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Within the days earlier than the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a bunch of British defence and safety officers took a top-secret journey to Moscow.
The plan was to ask their Russian counterparts for recommendation on working within the nation given the previous Soviet Union’s doomed Afghan intervention that resulted in defeat in 1989.
The response was brutally prophetic.
One one that was on the assembly recalled: “When the Russians stopped laughing they informed us: ‘You’ll make the identical dangerous selection we did, you’ll go in, you’ll lose, a lot of you’ll die and you then’ll be pressured to retreat, which will likely be good for us. How can we assist?'”
Twenty years on because the US-led intervention in Afghanistan stumbles by its closing, chaotic days and the Taliban take cost, occasions might hardly have performed out in a greater approach for Russia.
President Vladimir Putin’s authorities has one of many closing few embassies nonetheless totally functioning in Kabul and has developed shut ties with the Taliban, together with allegedly serving to secretly to fund and equip their combat towards US and British forces.
Russia has denied such claims.
As well as, photos of determined Afghans clinging to the undercarriage of departing US plane as Taliban fighters patrol the streets of Kabul are even beginning to make Moscow’s previous failures in Afghanistan look marginally much less catastrophic by comparability.
Not less than the then Soviet-backed authorities within the Afghan capital clung to energy for 3 years following the Russian withdrawal.
The Western-supported administration of Ashraf Ghani barely lasted three hours as soon as the Taliban reached the gates of Kabul, with the president and his closest aides fleeing to exile with out placing up any form of resistance.
Britain’s Overseas Secretary Dominic Raab claimed on Tuesday that nobody had predicted the pace of the Taliban victory and corresponding collapse of the Afghan authorities. “Nobody noticed this coming. After all, we might have taken motion if we had.”
Pressed by Sky Information’s Kay Burley on whether or not the UK’s defence and safety chiefs ought to have identified what may unfold given their previous 20 years of involvement in Afghanistan, Mr Raab stated: “It is easy to say that with the good thing about hindsight however the fact is you are at all times measuring a really fluid constellation matrix of danger components and that is the fact.”
Maybe so. However it will be fascinating to know if Russia and different international locations within the area with stakes in Afghanistan, specifically Pakistan, China and Iran, had been genuinely as clueless.
All of them stand to achieve from the US and British retreat and the Taliban’s return to energy.
Moscow and Beijing have additionally benefitted from the previous twenty years of watching Washington, London and different NATO allies distracted by the failed effort to show Afghanistan right into a democracy, with all of the blood and treasure expended, as Russia and China grew their respective militaries and unfold their world affect.
It is among the causes US President Joe Biden gave on Monday night time when he belatedly addressed the results of his resolution to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, handing victory to the Taliban.
“Our true strategic opponents China and Russia would love nothing greater than the USA to proceed to funnel billions of {dollars} of sources into stabilising Afghanistan,” President Biden stated.
However that has already occurred – for the previous 20 years.
By leaving Afghanistan within the careless approach that the USA has chosen, the brand new danger is to exacerbate additional the injury inflicted on Western powers by their previous errors.
It might in the end undermine President Biden’s personal ambitions for the world’s democracies to face up and push again towards the existential problem to world guidelines and human rights posed by China, Russia and different authoritarian powers.
The UK’s want to be a “drive for good” on the earth, nonetheless properly intentioned, additionally rings more and more hole as Afghanistan slips again beneath Taliban rule.
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