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Debt of Honour – politicalbetting.com
Debt of Honour – politicalbetting.com
Films from the 1960’s and 1970’s show Afghan women dressing and behaving much like women in the West. Not all women, of course. As in many countries, older attitudes were found in rural or isolated communities. Changes are never evenly distributed in a country. The same could be said of Iran. It seemed as if emancipation of women and what this meant for their ability to decide for themselves what to do with their lives was happening in countries far away from the West with very different cultural/historical backgrounds. Human rights were indeed universal. Progress was only going one way. Right?
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@AhmadKhan319338
Scene of three Afghans falling from an American plane
Locals say the men were hiding in the tires or fuses of the plane, which fell on the roofs of houses near Hamed Karzai International Airport as it took off.
#ZAWIANEWS #Kabul #SanctionOnPakistan #Afghanistan #Talibans
https://twitter.com/AhmadKhan319338/status/1427183525682352129?s=20
It's like a nightmarish mix of 9/11, Saigon and a climate change disaster movie.
These are searing images, and I just don't see how Biden can polish them away now. They cannot be unseen. But, who knows. Humans move on pretty quickly, probably because we'd go mad if we didn't
Priti Patel really getting the priorities absolutely wrong as usual
*) Who are the current Taliban leadership?
*) What relationship(s) do they have with the previous Taliban leadership, pre-2002?
*) How centralised is their control, particularly over all the provinces? (i.e. if they give orders, will most of the provinces and villages obey, either through loyalty or fear?)
*) Which countries are the current Taliban's paymasters. Pakistan? Russia? Turkey?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kzcLB0b5sQ
It is not just in Afghanistan that progress goes into reverse.
"France has also halted the expulsion of Afghans whose asylum applications have been turned down."
Well yes, one would hope so. I presume the UK has done the same?
(1) There is and there was zero American appetite for further investment in Afghanistan, including amongst Biden's most trenchant critics. A Taliban government for all Afghanistan was the inevitable consequence of that choice.
(2) Everyone, with the possible sole exception of the Taliban themselves, was caught out by the speed of the previous regime's collapse. A lot of the blame-shifting centres on that.
To @Cyclefree's point. Absolutely. We should do what we can do.
The answer to her question is no.
No doubt they'll be hoping to get their hands on some of that US military equipment.
Hong Kong.
https://twitter.com/RoryStewartUK/status/1427021966024876037?s=20
https://www.flightradar24.com/THY6DT/28cd1eca
MacArthur got a lot of criticism when he decided to retain a war criminal, Hirohito, as head of state but in retrospect keeping him and working with the remains of the Japanese central government helped the success of the American occupation of Japan, however hurtful it was to those who had suffered under Japanese militarism in the past.
The abolition of the Iraqi Army in 2003, instead of making use of it, and the complete failure to find any sort of locally acceptable leadership in Afghanistan were what doomed those operations. Back in 2003 I was quite active on the Slate message board. One particularly enthusiastic poster, when faced with the question of what happened after the fall of Baghdad, said “we go in armed with copies of the Federalist Papers and everything else follows”. It was that kind of naivety that doomed military action in both cases. A lack proper, albeit perhaps even more expensive, occupation and rebuilding was what doomed them.
‘Afghanistan: How does the Taliban make money?’ (December 2018)
The group's annual income from 2011 onwards was estimated to be $400m (£316m). But it is believed to have significantly increased in recent years and could be as high as $1.5bn.
Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium.
With an estimated annual export value of $1.5-$3bn, the opium poppy is big business, supplying the overwhelming majority of illicit heroin worldwide.
The head of Afghanistan's Electricity Company told the BBC earlier this year that the Taliban was earning more than $2m a year by billing electricity consumers in different parts of the country.
The mining industry in Afghanistan is worth at least an estimated $1bn.
Foreign funding: Private citizens from Pakistan and several Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are considered the largest individual contributors.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-46554097
https://twitter.com/Daniel_Sugarman/status/1427188629235974150
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Aug 9
Contrary to tropes about Brexit Britain being an intolerant outlier on the globe stage, the Brits are much less hostile toward immigration than many other developed nations and have become even less so since Brexit
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1424719512650371078
I am so ashamed of my country? There are times when we should just bloody try to do the right thing. This is one of those times.
The Biden-Harris disaster and capitulation has not only as the article sets out set back womens' rights and freedoms dramatically in Afghanistan it has also reopened a hornets net of potential Jihadi militancy heading for our shores
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1427192351810887681?s=20
10k, 100k, a million, more ?
And how are you going to integrate this multitude from an Islamic fundamentalist failed state into this country ?
A slightly more positive sign today is that the Taliban seem quite keen to get international recognition from states like China, Pakistan, and Turkey. There is some streak of pragmatism going on so far that doesn't seem to have been there before. This may be the key reason why they are leaving the foreigners, and others, alone, thus far, and have allowed them to leave peacefully so far.
