think it’s a waste of the 450 British deaths to let Kabul fall to the Taliban again but it’s too late now. There’s no appetite for war in the west.
It was inevitable as endless war just isn't acceptable if it's a remote endless war in a distant land.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The containment and control in Afghanistan was lost once Trump first signalled the withdrawal. Even the small residual foreign force was essentially holding the country together.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
Well said.
That some so-called "progressives" seek to make the most superior form of transport the preserve of the rich, rather than everyone, is completely regressive.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
To an extent, we've done that. Trouble is that Islamists have realised they do not need planning or central direction to carry out terrorist outrages. 9/11 was perhaps the first demonstration – no hard-to-source bombs with intricate electronic timers, just grab a kitchen knife or your car keys (or an airliner after a few hours training in Florida, not the Middle East or Afghanistan).
These new HGV drivers we are desperately training to make up the post-Brexit, post-Covid, post-IR35 shortfall – MI5 is monitoring them all, to make sure none of them will drive their lorries into crowds of people like in Nice on Bastille Day, when 84 were killed, or is it?
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
"If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them." - unless they have those vote thingies.
Yes, but I can profit from their votes, I am a lot better off financially because of Tory tax and spend policies than I would have been under Corbyn. The reduction of foreign competition for my job was even the point of Brexit wasn't it?
I just don't buy into their values, and shall continue to live a cosmopolitan internationalist, and specifically European lifestyle.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
"If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them." - unless they have those vote thingies.
Yes, but I can profit from their votes, I am a lot better off financially because of Tory tax and spend policies than I would have been under Corbyn. The reduction of foreign competition for my job was even the point of Brexit wasn't it?
I just don't buy into their values, and shall continue to live a cosmopolitan internationalist, and specifically European lifestyle.
The "listen to" bit... the problem is that, in a democracy, you don't get to chose who you listen to. In the long run.
No, but this is another 'morons post "yawn" when presented with data they don't like' post.
How different demographics vote is interesting. Especially for a site that aims to shape how people bet on how people vote. We don't all agree on what the data means, but "yawn"?
If everyone was you and thought like you then how would you plan to make money betting on politics?
I personally think it’s a waste of the 450 British deaths to let Kabul fall to the Taliban again but it’s too late now. There’s no appetite for war in the west.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
It's hard to see what point you're trying to make with those statements. Yes, cars are ace for those that can afford them and drive them (including me), but they also have a huge social and environment downside. They are noisy, polluting and deadly, and they require vast amounts of tarmaced land area. It is simply stupid to emphasise the benefits of cars while ignoring their disadvantages.
I personally think it’s a waste of the 450 British deaths to let Kabul fall to the Taliban again but it’s too late now. There’s no appetite for war in the west.
It was inevitable as endless war just isn't acceptable if it's a remote endless war in a distant land.
More US civilians died on 9/11 in 1 day than all the US military deaths in Afghanistan in the last 20 years combined.
The point was it was a remote endless war between the Taliban and warlords led by Massoud from 1995 until 2001.
On 9/11 however it no longer was a remote endless war, it was a war that had just come to the streets of NYC, collapsed the World Trade Centre, destroyed part of the Pentagon and killed over 3,000 mainly western citizens in a western city.
Even if we pull out completely the war on terror will not go away, it will just be on pause until the next bomb or attack in a western city restarts it again
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
Yeah, good look with all that. What if people don’t crop up on the intelligence service’s radar, like the 7/7 bombers didn’t?
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
It's hard to see what point you're trying to make with those statements. Yes, cars are ace for those that can afford them and drive them (including me), but they also have a huge social and environment downside. They are noisy, polluting and deadly, and they require vast amounts of tarmaced land area. It is simply stupid to emphasise the benefits of cars while ignoring their disadvantages.
Outside the centre of big cities, there is no realistic alternative to using cars most of the time.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
There was a review in the LRB the other week (i'll try and find it) about this. If the CIA devoted less time to its whizz-bang, James Bond, special/black ops type stuff (starting with the overthrow of Mosaddegh and continuing to the present day) and more time on actual intelligence gathering (notable failures including, but not limited to, 9/11) the world would not be in the mess it is in today.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
Afghanistan has no oil
Iraq has, now owned by American oil companies (and Halliburton).
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
Afghanistan has no oil
True! However, it was the perfect route for pipelines. The Taliban were feted by Governor Bush when the pipeline was proposed. Then the Taliban say no, there is a quick war and President Bush installs the alleged UNOCAL fixer as Afghanistan's leader
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
Yeah, good look with all that. What if people don’t crop up on the intelligence service’s radar, like the 7/7 bombers didn’t?
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
We are at war with international extremist terrorism and have been since 9/11.
Yes, we will not always win it but that does not mean it must be at the top of the intelligence services radar.
