The British elites are desperately clinging to their imperialist fantasies. The latest outburst comes from former British prime minister John Major. According to a report in the Daily Mail, Major has labelled the UK and US withdrawal from Afghanistan “strategically very stupid,” blasting the “shameful” failure to evacuate all British allies. He said pulling out allied troops “abruptly and in my view unnecessarily” will be a “stain on the reputation of the West” for at least a lifetime.
The shocking revelations made in Craig Whitlock’s Afghanistan Papers are also being brought back before public attention. While not an account of the British role in the forever wars, it will likely echo in London because Julian Borger, the Guardian’s US correspondent, has reviewed Whitlock’s book, which he calls a “superb exposé of a war built on lies.” Borger begins with an anecdote about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s rethink of the Afghanistan war after he took command in 2009. The first draft had to be rewritten because it made no mention of Al Qaeda, the supposed original reason we were in Afghanistan in the first place. “But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting,” Borger writes.
Whitlock’s book is based mainly (but apparently not solely) on the Afghanistan Papers published by the Washington Post in 2019, which are mainly interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, interviews that were never intended to become public. “Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking,” Borger writes. “The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.”
