Chaos As Kabul Falls

Taliban no longer allowing Afghans passage to the airport and have told women they should stay at home for ‘their own safety’.

 

The Taliban are missing a huge PR trick with Farthing and his animals imo

What I would do in their shoes is allow his private airplane to land at another airport, help load it and see him off, invite the worlds news channels and portray to the world the British government are incompetent and uncaring, and how kind and thoughtful the Taliban are

 

I see the UK government puts cars before people then

 

What with their massive reliance on selling opium and generally abusing folk, I doubt PR is their thing.

 

Raab was NOT paddleboarding. The Sea was closed, so how could he?

 

The spin from Raab, Boris, Biden, the idiot US daily press guy, the nonce US general on the daily press briefing… is truly nauseating

I vote we drop them in the middle of Afghanistan without a phone or passport and in just their y fronts

 

Does every former service(wo)man get one favour they can call in then? This one seems like a big'un!

I personally don't have any issue with the plane or the noise around that. I don't think he's jumping a queue. I'm not completely convinced a load of vets should be getting UK visas ahead of those who were embedded with the military, but whatever.

The bit I do think is ridiculous is that there's an unholy crush involving thousands of people outside Kabul airport at the moment, with periodic gunfire, and he seems to think it should (and will) part like the red sea to let him, his staff and animals through. What I can't figure out is what he plans to do if the masses don't move or Mr Tal E Ban won't let his people through. The implication seems to be that British soliders should be deployed to escort them. Maybe I'm wrong?

Anyway, he's rumoured to have his permission now after Prime Minister Carrie Boris Johnson sorted it out.

 

I don't think that gives someone carte blanche to act however they want though. He's hardly been respectful himself, including trying to whip up a hate campaign about a special adviser the other night, and if you're going to step into politics and trying to the media you can't really be surprised if those you're targeting reciprocate.

And I can't see why someone of his apparent experience would set up shop in a crumbling place like Afghanistan which has only been held together by US/Nato sticking plasters for 20 years and not have an exit plan. Him and his staff and the animals should have been out of there 3-6 months ago.

 

He’s never asked to jump any queue

He’s not asked the government to spend any money, the British public have crowd funded transport

He’s asking the government to do it’s job, something it has so far totally failed to do

This is such a screw up Boris should be falling on his sword

 

If he hasn't fallen on his sword over the past 18 months he is hardly going to do so for this.

I'm afraid the majority of the voting public don't give two hoots for what is going on in Afghanistan.

 

Great, so we're clear then if he can't get everyone through the crowds or a load of bearded wonders with AKs tell his staff to piss off, he's going to say his sad goodbyes and carry on through the checkpoints into the airport and head home alone? Or is he going to be tweeting or inviting Sky News camera crews along with him and, once stuck, demanding our military come and save them?

Taking it down to him and his people, as far I can see the British government has limited consular support working in extremis in a secure location within a military-fortified airfield. The expectations of what service the British government can provide from there should be very limited indeed. Realistically its capabilities are near zero.

 

The UK capabilities there are zero because the UK government has decided they will be zero

They have created their own excuse, by putting in the bare minimum military force they can get away with to be able to claim they tried

It is pathetic, indefensible, cowardice and incompetence from start to end

 

Britain elected them knowing them to be lofty prats too lazy to do their jobs. You can’t seriously expect any accountability?

 

Not sure why people expect the UK to sort this all out. This was an international force from 39 nations and all countries are withdrawing.

https://www.rferl.org/a/29669794.html from 3 years ago.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/9-592-troops-of-36-countries-serving-in-afghanistan/2212251 from 4 months ago.

The most notable nation not helping out was France.

 

Britain voted for them for no other reason than because no other party was prepared to deliver what 52% of those who could be bothered to vote had asked for

 

Good job the UK didn't have this view in 1941

 

Is it a bit too much if I say the best thing that could happen right now is if those d*mn animals were shot?

 

It wasn't unreasonable for the US or UK to want to withdraw. Clearly since the decision has been made there has been complacency and poor intelligence. It's a perfect storm to have the incompetent of Raab and the uselessness of former Foreign Secretary Johnson.

However, whenever it became known that the Afghan Government would not prevail it would have required tremendous energy and commitment to put a new coalition together to sustain the Afghan nation. I'd be surprised if there had been many takers if any at all, such is the weakness of the UN. In the absence of this, unilateral action is a tough call. Eventually the Taliban would have had a go at the occupiers. Who wants to be those occupiers?

It can go two ways now, civil war or power sharing.

 

Sorry, which view?

 

The problem isn't the principle of withdrawal, although I think that is wrong. Germany post ww2, Cyprus etc took time and patience. We had already done the hard yards in Afghanistan, anyone under 20 years old has been bought up in a more liberal way, many studied in western universities, in another 20 years those people are the people running things.

However if the majority in UK, US etc want to withdraw that is democracy in action. Fair enough.

The problem is the timing, the lack of intelligence, the lack of a plan, the lack of any risk assessment, the lack of basic care for fellow human… it is an abortion of an operation. It needn't have been.

 

Does anyone with military experience or some insight into crowd control techniques know how we can expect to avoid Kabul airport being completely overrun as the troops begin pulling out?

 

If it’s anything like Gatwick, just make the parking machines in the car park really difficult to get your head around and the transfer buses really infrequent. That should earn them a good half hour.

 

Dig traps and cover them in palm tree leaves

 

What i don't understand about the panic to get people out, is why when Trump signed his deal with the Taliban to remove all US Forces by May 2021, why the UK government were not already with a plan to start people out from March this year. I get that Biden unilaterally extended that deadline by 3 months, but surely it was always likely that the country would collapse into civil war within weeks of the withdrawal.

So we could have identified all the papers to people wanting to leave, and encouraged them to leave. Now we have the ambassador signing papers in the departure lounge.

 

Heard on a history podcast they should have waited to leave in winter but Biden obviously insisted on the 9/11 symbolic date which coincided with summer weather conditions that meant it was easier for the Taliban to invade

 

Well no one could have predicted this. Pen Farthing and his convoy have reached the vicinity of the airport but not moved for 10 hours. He's taken to tweeting the Taliban to ask for help...

https://twitter.com/PenFarthing/status/1430762647453110272?s=19

 

This is what happens when a senile crook is elected President of the United States

 

We should be used to that by now.

 

He had already extended the date from May.

Maybe he should have done it then? It’s not like the UK spent these three months working on an exit strategy. Not when there were holidays to take.

Had we left then we could have caught the Taliban less prepared.

 

Let’s face it, this is going to be made into a feature film, part caper comedy, part tearjerker. With Ewan Macgregor, Brenda Blethyn, Jim Broadbent, Joanna Lumley and the next canine winner of Britain’s Got Talent. Timothy Spall as Johnson.

Put my name on that BAFTA suckers!

 

Unfair. They have had younger crooks.

 

Ooh, when does that come out? Sounds marvellous. The Ark of Kabul