Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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    Malcolm Blair-Robinson U.S        

    Malcolm Blair-Robinson U.K.

This attack is ongoing as I write this. It is dreadful that after all the lives lost in years of intervention, so fragile is the security situation that the Taliban can directly attack the seat of government in Kabul. It shows that the future of Afghanistan is uncertain without some kind of accommodation with the Taliban, whose military defeat is out of reach of all the forces mustered against it. In the view of this blog it underlines a systemic fault in Western foreign policy in which the UK has been a principal architect.

There has been a view, and this lingers still among the zealots, that military or political intervention to encourage the overthrow or actually to overthrow an unpalatable regime the West does not like, will improve the stability of the governance, quality of life and freedom of the people of the country and region concerned. The opposite has been the outcome.

Not just once, but time and again. In Iraq where we invaded, in Libya where we bombed, in Afghanistan where we occupied, in Syria where we called for the overthrow of the Assad regime and backed the initial rebel grouping and in Ukraine where we backed street demonstrations which overthrew the legitimately elected government and replaced it with a western leaning one of very doubtful provenance, which split the country in two and has led to civil war. There are now five major states in strategically important regions in varying states of dysfunction, violence and failure.

The individual circumstance of each country were different but the principle underlying the response was the same. The West had a duty to intervene to rescue a subjugated people and failure to do so would risk enhanced threats to Western collective security.  The opposite has been the outcome in every single instance. Not only has humanitarian suffering been on a scale not seen since the worst periods of the twentieth century world wars and of much longer duration, but the threats to the West have multiplied and expanded way beyond the level at which action was initiated. This is a collective failure of strategic analysis and policy application of depth unseen since the fall of the Roman Empire. The worst of all is that few if any lessons have been learned and it is still far from over.