Afghans

If you look at really where we were in the South Asian strategy 2017 to 2018, I mean, Afghanistan was not Denmark, but it did need to be Denmark, right? And we were sustaining that effort with about $22 billion a year, maybe 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 troops.

How many Americans really cared how many troops we had there if they weren't bearing the brunt of the fight and the Afghans were? And so I believe that's a fight that was occurring on a modern day frontier between barbarism and civilization.

And remember what happened in Iraq.

I mean, the same kind of thing.

And absent direct American intervention, whether that was persistent in the sense that we were we were still walking the streets of these towns or we had sort of QRF forces position and ready to go.

But absent Americans there or close by and a lot of American money, a lot of what existed outside of places like Kabul.

was not sustainable by the Afghans alone.

I agree with that.

Who was it?

Oh, the Afghans, they're not playing with

you.

He said, oh.

Stop clutching your pearls about it.

It is reasonable for that population of Britons to care about whether it will remain a predominant and enduring part of the country it has inhabited and shaped over generations, to worry that a Britain filled with Afghans, Indians and Somalis would not be a Britain at all.

That concern should not automatically be treated as shameful or racist.

And so we go beyond, in this paper, just Fraser Nelson's gaslighting attempt saying, we hear your concerns, and then doing absolutely nothing about it.

The problem is that they turned their weapons against the United States a few years later.

There's this movie with Tom Hanks, The World According to Charlie Wilson, who was the senator who would provide those weapons to the Afghans, and he warned against post-Soviet Union collapse, and no one took him seriously, and today we are still paying the price.

Hillary Clinton said it bluntly that in the 1980s, U.S. policy consisted in helping those guys.

And even Ronald Reagan once welcomed them in the Oval Office and even said they were freedom fighters.

It's just different layers of unhappiness, you know, unhappiness with how long the war went on, unhappiness with how it's ending, unhappiness with those military families who lost people who were like one year old when 9-11 happened and now they're in their 20s or maybe they're older in their 30s.

Sadness for all those Afghans who are trying to get out of the country who were killed.

You know, this is what war is.

As my dad wrote to me, it's an obscenity.

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Charles writes, Rebecca, I imagine they are asking this because, of course, we know that Afghans lost temporary protected status not that long ago.

Yes, indeed.

It's a good question.

Partly to do with the war in Ukraine, but not entirely.

Lots of, um, lots of Afghans and, um, and Iranians and Iraqis coming as w- as, as well, as, as well as Syrians and, and, and all kinds of people from the Middle East.

Um, but also Germany is in deep economic trouble.

It's been basically in recession since 2019.

This? Tell it to the Ethiopians.

Tell it to the Afghanis.

Or the British coal miners.

or to the poor or the sick or the disenfranchised or the unhappy anywhere and everywhere in the world.