The fact is this was Trump's withdrawal. Admittedly it seems to have been handled disastrously by Biden, but who's to say it would have been different under Trump. The unforeseen element seems to have been the utter capitulation of Afghan government forces, giving no time for an orderly withdrawal. Trump releasing 5,000 imprisoned Taliban fighters won't have helped in this regard, though.
Biden agrees with Trump in that it's not America's job to be the world's policeman. He stood on the platform of carrying out Trump's withdrawal, so this shouldn't have been a surprise. He will be judged by the US electorate on the success or otherwise of his domestic policies - with which he seems to be doing rather well - not foreign policy.
Oh, and Biden looked at his watch - really? Trump refused to go to a memorial for fallen servicemen because he thought they were 'losers'.
It’s a tallest dwarf battle between Trump and Biden and I don’t really care about the winner.
But my Democrat friends in the US tell me that Biden is proving pretty poor all round, and Harris as VP even worse. COVID is just about completely out of control, inflation is rising sharply and hundreds of thousand of immigrants are entering the country illegally (supposedly Harris’ special brief’). Lots of resignations from the core teams, especially Harris’, who is apparently something of a bully and not very talented. As we know, this does not in any way damage her credentials to be the next president.
But we should be grateful to Biden, he deflects away from the sharp exposure of the true dimensions of ‘sovereign, independent, world player’ Great Britain and the way we have had to meekly follow nasty Joe’s lead. Seems only a few ex military Tory MPs want to make an issue of our culpability, and I salute them for it.
Meanwhile lots of weird empty threats/promises from Johnson and Raab to the Taliban - you’d better not harbour terrorists or……we’ll ask the Yanks to drone attack you? We won’t let you have an embassy in the U.K.? Chinese burn? Flicked with a wet towel? Gang raped by Old Etonians?
Raab busy with his usual bollocks this morning. Apparently there are some British citizens left in Afghanistan but ‘only in the low hundreds’. So that’s ok then. Government last week said about 250 citizens and a thousand others who have strong links to the U.K.s activities in the country and are therefore at risk from the Taliban are still there. Other sources, like the agencies that employed these people, put the figure at 7 to 9,000. Dom is still pondering the strategy to get them out, other than asking the Taliban nicely.
He also, rather casually, threw the intelligence services under the bus, saying that there was no intel predicting the rapid collapse of the Afghan military. Although others have claimed that Biden simply ignored strong advice that this would happen. So either we don’t share intelligence with the US, or our intelligence was just ****, or Raab is lying. None of which are great options.
Finally he had a quick windmill at those who have criticised his and the Foreign Office’s handling of this farce. Much of this criticism has come from within government, notably the Ministry of Defence. Raab reckons that the critics weren’t credible as they only had a ‘peripheral’ role in what was going on. Strange that, I thought the 18 year old soldiers who ended up processing evacuees at the airport worked for the MoD. The Foreign Office had got its staff (you know, the ones who are ‘skilled’ at processing visas) out as quickly as possible, the ambassador apparently had to be told to stay in Kabul.
Above all Dom didn’t spend any time on the beach during this episode. Honest.
