Patrick Christys: Joe Biden isn't up to the job of leading the US

We’ve now finished our evacuation mission in Afghanistan.

The optics of it have been pretty awful from start to finish. It’s hard to imagine a more undignified withdrawal – the images of desperate Afghan nationals standing in a canal of sewerage waiting for the inevitable bang of a suicide bomber will haunt us all forever.

Joe Biden’s legacy will be the picture of 13 coffins, draped in the stars and stripes, being loaded into the back a US military plane.

I’m not normally inclined to agree with Osama Bin Laden but it turns out we have some common ground – he urged al-Qaeda not to attempt to assassinate Joe Biden because he thought he simply wasn’t up to the job and would damage America.

Here’s something I never thought I’d say on national news – Bin Laden was right.

But today’s optics were also very bad.

It appears that we’ve managed evacuate around 14,000 people, but we’ve left behind at least 1,000 more who now face an inevitable death sentence at the hands of the Taliban.

As I speak, our armed forces are loading a charter flight up with 140 dogs and 60 cats. We were not able to load any of Pen Farthing’s human staff though. How does that look to the people of Afghanistan?

We went in there to instil western, liberal values onto people living in a rural Afghan village who, let’s be honest, weren’t exactly clamouring for a Lib Dem manifesto, were they? What values have we shown them?

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks about Afghanistan, from the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S.
JONATHAN ERNST

We’ll come in, carpet bomb the place, then leave you back in the hands of the Taliban, tell the jihadis who you are and give them your contact details just in case they were going to have any issues tracking you down and executing you, and then we’ll leave you on the tarmac so you can watch us evacuate some dogs.

I love dogs, but do we want the people of Afganistan to think that we value the lives of Tonto and Mr Whiskers more than we value theirs? Because that’s how it looks. I mean, that’s actually the truth of the matter. And I’m not really cool with that.

There are layers to this incompetence, the 20,000 Afghan refugees we’re supposedly bringing back to Blighty. Well, we’re not are we? That’s a total lie. News headline right in front of me here – final evacuation flight leaves Afghanistan.

So Boris wants me to believe that in three years time we’re going to land a plane back in Kabul and say: ‘Excuse me Mr Taliban, I know you’re in total control now but would you mind ever so much if I just airlifted my interpreter out of there? Oh, you’ve already executed him and his entire family? Right, well, you win some you lose some…Back we go!’

But then where do we house the 14,000 or so we’ve supposedly managed to evacuate? That’s double the number of homeless military veterans we have. I spoke to Dominic Raab earlier this week and he told me he wouldn’t house an Afghan refugee because he has, quotes, a young family….right, ok, well they have to live somewhere.

I do think the luvvies should open their doors, Gary Linekar style. But it’s an uncomfortable truth that, at the moment a homeless veteran is more likely to get a house if he gets in a dinghy and lands on a Kent beach than he is following the normal channels, if you’ll excuse the pun.