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This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport. The government had no power to do this unilaterally: it duly asked the United States, and was duly turned down. The issue was almost beside the point. It is doubtful, given the burning desire of so many to leave the country, whether a few more days of rescue flights would have done much to shorten the suffering queue of hopefuls.  Each day is dangerous, so more days are more dangerous. Preoccupation with extension deflected attention from the key point, which is that all evacuation planning assumed that Kabul and its airport would be controlled

Fortress Europe is pulling up the drawbridge. The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban is likely to being about a new wave of refugees heading west, and so walls and fences are being hastily built around the borders of the Schengen Area. As scars inflicted by the last migrant crisis re-open, the possibility of a new influx of refugees is causing deep apprehension throughout the EU. At Usnarz Gorny, on Poland’s border with Belarus, the migrant crisis is already beginning. Twenty four Afghan migrants currently sit stranded in no man’s land between Polish and Belarusian border guards. Left without food or clean drinking water for weeks on end, their situation

A staple of observing politics is watching rhetoric curdle into reality. Operation Enduring Freedom, thought up and slapped together in the wake of 9/11, was supposed to put down the ‘global terror threat’ and bring freedom to the subjugated peoples of Afghanistan and the Middle East. It ended last week with images of despairing Afghans tumbling to their deaths from the undercarriages of fleeing US planes. The rights and wrongs of leaving are sundering US foreign policy elites, but leaving the United States is most certainly doing. So what next? When the United States high-tails it out of the region you can be sure that everyone around is watching —

They say the city you most fondly remember is the one you grew up in. In my case that’s Kabul. I spent my formative years in the Afghan capital in the mid-1960s. It was a very different time and Afghanistan a very different country. But the Kabul that’s imprinted on my mind belongs to that decade. It was a happy city. No other description does it justice. Of course, it was poor, conservative and hierarchical but people were always smiling. They were warm, welcoming, courteous and generous. This was most obvious in their attitude to children. Everyone called me ‘bacho’. When Mummy took me out, shopkeepers would slip Hershey’s chocolates

The Panjshir valley, about three hours’ drive north of Kabul, has a mythical hold on the Afghan imagination. It is a natural fortress, a long lemon-shaped valley surrounded on three sides by 13,000-foot-high mountain ridges, with the only entrance a narrow road in a deep winding gorge to the south, cut by the Panjshir river. It is a place of stunning beauty, with green fields either side of the river laden with apple blossom in the spring, irrigated by ingenious canals. The walls between the fields, and sometimes the houses themselves, are buttressed with rusting metal war remains – the wheels of a tracked vehicle, armour plating, bridges formed of

America’s allies in Europe understood months before President Joe Biden’s fateful April speech to the American people that a full and complete US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was a very real possibility. Biden talked about the urgency of getting the United States out of what he termed ‘forever war’ conflicts which required tens of billions of dollars a year (not to mention thousands of US troops on the ground) to maintain. Indeed, anybody who bothered to pay attention to Biden’s words for even a moment recognised the phrase was intrinsically tied to the war in Afghanistan, which had outlasted three consecutive presidents, resulted in the deaths of over 2,440 US