Since 9/11 we have had no attacks on the same scale. Even before 9/11 Bin Laden had already attacked the WTO once before in 1993 and US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 well before any invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
Afghanistan has no oil
It has other mineral assets though. And, basically, the unfortunate people there got dragged into a sideshow of the Oil Wars because of the fallout from the Soviet invasion in 1979.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
There was a review in the LRB the other week (i'll try and find it) about this. If the CIA devoted less time to its whizz-bang, James Bond, special/black ops type stuff (starting with the overthrow of Mosaddegh and continuing to the present day) and more time on actual intelligence gathering (notable failures including, but not limited to, 9/11) the world would not be in the mess it is in today.
Wasn't one of the problems pre-9/11 that the CIA did have intelligence about Al-Qaeda and what it was planning but that it did not share it adequately and was more interested in collecting the intelligence than on acting on it? Plus the politicians - when told - ignored it.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
I walk, cycle, take the bus/train or drive depending on the circumstances, and I enjoy all of them. Walking is easy and good for you, and you sometimes meet people; cycling is even better for you, though a bit hairy on UK roads, and you can cover more distance; public transport lets you move around while doing something else, like reading or playing on your phone; and driving is comfortable and convenient, especially when carrying stuff, and can also be fun. I enjoyed motorcycling too (CBX 1000) in my younger days, but I'd struggle to make a case for it now :-)
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
Cars are essential in rural areas. Looking at a journey that might take me or my other half half an hour in the car would be over 3 hours on public transport, with 5 changes and about an hour walking round with 20+ kilos of feed. And that's just the outward leg.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
It's hard to see what point you're trying to make with those statements. Yes, cars are ace for those that can afford them and drive them (including me), but they also have a huge social and environment downside. They are noisy, polluting and deadly, and they require vast amounts of tarmaced land area. It is simply stupid to emphasise the benefits of cars while ignoring their disadvantages.
Outside the centre of big cities, there is no realistic alternative to using cars most of the time.
Is it fair if perhaps provocative to suggest that a lot of groups view students as 'programmable', which is why every group from religions to political to identity politics types target them? Where you put animal rights / anti-nuclear / traditional religion / cults / revolutionary communists (if they still exist) / traditional leftists / hunt sabs / greens / tories / 'rights' for 'x'-ists groups in those categories.
It is well-established that students make philosophical commitments that colour their views for years to life depending on what they meet at University (or even school).
That's how whatever group of whatevers get their future base. The tactic of the edge groups (however identified) is to throw individuals so off balance that they topple for one set of beliefs / values.
Isn't this stuff basic, and that the aim for school/Uni is to give people the skills to deal with the barrage of ideas. Somehow.
I think it's possibly a bit unfair to characterise most of these as seeking to "programme" students, in the way that Moonies and a few other crazies sought (and for all I know still seek) to do - but it's quite natural for any interest group to try to interest and enthuse students in their ideas (on the basis that they're interested in ideas and the next generation), and mainstream groups will do that too. Nothing wrong with that, so long as there's a variety of ideas to look into. I've given 6th form talks with that vague aspiration, but would be horrified to think that any of them felt programmed by me.
Most people, though, start with some assumptions and are influenced by their friends - if I was at uni and a friend said "I thought I'd look into neo-Nazism" I'd certainly tell him not to be an idiot, and no doubt less extreme examples of peer pressure abound.
It would be helpful, but difficult, to have a general "critical idea processing" course for all students, which trained them in processing assertions that they hear and asking questions like "Can you point me to websites both supporting and opposing what you're saying, so I can compare the arguments? The problem in such a course would be to give practical examples without straying into bias - for example, although I think that people who deny climate change are bonkers, I'd hesitate to have a course exemplifying climate change deniers as the sort of group seeking to brainwash students.
2001 would have been shortly after the Taliban, which was an 1990s invention by some twisted combination of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States (remember them?), had closed all the girls' schools.
That's really not accurate, the mujahideen comprised a wide range of groups backed by many different countries. Some of them later became known as Taliban, but other parts became groups like the Northern Alliance that were fiercely opposed to the Taliban. It was never one movement with one ideology under the control of a foreign coalition.
It's more accurate to say that the groups funded by the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, and Pakistan deposed the interim government and then started a civil war amongst themselves.
It's a bit like the French resistance groups that fought the Germans but themselves ranged from communists to far right groups, but with France there wasn't a civil war as such in the aftermath.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
Yeah, good look with all that. What if people don’t crop up on the intelligence service’s radar, like the 7/7 bombers didn’t?
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
If need be, yes, lobbing bombs at people from time to time is better than having them bomb us.
The problem is how do you tackle an evil like unreformed Islam? Christianity went through centuries of blood and turmoil in its Reformation and the problem is that the "extreme" orthodox Islam as promoted by the Saudis and Iranians and others is utterly unreformed and to be frank from a modern perspective pretty backwards and evil.
Which is not to say all Islam is. Most Islamic people are absolutely not Wahhabists or the like but for those that are - for whom Jihad means what they interpret it to mean - I don't see any simple solution to that.
