No 211: Global Britain Dies on the Tarmac of Kabul Airport.

Dear James, 

We all remember where we were on that day in early September 2001. My daughter called me in my office and told me to get home quickly and turn on the television. As I was already late for lunch, I hopped into my car and did as she said. My wife already had the tv on. There was a picture of a burning New York tower against a bright blue sky. Before I could take it all in, I saw a flash of a black object disappearing into another building and erupting on the other side in a vast plume of flame, debris and black smoke. The commentator was yelling, ‘Oh no. A second plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre”.

Twenty years later, almost to the month, two new historical images have just superceded those of 9/11. The first is of hundreds of desperate Afghan civilians  running alongside a massive, departing USAF cargo plane, in a manic bid to escape the country of their births. The second is the heart rending image of a mother handing her baby over a wall to an American soldier as he, fully kitted out with the equipment of war, helplessly accepts his precious cargo. They are hard images to take in. The Afghans rightly feel betrayed and their awful predicament is the direct result of Western hubris and limits of purely physical power. Have we learned nothing?

In an attempt to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban for ever, the west spent $2 trillion dollars, lost two and a half thousand US soldiers not to mention 457 of our own brave men and women. The humbling of such a massive superiority of Western fire power by a group of mediaeval fanatics is still being digested by the world. How could this have happened? Well, in a word, it is because the Taliban have conviction based in a certain cultural reality and we do not. The Taliban claim that their truth is the secret to the ills of the world. We know that this Is far from the case yet this week may be seen by history as a turning point in world affairs where the West went into final retreat. Emotional nationalism rules. Reason is dead. It is a sad day indeed. 

The West is divided. That great guarantor of our values, the United States, is split down the middle between the madness of a Trumpian Republican Party refusing to accept electoral defeat and the desperate yearning of a Democratic Party to return to America’s founding values. In our own country we have witnessed the madness of a small band of Little England fanatics who want to return to Britain’s once greatness under the false umbrella of a Global Britain. How sad that all looks now as we try to hang onto the coat tails of a retreating America. 

Global Britain is dying on the tarmac of Kabul airport. Our troops are confused, angry, depressed by what they are now being asked to do. They feel betrayed by successive governments who have been telling each other that it’s possible to convert an essentially tribal nation into a modern political democracy in a matter of a few decades. Western civilization has spent centuries trying to lift its own people out of such relationships into the security of the extra-personal structures of law and due diligence. The recent total collapse of the Afghan army and its supporting political structures was in part due to Western inability to understand the tribal nature of Afghan culture where a smile and a nod mean nothing compared with the intricate networks of family, tribal and religious relationships beneath them. In Afghanistan, a friendly smile and agreement before lunch can change into an assassination attempt after lunch. That is difficult enough for Europeans to grasp. For the average gung-ho American General it is an impossibility. 

From Moscow to Beijing, from Myanmar to Belorussia and now to Afghanistan, autocrats everywhere are smiling. They have discovered that they can stay in power by simply repressing the human rights of their peoples with impunity. The liberal world order is in retreat. To stop this retreat we must heal our own divisions. We need real leadership, not ideologues. We need people with vision not just crowd pleasing sound bites.Unfortunately, Britain gave up on this in 2016 when a tiny cohort of Little Englanders, aided by expert propagandists of the digital era, persuaded a tiny majority to cut ourselves off from Europe and wrap ourselves in the false flag of Global Britain.

Today Global Britain is dead.  China and Russia are watching. The most dangerous place in the world at the moment is Taiwan. Don’t be surprised James, if the final crisis of Western values lies not in Kabul but on the edge of the South China Sea. I hate to be a  cassandra, but this week we have all been warned!

Kind regards, 

 BH – Your Concerned Constituent