Afghanistan Crisis

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

Given Pen offered his thanks to British military personnel at the time for assisting with the evacuation he was either lying then or he's lying now. Either way he can f**k off and I hope he gets fleas from his dogs

[Detournement]

Is all the dog stuff not a dead cat to deflect attention from this which is the real story?

[Detournement]

The fact that this exact attack was announced as imminent in the media hours before it occured is utterly bizarre.  

[Sergeant Wilson]

Shambles, chaos, incompetent...

I don't believe a word of that. Here we footage of part of the controlled evacuation.

 

[Melanius Mullarkey]

2 minutes ago, Sergeant Wilson said:

Shambles, chaos, incompetent...

I thought you’d posted your CV there for a minute.

Was expecting the weaknesses section next.

[Sergeant Wilson]

2 minutes ago, Melanius Mullarkey said:

I thought you’d posted your CV there for a minute.

Was expecting the weaknesses section next.

I cut and pasted it from my appraisal.

[Florentine_Pogen]

3 hours ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:

Given Pen offered his thanks to British military personnel at the time for assisting with the evacuation he was either lying then or he's lying now. Either way he can f**k off and I hope he gets fleas from his dogs

Leaked letter suggests FCDO covering up PM's involvement in dog airlift from Kabul, MP claims

In the foreign affairs committee, as the session was drawing to an end, Chris Bryant (Lab) said that he had just been sent a copy of a letter that Trudy Harrison MP, the parliamentary private secretary to Boris Johnson, sent to Paul “Pen” Farthing about the evactuation of his animals from Kabul. It was sent on 25 August, Bryant said. He said Harrison was writing as PPS to the PM, and she said:

Dear Paul,

I’m writing to inform you that I have received confirmation from the FCDO, the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence that you, your staff and their dependents are permitted to travel to Hamad Karzai international airport.

Bryant said: “Feels very much like a direction from the prime minister to me, I have to say.”

He went on to read more from Harrison’s letter.

The secretary of state has made it clear that all 68 persons will be provided a flight by the Royal Air Force as part of the evacuation programme. The secretary of state has also confirmed that animals under the care of Nowzad can be evacuated on a separate chartered flight. The Minister of Defence will ensure that a flight is available.

Bryant said this did not equate with what the officials said earlier in the hearing, when they denied any knowledge of No 10 being involved in allowing the animals to be evacuated.

Sir Philip Barton, head of the Foreign Office, told Bryant he was not aware of this. He said they had not set out to mislead the MPs.

Bryant said the letter implied that “the prime minister’s fingers are all over this”. He went on: “And you are just - I’m hesitant to use the words cover up, but that what it feels like.”

There was silence for a short moment, before Barton said again: “I wasn’t aware of the letter.”

Bryant replied:

Again, it feels like nobody’s ever aware of anything, anything could happen at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the senior management, really, are a bit absent.

Barton did not reply.

[Detournement]

Remember when people cared about Afghans?

[101]

21 minutes ago, Detournement said:

Remember when people cared about Afghans?

Did anyone really care about them? Don't think we cared for them when we first went in and we just scooped as many of our staff out.

[Detournement]

9 minutes ago, 101 said:

Did anyone really care about them? Don't think we cared for them when we first went in and we just scooped as many of our staff out.

Look back in the thread.

There were quite a lot of heroes worried about Afghans particularly women and girls. 

Edited December 22, 2021 by Detournement

[Detournement]

On 18/08/2021 at 15:18, Ad Lib said:

Insisting that the Afghan state doesn't sanction the forced marriage, rape, stoning and beheading of women and girls (and others) isn't "imposing Western values" and it's incredibly fucking racist for you to imply that the values of people not from the West are somehow innately presdisposed to that. You are in effect pretending that there are no Muslim majority countries or nations where these things are wrong and condemned.

The values of the Taliban are out of step not just with substantial parts of the Western world, but also most of the societies elsewhere on the planet in the second half of the 20th, let alone in the 21st, century.

No of course not. The way the Taliban treats LGBT people, for example, is every bit as despicable as the way it treats women.

Thank you for helping to identify yet another group that has benefited tremendously from not being governed (in Kabul and other provincial capitals) by the Taliban for 20 years.

The NATO nations have overwhelmingly spent more money and shed more of their own soldiers' blood fighting and supporting the Afghan army than they could ever hope to have made in energy contracts and reconstruction.

I agree with you that NATO for the most part was unsuccessful in helping those outside Kabul and a handful of other provincial capitals.

But for years they also haven't been in those parts of Afghanistan. So they're not really "withdrawing" from there are they?

Good thing no one is suggesting this then, is it? Except of course most of those refugees are seeking refuge... because we withdrew.

And many of those deaths were at the hands of the Taliban or were themselves civilian supporters of the Taliban who oppressed women and girls.

It is not racist to call the Taliban theocratic savages.

They are. They forcibly marry, rape, stone and behead women and girls, deny them the vote, deny them positions of political power, force them to wear certain clothes and more. All in the name of a barbaric legal system founded upon a religious code conceived a millennium or so ago.

