Friday 12 August 2022

The Taliban destroy Afghanistan a year after US coalition withdrawal

The Taliban have proven, not to anyone's surprise, that they can never be trusted to fulfil any promise they have made. A year since they seized back control of Afghanistan, the country is back in the Dark Ages, the economy has collapsed, women have been reduced to slaves, human rights abuses are spreading and every promise by the Taliban negotiators in talks with the US in Doha, Qatar, has been broken. The eight hard-faced Taliban negotiators promised in writing that they would not allow al-Qaeda to return in force to Afghanistan and be given safe refuge. They lied. What more evidence do you need of that broken promise than the arrival in Kabul itself of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader, and his family. It proved fatal for him because the CIA was tipped off and he was duly targeted by two Hellfire missiles and killed while he was standing on the balcony of his safe house. But the Taliban had actually invited al-Zawahiri to Kabul and he was being protected by Taliban bodyguards. As a result of this blatant breach of the Doha agreement, the US is now even more unlikely to unfreeze all the assets which Afghanistan so desperately needs to survive. Afghanistan is doomed, and, far more importantly, the poor Afghan people are facing the bleakest future imaginable. How on earth are they going to survive when they have no money to buy food and no support from the Taliban government? The US and coalition wholesale and rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan will be seen by historians as one of the worst and most devastating political decisions ever made.

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