Recognising that Saudi Arabia is our enemy and not our friend in that fight is a first step to take. We quite rightly call out unreformed, extremist, intolerant Christian groups but we don't do the same anywhere near enough for unreformed, extremist, intolerant Islam.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
I walk, cycle, take the bus/train or drive depending on the circumstances, and I enjoy all of them. Walking is easy and good for you, and you sometimes meet people; cycling is even better for you, though a bit hairy on UK roads, and you can cover more distance; public transport lets you move around while doing something else, like reading or playing on your phone; and driving is comfortable and convenient, especially when carrying stuff, and can also be fun. I enjoyed motorcycling too (CBX 1000) in my younger days, but I'd struggle to make a case for it now :-)
Variety is the spice of life!
People do all those things as leisure activities. But in terms of getting to and from work, there's no option but using a car for most people, which is regrettable.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
It's hard to see what point you're trying to make with those statements. Yes, cars are ace for those that can afford them and drive them (including me), but they also have a huge social and environment downside. They are noisy, polluting and deadly, and they require vast amounts of tarmaced land area. It is simply stupid to emphasise the benefits of cars while ignoring their disadvantages.
Outside the centre of big cities, there is no realistic alternative to using cars most of the time.
Sadly that is indeed the case in most parts of the UK. That's because our infrastructure has been developed primarily to suit cars.
It costs me close to £5 to travel the ≈ 10 miles into Newcastle and back on the bus. For that I get the privilege of waiting up to an hour for one to arrive.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
It's hard to see what point you're trying to make with those statements. Yes, cars are ace for those that can afford them and drive them (including me), but they also have a huge social and environment downside. They are noisy, polluting and deadly, and they require vast amounts of tarmaced land area. It is simply stupid to emphasise the benefits of cars while ignoring their disadvantages.
Outside the centre of big cities, there is no realistic alternative to using cars most of the time.
Sadly that is indeed the case in most parts of the UK. That's because our infrastructure has been developed primarily to suit cars.
There's nothing any more sad about relying upon cars than there is anything sad about relying upon electricity or running water.
I'm with Hyufd on this. The 'War on terror' was about containment and control. And Biden's just given it all up.
The War Against Terror was about taking control of oil-rich parts of the world. What do they care about control? Or terrorism for that matter - remember that the CIA literally created this monster to attack the Soviets.
There was a review in the LRB the other week (i'll try and find it) about this. If the CIA devoted less time to its whizz-bang, James Bond, special/black ops type stuff (starting with the overthrow of Mosaddegh and continuing to the present day) and more time on actual intelligence gathering (notable failures including, but not limited to, 9/11) the world would not be in the mess it is in today.
Wasn't one of the problems pre-9/11 that the CIA did have intelligence about Al-Qaeda and what it was planning but that it did not share it adequately and was more interested in collecting the intelligence than on acting on it? Plus the politicians - when told - ignored it.
The LRB review is of "The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts" by Scott Anderson and concludes as follows -
"Anderson makes the case that the CIA’s obsession with covert operations, which when successful (as in Iran and Guatemala) garnered both kudos and bigger budgets, coincided with the neglect of intelligence-gathering. The CIA failed to foresee the Soviet atom bomb in 1949, North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, China’s crossing of the Yalu River later that year, the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, popular support in Cuba for Fidel Castro on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968, Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran, Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990. This is not to mention the 9/11 attacks, which had the perverse effect of revitalising the CIA while it was floundering without a credible enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many of those involved in the founding of the CIA rued what they had done. ‘Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t report on wars and the like,’ Truman said, ‘they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on.’ Scores of former agents have exposed CIA crimes and defeats in books, films and articles. In the wake of American humiliation in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, Senate and House investigations documented CIA malfeasance at home and overseas that involved both violations of federal law and the agency’s own charter. Yet no matter how outlandish its schemes and plots, the CIA goes on and on and on, just like Fleming’s 007 franchise."
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
Yeah, good look with all that. What if people don’t crop up on the intelligence service’s radar, like the 7/7 bombers didn’t?
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
We are at war with international extremist terrorism and have been since 9/11.
Yes, we will not always win it but that does not mean it must be at the top of the intelligence services radar.
Since 9/11 we have had no attacks on the same scale. Even before 9/11 Bin Laden had already attacked the WTO once before in 1993 and US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 well before any invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is nothing illegal about bombing militants training camps except according to the most wet leftists
Hey, you’re a neo-con! I can’t say I admire your blatant disregard for international law, but it’s revealing that you are so sanguine about jettisoning this stuff when it suits. An example of western hypocrisy that plays well with the terrorist recruiters.
No there hasn’t been a big terrorist attack in the west since 9/11. There’s no need. The Islamists are playing the long game, we have shown we lack the stomach to stay in these countries long-term. Job done.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
Yeah, good look with all that. What if people don’t crop up on the intelligence service’s radar, like the 7/7 bombers didn’t?
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
If need be, yes, lobbing bombs at people from time to time is better than having them bomb us.
The problem is how do you tackle an evil like unreformed Islam? Christianity went through centuries of blood and turmoil in its Reformation and the problem is that the "extreme" orthodox Islam as promoted by the Saudis and Iranians and others is utterly unreformed and to be frank from a modern perspective pretty backwards and evil.
Which is not to say all Islam is. Most Islamic people are absolutely not Wahhabists or the like but for those that are - for whom Jihad means what they interpret it to mean - I don't see any simple solution to that.