If the majority of Afghans at this moment in fact support some sort of ancient way of running society, including about the nonrights and oppression of women and girls, then it is game over. They have what they want. And we would know, yet again, that the world bears little relation to the BBC's and Guardian's take on it.
If however a small minority are oppressing a majority, (the standard way of reporting this in the west) then how much longer than 20 years does it take to realise from history that freedoms and liberties are hard won, and have to be defended by massive force of arms and policed by strong civilian forces. No other country is under an obligation to win freedoms for another.
In the last few days an elected government and state army and police has faced a May 1940 situation, for which they had prior warning and 20 years to organise for. The principle failure belongs there and nowhere else.
https://joebiden.com/joes-codes/
Still, congratulations. For the last few threads you've been on and on about how we should have stayed in the country to stop it turning into a haven for terrorists and now without missing a beat you accuse those who were working to turn the country into a civilised non-terrorist state of being potential or actual terrorists.
Let me put a human face to the people I am talking about. Here - a woman, a journalist, a single mother with 2 daughters: https://twitter.com/samirashackle/status/1427039953796665345?s=21.
Kudos to Blair and Bush for their swift actions in 2001 in removing the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Just so sad Biden has withdrawn and handed it back to them on a plate and disappointed Boris has not stood up to Biden more on this too
There is then going to be a very, very large subset of Afghan society who were connected to the regime in some way, amounting to millions of people, who will be subject to kafkaesque vagaries of the international asylum system if they manage to get out. I would guess that these are the people who are stuck at the airport now, or have already got out on some kind of temporary visa. Unless they have access to some kind of significant financial resource, they will be stuck in limbo for many years, and potentially subject to all kinds of nightmareish realities as they try and navigate passage to safe countries whilst being effectively stateless. If you are used to a comfortable middle class life, as we all are, it may well be a fate worse than death. Certainly, life under the taliban might not seem too bad in comparison, if they let you live.
Reading this website, the same people who are saying that 'we need to sort out the problems in the channel' then react to events like this and declare that we need to immediately grant asylum to X people (artists/human rights activists/ women/ children etc etc). It is an understandable reaction but is one that poses a simple answer to an intractable problem.
We should recognise that we can't save the world and start to see problem as an essentially intractible one. This way we are more likely to come up with better and more realistic ideas about how to deal with the large numbers of people fleeing war zones and brutal regimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_(novel)
If we ignore the fact that Scotland currently has a queen, Elizabeth I, then the last queen of an independent Scotland was not Mary I (1542-1567), but Anne (reign 1702-1714).
And of course Mary, also briefly Queen of France, was a Catholic whereas Elisabeth was a Protestant. The English Reformation was in 1532-34 whereas the Scottish Reformation was much later, 1557-60.
And the papal visit has zilch to do with how many catholics a country has. The pope visits places where fractions of a percent are catholic and also the opposite extreme.
If we ignore the fact that Scotland currently has a queen, Elizabeth I, then the last queen of an independent Scotland was not Mary I (1542-1567), but Anne (reign 1702-1714).
And of course Mary, also briefly Queen of France, was a Catholic whereas Elisabeth was a Protestant. The English Reformation was in 1532-34 whereas the Scottish Reformation was much later, 1557-60.
And the papal visit has zilch to do with how many catholics a country has. The pope visits places where fractions of a percent are catholic and also the opposite extreme.'
Anne was Queen of England and Scotland, does not count. Mary Queen of Scots was Queen of Scotland alone (apart from 1 year when she was Queen of France by marriage). I have also not noticed Elizabeth 1st rising from the dead to take the place of our current Queen Elizabeth IInd?
The Pope obviously makes more visits to majority Catholic areas, hence he makes far more visits to Ireland, Latin America, Poland and the Philippines than he does to Northern Ireland, the southern and Eastern USA, India, Saudi Arabia and Japan
We keep saying that the reason we don't want fit young men in boats from France is because that stops us helping genuine refugees. Well, now we have a chance to help some of those genuine refugees and once again we hear excuses for why we can't help these ones either.
"To give a small sense of the nightmare unfolding for Afghans: weeks ago, my friend in Kabul, a female TV journalist and single mother of two, asked me to help her find info about legal routes out of the country."
https://twitter.com/samirashackle/status/1427039953796665345?s=20
Hence the very modern, very progressive types reaching for any kind of nonsense they can invest their religious instincts in.
https://order-order.com/2021/08/16/watch-ben-wallace-reduced-to-tears-over-afghanistan/
It's a pretty long road from Guru Nanak or Julian of Norwich to chucking your opponents off a cliff.
https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores
They were rather upset to be told that they (the leftists) were counted as part of "The West"
Most of the people we used were employed by third parties - in my world, given their jobs I believe they should be brought into the UK, but I suspect you would use that technicality to rule them out.
