Afghanistan

So here it is, the "East of Suez" moment for withdrawal of the US Empire. ( Peter Oborne compares it to Vietnam - and there are nasty parallels, the worst of which will be the collapse of confidence in any anti-Taliban forces as they realise the last helicopter will be leaving from the Embassy roof without them. )

In truth its really the US East of Suez moment. They can't afford to keep this going, and if they do then the bluff they use to keep the rest of the world in line will be called. ( We would have more sympathy is the US hadn't been so ruthless in hastening the demise of the British Empire fifty years ago. )

So what did all our men and women die for in Helmand ? Because it hasn't been to stop the Taliban.

This has been a long time coming, as my blog post show. Its just been seen as very unpopular to say so:

• October 2006 "What is going on in Afghanistan ?"
• Oct 2008 "Is the Afghan campaign doomed to failure"
• Jul 2009 "Blogging on the Afghan war"
• Aug 2009 "40 more years in Afghanistan - I don't think so"
• Aug 2009 "Two enormous lies that are being told straight to our faces"
• Sept 2009 "The sunken cost fallacy on Afghanistan"
• June 2010 "The Afghan stabilisation war has stopped being in Britain's interests, if it ever was"

I can see that David Cameron has been looking for a way out for a while, and perhaps he helped swing Obama round to this.

Once everyone's home safe there needs to be the mother of all public enquiries and inquests into how Victory over the 9/11 supporting Taliban was allowed to go so wrong.