Recognising that Saudi Arabia is our enemy and not our friend in that fight is a first step to take. We quite rightly call out unreformed, extremist, intolerant Christian groups but we don't do the same anywhere near enough for unreformed, extremist, intolerant Islam.
The problem with Saudi Arabia is that while the House of Saud are not perfect by any means, the alternative to them really would be far worse.
Much as with Assad they may not be allies but they are better than the really extremist militants who would take over if they fell
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
Cars are essential in rural areas. Looking at a journey that might take me or my other half half an hour in the car would be over 3 hours on public transport, with 5 changes and about an hour walking round with 20+ kilos of feed. And that's just the outward leg.
Cars are essential in rural areas covering about 15% of the population. If the other 85% of the population don't have an adequate public transport service, the problem is with the public transport system, not people being anti-car.
There is not here, nor is there in the US, the political will to send the hundreds of thousands of troops there that would be required to make and then keep the peace.
It seems to me that what was really needed was for the bad guys to be wiped out. But there's certainly no will for that.
Define "bad guys"
Al Qaeda are long gone in Afghanistan - in the shifting sands of alliances there, all the warlords are now buying into the "Taliban" franchise. Which means something different to the Taliban of 20 years back.
The important bit of the Taliban franchise is the Koran waving bit - "We Are More Muslim Than Everyone Else".
Which means, in turn, that those in the franchise must be more blessed by God. In all their doings.... Which is a very useful flag of convenience for those in the war lording business.
So you have the same bunch of people signing up to a name that doesn't mean what it used to.
Who are you going to kill and why?
It's a fair point. What I'm getting at is that I got the impression that our soldiers were not in a position to take out the people they were fighting. Didn't someone get done for murder? I just think we're too squeamish to do what's required. It's a bit like at the end of WW2 us allowing the Nazis to carry on living as they want to so long as they don't try to take power again.
It was tricky to establish who exactly was a ideological, fanatical Talib and who was merely a farmer who picked up an ancient AK47 to defend his land and family from what he perceived to be infidel invaders.
It is impossible to defeat guerrillas if they have the support of the local population.
So we decided on a policy of winning hearts and minds, which meant we restrained ourselves in the use of firepower, trying to avoid killing the farmers with ancient AKs, which would not be good for winning hearts and minds, to put it mildly. We tried to do the nice stuff. Healthcare, infrastructure. Throw money around. It didn’t really work.
We perhaps forget that the Taliban had won the civil war. We upended that after 9/11. They never went away and are now obviously resurgent.
Occupying Germany, a modern country with an educated population and good infrastructure, is vastly different to occupying a country like Afghan which is still very much tribal, uneducated and is very, very difficult terrain - poorly connected valleys and deserts.
The desire to get Bin Laden blinded our militaries and politicians to the lessons of Vietnam and the Russian Afghan experience. We cannot impose our systems and values on societies that do not want them.
We went there to keep the terrorists out, not to turn it into Canada.
You keep saying the same thing again and again. ‘We got rid of Al Qaeda, if they return we will re-invade and take them out again.’
With the greatest of respect, that is the most simplistic view. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If we didn’t want to turn it into Canada, why do we spend 20 years there, chucking money at it, trying to build a democracy - and failing?
We did seriously degrade Al Qaeda, for a while at least, so why didn’t we leave when we did that? Why didn’t we leave when Bin Laden was killed?
As Al Qaeda can return
They never went away. Al Qaeda means ‘the base’ - the base of a franchise model. There are innumerable splinter groups who are Al Qaeda by any other name.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Why not? We can identify and arrest those in the West planning terrorist attacks using intelligence services and outside the west we can also bomb any terrorist camps in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where terrorists are being trained to attack the West.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
Yeah, good look with all that. What if people don’t crop up on the intelligence service’s radar, like the 7/7 bombers didn’t?
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
We are at war with international extremist terrorism and have been since 9/11.
Yes, we will not always win it but that does not mean it must be at the top of the intelligence services radar.
Since 9/11 we have had no attacks on the same scale. Even before 9/11 Bin Laden had already attacked the WTO once before in 1993 and US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 well before any invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is nothing illegal about bombing militants training camps except according to the most wet leftists
Hey, you’re a neo-con! I can’t say I admire your blatant disregard for international law, but it’s revealing that you are so sanguine about jettisoning this stuff when it suits. An example of western hypocrisy that plays well with the terrorist recruiters.
No there hasn’t been a big terrorist attack in the west since 9/11. There’s no need. The Islamists are playing the long game, we have shown we lack the stomach to stay in these countries long-term. Job done.
In which case the terrorists will just come to us again, as they were already doing well before 9/11.
Yes I am more of a neo-con than a pacifist on this, international law is made by the UN and the security council, including the UK and US, have vetos on UN action, we make international law along with any treaties we sign
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
That's rather a simplistic attitude. There must be plenty of people who, like me, like driving and enjoy the comfort and convenience of a car, but also recognise the social and environmental damage that they cause and who therefore walk, cycle or use public transport whenever possible.
