Afghans left to pay the price for our retreat
WHEN I visited Afghanistan in early 2018, the security situation was such that the UK Government deemed me at potential risk of kidnap or attack.
It was made clear to the mine-clearance charity hosting me that a female, gay and relatively highprofile political leader would not be supported into and out of the country unless we agreed to precautions such as staying in the Embassy compound, rather than the charity’s safe house on the outskirts of Kabul.
Helmets and flak jackets had to be worn at all times outside the compound walls and my first briefing was on what to do if our armoured convoy came under attack and the armed guards who accompanied us were shot or otherwise disabled – where the emergency alarm was to call for air support and where the extra weapons were stashed, should I wish to try to defend myself.
So it is fair to say that, even then, more than a decade’s worth of military, structural and political investment from the international community hadn’t quite turned this vast and disparate country from a hotbed of terrorist activity to a functioning western democracy.
But nor was it a failed state. The streets of the country’s capital were clogged with traffic. Shops and street food carts were bustling, and dozens of homemade kites – a favourite children’s toy there – fluttered above the spaces between buildings. Institutions were being developed and the economy was growing.
What struck me first was the poverty. Driving into the city we passed the squalid shacks making up a large shanty town, but what became apparent later was the disparity. Less than two miles from those homemade dwellings, held together with plastic and baling twine, were three-storey town houses surrounded by compound walls and protected by armed guards for the nation’s political elite.
Also apparent was that this was a country and a people trying to make things work to get better.
Kabul has a distinctive smell – a mix of food, sweat, diesel and animal waste. It has a rhythm – round the four-laned roundabout in the centre of town, the pavements seethe with people.
Mostly men – some in western suits or jeans, others in traditional white tabard and trousers, and a mix of those carrying sidearms acting as bodyguards for local VIPs, and those going about their business, trying to work and hustle and support their families.
But also women, and, given the sometimes vicious history of this land, seeing women walk unaccompanied and unmolested on the street isn’t a given.
I met female politicians, too, fighting for greater rights for their sisters and to entrench and encourage the schooling that the Nato-led intervention following 9/11 had opened up. And charity workers, supporting those coming to the city to get on, but who had fallen on hard times.
I fear for those women now. As Kabul waits for the Taliban to seize the city, and reinstate the strict Sharia law it practised in the parts of the county it held before western forces intervened in 2001, the future that they saw for themselves and their daughters has changed irrevocably.
All those deaths. All that effort. For 20 years, the US and UK and others fought and built and stabilised a nation, recruiting, equipping and training its armed forces and for what? To hurriedly leave it to the same fate it claimed to have delivered it from?
Now we’ve abandoned the country. Abandoned the soldiers we trained to take responsibility for its security. It is likely, once again, that large-scale terror attacks will be launched from Afghanistan by the Taliban. Likely, too, that those nations who invaded, and have now withdrawn, will be first in the firing line.
The women of Afghanistan will pay for our retreat today. Our country and other free nations will pay for this surrender for decades to come.