Incidentally, it has generally been quite a short road from "Be nice to other people" to "Set all the heretics on fire"
The sudden disintegration (collapse is too weak a word) of the Ghani Government is an object lesson in the notion you can give anyone the means to fight and defend their homeland but what they have to provide is the will.
Have mistakes been made? Yes, though it's worth re-iterating it was the Trump Administration which instigated talks with the Taliban and the Trump Administration which signed the Doha Treaty and committed to a 14-month withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Still, much easier to kick the current occupant of the White House especially by those for whom it must have been really hard to see Biden and the Democrats win last November.
None of this matters.
The salient questions are how and why did a seemingly well-equipped army simply fall apart? Cities like Jalalabad, Mazar-E-Sharif and even Kabul fell without a shot fired in their defence. The Afghan Air Force seems to have been non-existent. For what reason were the supporters of Ghani completely incapable of defending their State?
The truth is we failed to inculcate any sense of legitimacy in and support for the Karzai and Ghani Governments. Both were, I strongly suspect, riddled with corruption and I suspect those leaders fleeing the country didn't go empty handed. As happened in South Vietnam, we propped up an endemically venal Government and once it came to a fight, those with the money and means ran to their pre-prepared exile and left the people to face the tender mercies of the Taliban.
We must have known of the corruption and presumably we tolerated it. We also know Afghanistan's relevance to the world in terms of the supply of drugs but our "war" against drugs is, it seems, as riddled with failure as our attempts to keep the Taliban out of Kabul.
And yet it's so much easier to kick Joe Biden (with a few snide digs at Kamala Harris) than to address twenty years of endemic, systemic and cultural failure.
Though to compare the Taliban to the Wehrmacht is rather unfair on von Rundstedt etc.
How many 'proper' soldiers would have been required to stop the Taliban ?
Somewhere between 10k and 100k at a guess.
But I doubt the Afghan 'army' has as many as 1k.
Yes its absurd, but so is the whole concept of an offshore gulag. Yet it has supporters on here. So why not Afghanistan? A purpose built facility has just become available, and it is right next to a long runway.
I had some knowledge of a large family of wealthy and educated Syrians who were put in to vacant public housing in an idyllic Scandinavian fishing village a few years ago. They quickly got frustrated with the lot they had been dealt with and refused to do the low paid jobs they were offered. They were eventually despised by the local community - They hung around spitting at the bus stop. Its just a few steps from that to radicalisation, particularly amongst the younger generation.
As to the length of the road; disagree. The number of people in my town who think you should be nice to other people is disproportionately large in comparison with the number of the same group who set fire to heretics.
As usual, a good and sensible header. But you feel the result was always predictable in Afghanistan. Imperialism is a dirty word but surely the relevant one when you try to change the mindset of another country to suit your own liberal beliefs?
Exactly what the Victorians tried to do in Africa, when conditions were different. And that was a sin only when you disagreed with the Victorian's old-fashioned views.
When I was a lad, the hard left used to accuse the Americans of trying to be the 'policemen of the world', exporting their culture and ideas globally. This was despite the communists doing exactly that. Are the liberals now becoming the bullies? I would support Afghanistan becoming a more liberal society, but I don't live there. In the end, they will decide. As Mr Algarkirk says, and a yellowbelly must be correct, no other country is under any obligation to win 'freedom' for another.
PS Yellowbelly refers to Algarkirk.
Personally I would have kept troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, it was always too risky to believe the elected Afghan government would be able and strong enough to defend itself alone.
As it is Biden-Harris have capitulated and withdrawn with their tails between their legs and they will be responsible if terrorists return en masse to Afghanistan and 9/11 2 happens on their watch.
That does not mean I have much time for Trump on this either, as I said Bush, McCain and indeed Romney were far better on this
Firstly, Anne, was by the Grace of God, Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.
How does being a monarch over several countries not make you monarch of one of them? Was Cnut the Great somehow not King of England, just because he was also King of Denmark and Norway?
There have been hundreds of personal unions in Europe. Being monarch of more than one place doesn’t invalidate your title. Ask HM Elisabeth I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_union
And Scotland has only ever had one Queen Elisabeth, the current one.
Does someone who worked for the British Council for a few weeks a decade ago count as being worthy of asylum ?
How about someone who worked many years for the British embassy but has now defected to the Taliban - do they have a right to asylum in the UK ?
Do we set definitions or numbers or whatever ?
Its easy to say take 'as many as possible' on the internet but real life is different.
This is because of the long process of creating a liberal, social democratic society. This took hundreds of years and involved alot of dead people along the way. And a vast expenditure of treasure.
Freedom isn't Free, as they said in Team America.
The idea of such tolerance is unthinkable and unfathomable to many in this world.