Cars are superior to public transport in so many ways. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about regressing our standard of living for the sake of it.
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
It's hard to see what point you're trying to make with those statements. Yes, cars are ace for those that can afford them and drive them (including me), but they also have a huge social and environment downside. They are noisy, polluting and deadly, and they require vast amounts of tarmaced land area. It is simply stupid to emphasise the benefits of cars while ignoring their disadvantages.
Outside the centre of big cities, there is no realistic alternative to using cars most of the time.
Sadly that is indeed the case in most parts of the UK. That's because our infrastructure has been developed primarily to suit cars.
In non-urban areas around the world, cars are universally the prime mode of transport.
Public transport is nice but works for moving people from one concentrated location to another.
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
2001 would have been shortly after the Taliban, which was an 1990s invention by some twisted combination of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States (remember them?), had closed all the girls' schools.
That's really not accurate, the mujahideen comprised a wide range of groups backed by many different countries. Some of them later became known as Taliban, but other parts became groups like the Northern Alliance that were fiercely opposed to the Taliban. It was never one movement with one ideology under the control of a foreign coalition.
It's more accurate to say that the groups funded by the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, and Pakistan deposed the interim government and then started a civil war amongst themselves.
It's a bit like the French resistance groups that fought the Germans but themselves ranged from communists to far right groups, but with France there wasn't a civil war as such in the aftermath.
France was a close-run thing. There was genuine fear that France would collapse into civil war, which is why De Gaulle's myth-making about a united France defeating the Nazis was invaluable. More French civilians were killed by their countrymen after the war as collaborators than the Nazis had killed during the occupation. (Not to mention all the collateral damage from D-Day.)
ETA this was shown in the BBC's documentary series, 'Allo 'Allo. Michelle of the Resistance was a De Gaullist (the tall one) and there were occasional run-ins with the Communist Resistance.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
I walk, cycle, take the bus/train or drive depending on the circumstances, and I enjoy all of them. Walking is easy and good for you, and you sometimes meet people; cycling is even better for you, though a bit hairy on UK roads, and you can cover more distance; public transport lets you move around while doing something else, like reading or playing on your phone; and driving is comfortable and convenient, especially when carrying stuff, and can also be fun. I enjoyed motorcycling too (CBX 1000) in my younger days, but I'd struggle to make a case for it now :-)
Variety is the spice of life!
People do all those things as leisure activities. But in terms of getting to and from work, there's no option but using a car for most people, which is regrettable.
I regularly do all of those things as part of my everyday life. Drive to work, cycle to visit nearby relatives, train into the city centre, walk to nearby shops. As I say, I enjoy the convenience of a car, but not every journey has to be by car, and more journeys could be made by other, less environmentally taxing modes of transport if we had the appropriate infrastructure.
Mr. Gate, I'm significantly closer than that to Leeds, but the cost is comparable. And even if everything's quick (in pre-pandemic days, I'm even more reluctant now due to masks) it's still a minimum of an hour and a half and an extra fiver to buy a book. Whereas Amazon has free delivery. It's little wonder high streets were in dire straits even before the plague.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
Cars are essential in rural areas. Looking at a journey that might take me or my other half half an hour in the car would be over 3 hours on public transport, with 5 changes and about an hour walking round with 20+ kilos of feed. And that's just the outward leg.
Absolutely, but if you're in a densely populated city there isn't the room for everyone to travel around the city by car all the time. And you have people who can no longer drive for whatever reason.
There are some people who believe we can do all transport by car, but we're much better off with a diverse mix - which means making it easier to walk and cycle and improving public transport.
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
It's come to mean brown people doing bad things in the last 20 years or so.
Powerful interview with Durrani here from Kandahar, waiting for a knock on the door:
“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”
Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. https://t.co/j6qUPzDkP3
Rory Stewart on R4 this morning was equally devastating about the consequences of the abrupt decision to pull out. As he pointed out, things were being held together by a few thousand troops, and air support, which while costly, represented a fraction of what had previously been spent. The US decision is at least defensible; the manner in which it has been carried out is not.
The Afghan regime deserve some blame too, for utterly failing to plan for the consequences.
"The Afghan regime" .... "utterly failing to plan for the consequences"
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As to pulling out. It is inevitable, for the UK. Do it now or wait until it gets to the roof of the Embassy.
The only way to have changed this result would been to have changed the culture of Afghanistan.
Which, interestingly, is the one thing everyone involved agreed not to do.
The culture of Afghanistan has been changed, significantly. There is a whole generation which has grown up under the US occupation, and a large number of them have had access to education which simply didn't exist prior to that. Though of course other parts of the country had no such thing.
Whether it might have been possible for an Afghan government to consolidate its forces in defensible regions and hold out against the Taliban is pretty well moot now - but they didn't even make the attempt.
The Taliban did not exist before the mid-1990s, let alone run the country. Basically, it was a foreign-financed and armed militia which won what was effectively a low-level civil war after the Soviet invasion and departure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban's_rise_to_power
ETA at least in its urban centres, if not always outside, Afghanistan was a relatively modern, westernised state.
