Patrick Christys: USA is no longer a friend with benefits

It’s a double whammy. We are now being bossed around by the Taliban and we’ve lost our greatest ally, America. We no longer have a special relationship.

Headlines this morning include ‘Biden refuses to extend evacuation deadline’. ‘Biden snubs Boris’ plea to extend mercy mission’. No – the Taliban have said if we stay there beyond August 31st then they’ll just kill everyone. So we’re off.

It’s rare for me to agree with Osama Bin Laden, as you can imagine, but I do on this. He banned al Qaeda from trying to assassinate Joe Biden because he thought Biden was unfit to be President and would lead the US into crisis.

Old Bin Laden wasn’t wrong, was he.

Biden apparently wouldn’t take Boris’ calls for days after he announced the US was cutting and running from Afghanistan, Boris tried to lobby him at the G7 to extend the withdrawal deadline, or at least try to…it quite literally fell on very deaf ears.

But we’re now seeing empty words and empty platitudes from our government, and we’re being taken for fools.

Dominic Raab said, and I quote, we are ‘striving to secure a more inclusive Afghan government that can maintain stability and avoid the kind of human rights abuses that the Taliban have committed before, particularly against women.’

I saw a video yesterday of a woman being flogged in an Afghan village, surrounded by a crowd of men. Like it was sport.

It’s been reported that an Afghan woman was burnt to death for, quotes, bad cooking…

Raab went on – ‘We want to protect the gains of the last twenty years, and stand with the Afghan people, supporting their aspiration for a better life.’

Watch out for this coming your way now – for the last 20 years the women of Afghanistan have had an education, for the last 20 years women haven’t had to wear the full face covering, for the last 20 years children have gone to school.

Yeh, alright, but that stops now doesn’t it. What’s the logic there? Oh, well, they had a good run didn’t they. Good innings chaps.

Would our politicians tolerate that line of reasoning with their own families? Dominic Raab wouldn’t be ok with the idea that his kids had a few years of a good education before, you know, the Taliban took over the school again and probably burnt it to the ground.

He’s on the show later so I can ask him I suppose.

Yesterday I sat through something I never thought possible. A proper press conference from the Taliban, beamed around the world. This is something we’re going to have to get used to. Let’s be honest, how long is it before FIFA gives Afghanistan a go at hosting the World Cup?

Are we going to have to welcome the Taliban’s foreign secretary into Downing Street?

Supposedly America has frozen almost $10bn worth of Afghan assets, Boris Johnson bizarrely set out what the Taliban needs to do to get that money back.

“Afghanistan can’t lurch back into becoming a breeding ground of terror, Afghanistan can’t become a narco state, girls have to be educated up to the age of 18.”

As long as the Taliban have close relations with China and Russia, no economic sanctions we impose on them matter at all. It’s gone, it’s over.

Yesterday the Taliban’s spokesman, which is a weird thing to say but, hey, Twitter thinks he’s less dangerous than Trump…the Taliban’s spokesman encouraged us not to evacuate the educated people of Afghanistan.

I would like to encourage the Taliban not to stone people to death, keep women as sex slaves or blow stuff up but I can’t. Because we’ve lost the war to the Taliban, and we’ve lost our greatest ally in the process.