It would be like us imposing the letter of Leviticus.

This is just a completely empty assertion, lacking in any factual underpinning.

But let's assume you're right, and the financial gains of the occupation outweigh the astronomical military and aid cost that has gone into it in the past 20 years. Why on earth would they pull out of Afghanistan just when those sources of revenue were starting to bear fruit? That makes absolutely no strategic sense, even selfishly.

The more plausible explanation is that the operation does not have at its heart a profit motive.

The American constitution literally provides for the separation of Church and state.

Both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson treat women appallingly. That is not in dispute. By any reasonable standards, we in this country should (and I do) condemn their track records, judged against any standards.

But neither of them have, as far as I can tell, used a religious justification for forcing girls to get married when they've barely hit puberty. Neither of them has advocated or used state power to stone or behead anyone. Neither of them has tried to tell women that they cannot show their nose and mouth in public (in Boris' case, slightly disgustingly, he has done the opposite by comparing burqas to letterboxes).

Their appalling records on women's and LGBT rights are not even remotely comparable to those who throw gay people off towerblocks tied to chairs. And you know that just as well as I do.

Except I didn't say "and live in a country that won't fight back". I explained very clearly that no military intervention in Saudi Arabia or China would have any reasonable prospect of success, even in pockets of populations (as in Kabul).

You don't do things that would be demonstrably futile and counter-productive to your objectives and values. Staying in Afghanistan would be better for millions of women and girls in Kabul and other provincial capitals. There are precisely zero military intervention strategies that would improve the lives of a single person in Saudi Arabia or China.

That is not to endorse the West's accommodation of and cooperation with Saudi Arabia. Quite the opposite. It is simply a recognition that if your priorities and values are the upholding of human rights, some military interventions advance them whereas others actively hinder them.

And now the government that he works for is starving Afghan women and girls.

Possibly too busy seat sniffing Laura K to care. 

[Ad Lib]

33 minutes ago, Detournement said:

And now the government that he works for is starving Afghan women and girls.

I don't work for the Government. My job is quite literally to provide the opposition and backbenchers with information with which they can scrutinise and hold to account what the Government does.

You're giving it big licks like you've hit a strike but your bowling ball is in the gutter of three lanes left of your own.

[NotThePars]

I feel like there's been at least three Mail front pages blaming wfh civil servants for British personnel dying during the evacuation. I definitely saw one a couple of weeks ago.

[Sergeant Wilson]

1 minute ago, NotThePars said:

I feel like there's been at least three Mail front pages blaming wfh civil servants for British personnel dying during the evacuation. I definitely saw one a couple of weeks ago.

I'm entitled to a tea break, I can't be there all the time!

[Detournement]

4 minutes ago, Ad Lib said:

I don't work for the Government. My job is quite literally to provide the opposition and backbenchers with information with which they can scrutinise and hold to account what the Government does.

You're giving it big licks like you've hit a strike but your bowling ball is in the gutter of three lanes left of your own.

BBC not a state broadcaster, guy who works in The Palace of Westminster doesn't work for the state. 

I wonder if this logic would work for Afghan institutions trying to evade sanctions?

[Ad Lib]

15 minutes ago, Detournement said:

BBC not a state broadcaster, guy who works in The Palace of Westminster doesn't work for the state.

You said "the government [Ad Lib] works for" not "the state [Ad Lib] works for".

I am no more morally or practically responsible for the foreign policy of the UK Government than you are. Just as public servants who worked for the National Assembly of Afghanistan bear no more moral culpability for the rise of the Taliban than the average 12 year old girl in Kabul.

15 minutes ago, Detournement said:

I wonder if this logic would work for Afghan institutions trying to evade sanctions?

Whether or not you support sanctions, the justification that Western countries offer is not that ordinary Afghan functionaries are morally culpable for what the Taliban does. Their argument is a utilitarian one: that it is impossible to influence the Taliban's behaviour without rendering parts of Afghan civil society non or less functional.

If you think it is necessary to cripple the House of Commons Library in order to change the foreign policy of this Government, good luck to you. But in adopting that position you'll look like a fucking moron.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Ad Lib

[Detournement]

Do you support sanctions?

[Ad Lib]

23 minutes ago, Detournement said:

Do you support sanctions?

In principle I support the use of sanctions against tyrannical regimes, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.

On the specifics, I think the sanctions that have in fact been imposed on Afghanistan do not strike the right balance, and unduly restrict the availability of international aid. Several Western Governments appear to be coming around to that position, and have acknowledged their previous approach got it wrong.

[Detournement]

Congratulations on being marginally on the correct side of the argument. 

Sanctions on under developed nations are always a cruel and murderous collective punishment on the ordinary people.

[welshbairn]

53 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

I feel like there's been at least three Mail front pages blaming wfh civil servants for British personnel dying during the evacuation. I definitely saw one a couple of weeks ago.

The Foreign Office civil servants dealing with it were told to leave what ever they were doing to read the the 10's of thousands of emails they were getting from people asking for help, not so they could do anything about it but so their bosses could honestly say they'd been read.