It is true. I spent an interesting evening once with a retired medical missionary who had spent the Sixties and Seventies in Kabul, doing clinics all over the country. It seemed quite a comfortable existence, and while his Christianity was low key, it was not disapproved of.
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
I think the car versus no car polling with social class splits the other day was fascinating. Basically social class was absolutely irrelevant, car versus no car summed up the polling divide perfectly.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
I prefer cycling to a car. It's far easier to engage with the environment I'm travelling through, finding somewhere to park is less of a hassle, I can more easily go past people who are dithering ahead of me.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
Cars are essential in rural areas. Looking at a journey that might take me or my other half half an hour in the car would be over 3 hours on public transport, with 5 changes and about an hour walking round with 20+ kilos of feed. And that's just the outward leg.
Cars are essential in rural areas covering about 15% of the population. If the other 85% of the population don't have an adequate public transport service, the problem is with the public transport system, not people being anti-car.
Without a car Mrs C & I would have to significantly rejig our social lives for the worse. There are only two larger nearby towns to which I can go by bus, East and West. To go to the populations centres, North and South requires two buses or bus and train. And before anyone suggests going by bike, sadly that's not an option for me any more, and never really was for my wife.
I'm just reading one of the DCI Banks books, 'Past Reason Hated', written in 1991. Some major characters in it are lesbian, and the attitude of the other characters towards them would be totally unacceptable nowadays - even in Yorkshire.
Societal attitudes can change very rapidly, as can concepts of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, or even 'good' and 'evil'. And the movement may not always be in directions we currently see as being positive.
Very true. I really like the Peter Robinson DCI Banks series, and it's done a decent job of plotting changes in attitudes over the years, even though the central character remains mostly unchanged as the world develops around him.
You might like Susie Steiner's books like Missing, Presumed too (though sadly there may be no more as she's gone blind). The first was about Yorkshire farmers; the later ones crime novels with some social observation and interestingly nuanced characters (though the last one, Remain Silent, was a bit too political even for me).
LD gain in Inverness West of Highland UA. They were behind the SNP on 1st preferences but won on transfers. In the North Ayrshire seat the Conservatives got 2016 ( winning on 1st preferences) compared to 1137 last time ( but then there were also 990 votes for an Ind who used to be a Conservative councillor).
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
The definition that makes sense is - was the action is personal or designed to inspire terror and reaction in the wider community?
In this case we don't know what the motive was yet.
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
It's come to mean brown people doing bad things in the last 20 years or so.
Quite a few white people arrested and sentenced for terrorism over the last few years.
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
It's come to mean brown people doing bad things in the last 20 years or so.
I disagree, actually. What they're saying is that the victims were known to the killer.
To be honest, quite why anyone would have thought such an incident might be anything other than a domestic incident, I don't know.
I personally think it’s a waste of the 450 British deaths to let Kabul fall to the Taliban again but it’s too late now. There’s no appetite for war in the west.
There were those who said the same of the 58,000 Americans (plus 5,100 South Koreans and 500 Australians) killed in Vietnam.
Ultimately, the question is not whether it was right to withdraw (a rare time I find myself in agreement with Donald Trump) because if after 20 years the Taleban had not been beaten they were never going to be. Sadly, the question is was it ever worth it in the first place?
And whatever we as a country and the families of the soldiers lost the Afghan people, particularly as @Cyclefree notes Afghan women, have lost and will lose a great deal more.
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
It's come to mean brown people doing bad things in the last 20 years or so.
I disagree, actually. What they're saying is that the victims were known to the killer.
To be honest, quite why anyone would have thought such an incident might be anything other than a domestic incident, I don't know.
It might have been a spree killing (see the US), or it might have been a terrorist attack (see NZ)
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
Why do labels matter? Every time something like this happens there's a big debate over whether to classify it as terrorism or not, but I don't see the point of the discussion.
I'm just reading one of the DCI Banks books, 'Past Reason Hated', written in 1991. Some major characters in it are lesbian, and the attitude of the other characters towards them would be totally unacceptable nowadays - even in Yorkshire.
Societal attitudes can change very rapidly, as can concepts of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, or even 'good' and 'evil'. And the movement may not always be in directions we currently see as being positive.
Very true. I really like the Peter Robinson DCI Banks series, and it's done a decent job of plotting changes in attitudes over the years, even though the central character remains mostly unchanged as the world develops around him.
You might like Susie Steiner's books like Missing, Presumed too (though sadly there may be no more as she's gone blind). The first was about Yorkshire farmers; the later ones crime novels with some social observation and interestingly nuanced characters (though the last one, Remain Silent, was a bit too political even for me).
Read a Raymond Chandler the other day, for a book group to which I belong. The sexism and homophobia would get the book refused by any publisher today, or at least would require considerable revision before publication
Comments
And Bin Laden wasn't even there when killed.
People do change though. Mao's Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution are now in their seventies, and have changed China beyond recognition, just not in the way that they originally thought.
Yawn.....
Not convinced a one size Central government can hold such a diverse country together. Whether they are foreign backed or the Taliban.
