Member-only story
There is no flag big enough to cover the West’s ignominy in Afghanistan
The encomiums to the courage of the British troops who participated in the Afghan airlift have come thick and fast from a government that has been fighting a desperate rearguard action against the understandable and justifiable criticism it has received throughout this debacle.
While the courage of the troops is inarguable, and rightly acknowledged — and also particularly poignant considering that most of them were either unborn or mere babies when Blair joined Bush’s crusade to Afghanistan in 2001 — the courage of the troops should not be allowed to detract from the ineptitude and incompetence of a Johnson administration which has, since coming to power in 2019, been nothing if not serially crisis and scandal prone.
Whether it be its negligence when it comes to Brexit, Covid, and now Afghanistan, the overriding priority of Boris Johnson and his cabinet has not been to do what is right and in the interests of the majority of UK citizens at any given point, but to ride a wave of post-Brexit jingoism, pushing a right wing populist programme underpinned by anti-migrant and refugee hostility, nativism and base English nationalism.
The Afghan debacle is particularly instructive. A fool’s crusade from inception, when launched by Tony Blair in a fit of the mad messianic Christian fervour which still today consumes the man, it has been responsible for death and suffering in Afghanistan and Iraq on a biblical scale.
Indeed, the claim by Blair and those of his ilk that the West’s two decades long occupation of the country should be considered a success because women were able to go to school and university should be set alongside the proportion of Afghan women killed by the Western bombs and bullets. In this regard, 200,000 dead Afghan civilians tells its own grim story.
Afghanistan was a futile military deployment continued by four of Tony Blair’s successors — Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson — at a cost of 457 British service members killed, thousands more injured, many permanently, and an unquantifiable number left struggling with PTSD and other mental health disorders.
As for the suffering of the Afghan people caused by the presence and actions of British…
