Afghanistan

The media reports about Pen and the animals is the usual stirring negative stuff.

He had organised the flight (paid for privately) to take out his 24 staff and their families (all of which were either British citizens or had Visas organised). The Taliban stopped the bus taking the humans and refused to let them go to the airport but said he could take the animals. Which is what he did. There was no point in not bringing them home. Some of the animals (I think quite a lot but can't be sure) were pets of servicemen and their families.

I listened to the interview with him and with one of the diplomats that had helped organise it. The whole exercise was to get the staff and families out whilst being able to take the animals in the hold of the aircraft. The Taliban, also, wouldn't let him fill the empty seats.

 

James Kirkup says in there that he now believes the report from his MOD sources that no time of officials and servicemen were taken up in facilitating Pen.

He then goes on to criticise how much of our resources taken up by the hue and cry raised during all this publicity (after he agreed none were taken up) when he has devoted a whole page to the matter - and has probably written a lot more in the last week about it.

If reporters didn't bother to report it then nobody's time would have been wasted.

 

Anyone who can look at the situation in Afghanistan and think that Biden has done well or is even fit to be in office should be getting psychiatric help.

There is no way on earth that we (or any other country for that matter) is in a position to be housing all of those displaced from Afghanistan - many of them would have been quite happy to stay in their home country (as is quite right to be honest) if it were safe/stable. That is never going to happen.

This boils down to natural resources, the question is who is going to make use of them first? Is it going to be China, Russia or both?

 

Yes that is the only reason the West was involved. Let's face it there are worse regimes such as N Korea but no country is interested in sorting them out as they have very little in the way of natural resources.

 

I only clicked on the link you gave. He admitted he believed his source and then went on to reiterate what he said before.!

 

It's not what we're getting it's what is there. Rare earth elements I guess is the big one. Essential for new tech, batteries etc which China already made an attempt to corner the market on and came pretty close. It makes China, Russia et al very keen to work with the Taliban and the now no longer westernised government

 

I don't think we can, or at least not without massive bloodshed. There is a theoretical solution, tipped with uranium and plutonium but the collateral damage is simply unthinkable - therefore it is not an actual solution. The problem is, the US went in and our liar-in-chief at the time took us into an illegal war, thus committing and involving us - essentially making it our problem.

Should we be exiting? Almost certainly - but not in the way that we have, and much as people decry this as being a Trump policy, he himself said that it should not be a rapid exit leaving a vacuum.

One train of thought is that China want into Afghanistan for the Lithium and other deposits for battery manufacture - Biden being somewhat cozy with China pulled the plug the way he did to leave things wide open for China.
The other train of thought is that Russia (and Europe) want in as there is a hell of a lot of gas/oil reserves that are completely untapped, and this relates to a pipeline project to run from Europe through Siberia and down to Afghanistan - - the government in place wasn't interested in tapping into these resources, but the Taliban wouldn't give two hoots as long as they got what they wanted which was back into power. Better still, they could be bought off by gifting them equipment and resources that are already there.

Not sure either of those hold much water, but I know for sure that leaving over $60bn of equipment, brand new or in perfect working order and simply walking away whilst knowing that the Taliban would be back in, smells..... and it smells really bad.