Bush removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Obama completed the job by sending special forces into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden.
Even IS have now been almost completely eliminated in Syria and Iraq.
It is Biden who has withdrawn US troops, it is Biden who is responsible if the Taliban recapture Kabul and it is Biden who is responsible if terrorists return to the country and launch further attacks on western cities.
This failure will be entirely at the door of the Biden-Harris administration
As the credits rolled my wife went to get her new board game out coincidentally just as my daughter said "its a good thing that game isn't real" - she then saw her mummy holding the game and screamed and ran up the stairs to her room.
May sound like a cruel practical joke, but it wasn't intended that way. She could laugh about it afterwards.
Killing Bin Laden over a decade later didn't "finish the job", since the rest of them survived.
If as you ignorantly pretend the training camps were eliminated then why aren't the Taliban fighting today untrained amateurs easily defeated by an Afghan army with two decades of western training?
The disconnect between the middle classes and the blue collar workers outside the big cities is a world wide phenomenon. I don't think this is snobbery, more lack of interest, and that is mutual. What fascinates and obsesses one is thought dull or irrelevant by the other. I think Brexit has increased this, as the Remainers that I know simply ignore Brexit and the Brexiteers as far as they can. If the folk of Hartlepool dislike what I value, then I see no reason to listen to them.
However, if landline use anti-correlates say with being a citizen of nowhere, then it's possible this wouldn't be corrected for in the construction of the sample, and that might introduce a systematic bias.
Another measure.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26747712
In 2001 no girls attended formal schools and there were only one million boys enrolled. By 2012 the World Bank says there were 7.8 million pupils attending school - including about 2.9 million girls.
Incidentally, AIUI, the Taliban originally received substantial funding for the CIA and from a shadowy 'Christian' Texan organisation which regarded opposition to 'Communism' as more important than religious affiliation.
The training camps was an issue with Al Qaeda, it was just the Taliban allowed them when they were in control.
The Taliban were never eliminated but pushed out of most of the country and with just a small presence left in their heartlands.
All that could now be reversed due to the Biden-Harris withdrawal
Plenty of countries with a dictatorial regime had a cosmopolitan capital surrounded by relatively unchanged broader culture - Iran comes to mind.
Get rid of the dictatorship and guess what?
Another major factor in all this was the Islamic revival - as the various attempts at modernisation/socialism failed in various countries, religion moved into the void formed.
Bin Laden established a set of ideas, an approach, that anyone can take up. For example all the self radicalised bombers who’ve carried out attacks in the West with no direct contact with Al Qaeda. We can’t bomb everyone, across the globe, who subscribes to Bin Laden’s propaganda, who may carry out a terrorist attack.
Which probably reflects the city versus provincial split.
To me cars represent the very best of transportation. Personal, individual, on demand, can be personalised, can be controlled etc.
For others cars are the worst form of transportation and they'd rather get on trains commuting with other people (shudder) on preset routes.
Is there any surprise that car drivers are more likely to be individualists and train commuters collectivists?
Thankfully like with Brexit, the car is king in marginal seats.
Otherwise we will get future 9/11s and more 7/7s again
It would do far more societal damage to make cars unaffordable for the majority.
That some so-called "progressives" seek to make the most superior form of transport the preserve of the rich, rather than everyone, is completely regressive.
These new HGV drivers we are desperately training to make up the post-Brexit, post-Covid, post-IR35 shortfall – MI5 is monitoring them all, to make sure none of them will drive their lorries into crowds of people like in Nice on Bastille Day, when 84 were killed, or is it?
I just don't buy into their values, and shall continue to live a cosmopolitan internationalist, and specifically European lifestyle.
The car is useful when there's something large to bring back from Ikea though.
How different demographics vote is interesting. Especially for a site that aims to shape how people bet on how people vote. We don't all agree on what the data means, but "yawn"?
If everyone was you and thought like you then how would you plan to make money betting on politics?
The point was it was a remote endless war between the Taliban and warlords led by Massoud from 1995 until 2001.
On 9/11 however it no longer was a remote endless war, it was a war that had just come to the streets of NYC, collapsed the World Trade Centre, destroyed part of the Pentagon and killed over 3,000 mainly western citizens in a western city.
Even if we pull out completely the war on terror will not go away, it will just be on pause until the next bomb or attack in a western city restarts it again
Are we going to continue to ignore international law and national boundaries and bomb wherever we want illegally, thus increasing resentment of the west and being a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda and it’s offshoots?
And you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main aims of 9/11. It was to provoke the west into unwinnable wars in Muslim countries, to demonstrate that the west is ‘weak’, that its populations will not tolerate the demands on blood and treasure that are needed to fight and win sustainably, in the long term, in Muslim lands.
What happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan currently demonstrate the accuracy of Bin Laden’s hypothesis.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/55023766
Yes, we will not always win it but that does not mean it must be at the top of the intelligence services radar.
