Afghanistan

The photos are horrendous. As are the reports, with professionals like Lyse Doucet conveying the terror sweeping through friends and ex-colleagues, as they contemplate the future of Afghanistan. It’s easy to assume that Biden has got it wrong, but if Trump was there he’d be doing very much the same, and in strictly rational terms it’s easy enough to understand. What exactly was the plan? How were we ever supposed to go, being happy with what we’d leave behind? For those of us old enough to remember twenty years ago, it’s no consolation to say “we told you so”, but we did, loudly and often. All the way through, there have been rational voices warning that this was a mistake, that it hadn’t been clearly thought through, and that it was likely to end badly. So here we are, and it’s ending badly. And what that does o how we look to the rest of the world is not hard to work out - why should they believe anything we say, ever again? For those with poetic tastes, there’s a new poem, Afghan Sunset, at another part of this website, Poems from the News.