Action Stations. It may be the silly season, but we've got the largest military and civil evacuation since Saigon in 1975 and we've also got the BBC to explain what's going on and why. As the nation stared frowningly at its TV sets, the first things our intrepid correspondents had to get right were the scene of the action and who were the bad guys. The first bit should have been easy: Lyse Doucet, being the Beeb's Chief International Correspondent, would surely be on top of that. But Lyse has a voice like a Chinese person trying to speak with an Irish accent, which is putting it kindly. With a whine like finger nails being dragged down a blackboard, she averred from the top of her hotel in the distinctly un-dangerous Abu Dhabi that events were unfolding some place called Gor-bull, which might be in Glasgow. Back at the mother-ship, Mishal Husain essayed that it was in fact Garbool in Arfgarnystarn. Happily, the BBC has its own Arfgarn correspondent (of Pakistani heritage), who definitively pronounced it Karboole.
That settled, the next bit of key info was trickier to grasp: Lyse sounded as if the enemy were the Americans, a view later endorsed by some uneducated buffoon in our very own Foreign Office, where a "senior source" scoffed to the Times that the USA had been late for World Wars I and II and had cocked up everything else ever since. But who were these geezers in beards and tea towels from whom everyone seemed to be fleeing? Mishal thought it was an outfit called the Dallybun. Lyse said it was the Tallybun, but the Beeb's wallah in situ seemed surer it was the Dollybon, a word he repeated about twenty times in every piece to camera.
Sadly however, the BBC no longer really likes to get close to the action to check the veracity of stories on the ground, where reporters such as Martin Bell were once wounded by flying shrapnel in Bosnia and Martin Taylor was nearly lynched by an angry sectarian mob in Belfast. Nor are there authoritative correspondents like Charles Wheeler, David Lomax and Michael Cockerell back at base to explain lucidly and convincingly what on Earth it all means. Now the Beeb is about risk assessments, "threat level" protocols, security and diversity awareness training and Lyse giving her personal "take" on events from a very safe distance, her barnet ludicrously covered by an out-size helmet to protect it from the odd stray bullet fired high into the air by Dollybon celebrating miles away. Standing amidst the peaceful wreckage of helicopters disabled by the departing Americans, Lyse gravely told us that the US would have to live "for a very long time" with the "chaos" they had caused. Tomorrow, she said, 39 million Afghans would wake up in fear of the future. What, all of them?
Yes, it's open season on the USA all right. The Brits are letting it be known that the Americans left them in the lurch, although it now appears that the UK's embassy staff bailed out before nearly anyone else, and had to be ordered back to their posts where they "heroically" went through the papers of the few refugees able to present them. Rory Stewart was grabbed by the media to give an opinion on the basis that he walked, rather quixotically, across Afghanistan in 2002. Alas, Stewart's somewhat romanticised view of why the Afghans have been so badly let down by the West in 2021 does not seem to have been very much informed by the passage of the intervening years. An eloquent and empathetic man, he nevertheless gives the impression that our own governance would be massively improved if only we sat in a circle, cross legged in our jim- jams, silly hats on our heads, gossiping and drinking chai. Perhaps he thought that would work in London, where he briefly ran to be the capital's mayor. But it would be wrong to single Stewart out for wishful thinking. In the wake of the appalling suicide attack at Kabul airport, credence was given by the BBC to the hope that the Taliban might include some "moderates", as if cutting the hands off transgressors counts as being liberal on the spectrum of psychopathy. Suddenly, everyone is an expert on the wise and ancient habits of Afghanistan and of a people seemingly "abandoned".
Who on Earth are we trying to kid? The ruthless invasion of Afghanistan by the USA in 2001 was a calculated and justifiable act of war, the response to the mass-murdering terrorist attack on New York and Washington on 9/11. Indeed for the first time the USA invoked the NATO charter, which held that an attack on one member was an attack on them all. The Americans must indeed be rueing the day that they didn't just leave it at that - a devastating punitive expedition followed by a swift withdrawal, but one which would have left no doubt about Western (or at least American) ferocity in defence of its legitimate security interests.
The intervening years have taught the US quite a few things about the reliability of allies, not least when it extended the scope of its retribution by its questionable invasion of Iraq. But the attack on the regime of Saddam Hussein gave those allies the excuse to soft pedal on their far more justifiable involvement in Afghanistan. Over time, the US came to shoulder an incrementally heavier burden for both security and nation building in Afghanistan while their NATO and ISAF allies penny pinched and insisted on deployment to less challenging areas and tasks. Trump was the first to grasp that nettle, and now his successor has finished the job which (in hindsight) should have been done nineteen years ago.
Naturally, in choosing its own role, the UK managed to get the worst of all worlds. Castigated for its seemingly blind devotion to the US mission in both Asian theatres, London still contrived to deploy resources which were inadequate even for one area of operation, never mind both. By "going in", we merely got in the way and had to be bailed out in turn in both Southern Iraq and Helmand by the Americans. In Afghanistan, the politicians and the brass thought that a large Brigade would do the trick, and for a while and with the overwhelming and sometime indiscriminate use of firepower, it did. But given that Afghanistan is nearly three times the size of the UK, sending in a Brigade was like sending in a platoon to subdue Wales. In such circumstances achieving basic security for the citizens, never mind nation building, was nigh impossible.
Europe has thrived comfortably under the blanket of security provided by the USA since the end of the Second World War. But like a lot of folk who have had too much of a good thing, Europeans have increasingly questioned the manner in which American support is provided, while failing to deliver it on their own account. Ingratitude and impotence have been reinforced by cultural disdain too. Look at those silly Yanks, we seem to say, with their Bible bashing, daft Presidents, obese citizens and the occasional deployment of automatic weapons by crazed nutters against school children. Being anti-American is so courant, and "progressives" can have their cake and eat it. How awful the US was to invade Afghanistan they say, and how awful they are now to leave it, thus depriving Afghan women of an exciting education in trans-genderism, or Kabul of its version of the Turner Prize.
Quite sensibly, the USA has decided to cut the crap.
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