Since 9/11 we have had no attacks on the same scale. Even before 9/11 Bin Laden had already attacked the WTO once before in 1993 and US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 well before any invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
You don't reason with Al Qaeda and IS by appeasement, IS literally has a goal to make lands as far as Spain and Greece and the Balkans into Islamic states governed by Sharia law
https://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/self-declared-states-geopolitics/islamic-states-aspirational-map/attachment/future-islamic-state-map
There is nothing illegal about bombing militants training camps except according to the most wet leftists
Variety is the spice of life!
Have a good day all.
Most people, though, start with some assumptions and are influenced by their friends - if I was at uni and a friend said "I thought I'd look into neo-Nazism" I'd certainly tell him not to be an idiot, and no doubt less extreme examples of peer pressure abound.
It would be helpful, but difficult, to have a general "critical idea processing" course for all students, which trained them in processing assertions that they hear and asking questions like "Can you point me to websites both supporting and opposing what you're saying, so I can compare the arguments? The problem in such a course would be to give practical examples without straying into bias - for example, although I think that people who deny climate change are bonkers, I'd hesitate to have a course exemplifying climate change deniers as the sort of group seeking to brainwash students.
It's more accurate to say that the groups funded by the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, and Pakistan deposed the interim government and then started a civil war amongst themselves.
It's a bit like the French resistance groups that fought the Germans but themselves ranged from communists to far right groups, but with France there wasn't a civil war as such in the aftermath.
The problem is how do you tackle an evil like unreformed Islam? Christianity went through centuries of blood and turmoil in its Reformation and the problem is that the "extreme" orthodox Islam as promoted by the Saudis and Iranians and others is utterly unreformed and to be frank from a modern perspective pretty backwards and evil.
Which is not to say all Islam is. Most Islamic people are absolutely not Wahhabists or the like but for those that are - for whom Jihad means what they interpret it to mean - I don't see any simple solution to that.
Recognising that Saudi Arabia is our enemy and not our friend in that fight is a first step to take. We quite rightly call out unreformed, extremist, intolerant Christian groups but we don't do the same anywhere near enough for unreformed, extremist, intolerant Islam.
Brilliant they are.
"Anderson makes the case that the CIA’s obsession with covert operations, which when successful (as in Iran and Guatemala) garnered both kudos and bigger budgets, coincided with the neglect of intelligence-gathering. The CIA failed to foresee the Soviet atom bomb in 1949, North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, China’s crossing of the Yalu River later that year, the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, popular support in Cuba for Fidel Castro on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968, Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran, Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990. This is not to mention the 9/11 attacks, which had the perverse effect of revitalising the CIA while it was floundering without a credible enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many of those involved in the founding of the CIA rued what they had done. ‘Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t report on wars and the like,’ Truman said, ‘they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on.’ Scores of former agents have exposed CIA crimes and defeats in books, films and articles. In the wake of American humiliation in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, Senate and House investigations documented CIA malfeasance at home and overseas that involved both violations of federal law and the agency’s own charter. Yet no matter how outlandish its schemes and plots, the CIA goes on and on and on, just like Fleming’s 007 franchise."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n16/charles-glass/hush-hush-boom-boom
No there hasn’t been a big terrorist attack in the west since 9/11. There’s no need. The Islamists are playing the long game, we have shown we lack the stomach to stay in these countries long-term. Job done.
Much as with Assad they may not be allies but they are better than the really extremist militants who would take over if they fell
Yes I am more of a neo-con than a pacifist on this, international law is made by the UN and the security council, including the UK and US, have vetos on UN action, we make international law along with any treaties we sign
Public transport is nice but works for moving people from one concentrated location to another.
https://twitter.com/Fhamiltontimes/status/1426133407768190977
Police tell me Jake Davison had a firearm licence but they do not know if he had a licence for the weapon he used last night. They reiterate that they have ruled out terrorism, despite the gunman’s apparent affiliation with the online group Incel.
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1426134125988175875
We need a better definition of "terrorism"
ETA this was shown in the BBC's documentary series, 'Allo 'Allo. Michelle of the Resistance was a De Gaullist (the tall one) and there were occasional run-ins with the Communist Resistance.
There are some people who believe we can do all transport by car, but we're much better off with a diverse mix - which means making it easier to walk and cycle and improving public transport.
And before anyone suggests going by bike, sadly that's not an option for me any more, and never really was for my wife.
You might like Susie Steiner's books like Missing, Presumed too (though sadly there may be no more as she's gone blind). The first was about Yorkshire farmers; the later ones crime novels with some social observation and interestingly nuanced characters (though the last one, Remain Silent, was a bit too political even for me).
In this case we don't know what the motive was yet.
To be honest, quite why anyone would have thought such an incident might be anything other than a domestic incident, I don't know.
Ultimately, the question is not whether it was right to withdraw (a rare time I find myself in agreement with Donald Trump) because if after 20 years the Taleban had not been beaten they were never going to be. Sadly, the question is was it ever worth it in the first place?
And whatever we as a country and the families of the soldiers lost the Afghan people, particularly as @Cyclefree notes Afghan women, have lost and will lose a great deal more.
How the hell do we stop these kind of things from happening?
Surely we can do a lot more about the availability of guns on the darkweb etc.