That weird break-up between America and Afghanistan and the damage control that followed.
On a misty dark night, the sort where every molecule in the air is oscillating with turbulence, they left. The last band of American soldiers boarded their C-17 Globemaster, this gigantic grey behemoth of a plane, and swooped up into the air, broke through the black layer of clouds and zoomed back home in a cloud of disgust and unfinished business. As the grey metal beast rumbled across the sky, a horde of half-crazy Taliban soldiers spilled out onto the runway like a puddle of piss and seized Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul which was just hours ago under heavy American military control. In a lustful frenzy of victory this mob celebrated their victory in a 20-year war by cracking the sky asunder with bursts of wanton gunfire, dancing, cheering, smoking some good heroin and sodomising underaged girls right on the tarmac. From a distance it would probably look like a Dionysian ritual, but the closer you get and the more you hear their throat drying cries – if you can understand their language that is – the more you realise that it’s a cavalcade of murderous bastards who have been left behind to do what they please with a country they’ve been wanting to get their hands on for an almost perennial amount of time, their own country. Now they can ravage their home like an A-lister French prostitute and then turn their aggression outwards onto the rest of the world.
How did it end up like this? When one considers the tumultuous and long history which makes up this toxic love affair between America and Afghanistan, the nature of their break-up becomes ever-more complex. The whole thing exploded with the violence of a vigorously shaken Coke bottle hurled at a wall, shooting glass shards of diaspora and trouble in all directions surfing on a fizzy wave of diplomatic impotence. Every party involved in this is showing signs of such unfathomable stupidity that they would make a perfect evolutionary exhibit. This whole story reeks of bad spice and I latched onto it immediately like a leech on a blood bag.
It was a quite shift at work for me, I was on my break eating a bowl full of chips and trying not to work up a seething hatred for potatoes with the amount of chips I had eaten that week when one of my co-workers joined me. “Good, some company” I thought, “company will help me forget that potatoes exist.”
This was when she asked me whether I knew what was happening in Afghanistan.
“What’s happening in Afghanistan? I know a bunch of terrorists held a press conference and begged the world to see them as a legitimate nation but apart from that nothing.” I told her.
Which was when she told me that the Americans pulled out of Afghanistan which is what led to the Taliban taking over the country. This came as a massive surprise for me, enough that I had to eat a few chips to anchor myself in the moment. This had the air of the biggest and most scandalous divorce trial in history. One where two people who detest one another stay together for the longest time and then eventually separate, leaving everyone wondering what was the straw that broke the camel’s back. All I could think was what sort of proverbial adultery led to this break-up. For twenty years these two countries have been dispassionately fucking each other that they’re almost beginning to enjoy it. Something major and sordid is going down here and I’ll be damned if I miss this train. So, I plugged myself into this corrupted circuitry and began devouring all pieces of information, all new developments heaving up out of the sand and the entire history of this war between America and Afghanistan. I clipped away and tore at newspapers like a detective on the perilous brink of a psychological collapse and made jangled notes that look like they were written with a broken wrist. I’ve paid for the ticket and now I’m taking the ride.
A Messy Pull-Out. Accidents Everywhere. Abortions Needed. A Bastard Inheritance From Our Good Friend Trump.
I scarcely remember the night Joe Biden won the election and belted Donald Trump out of the White House and back into his cave of gluttonous insanity. All I remember was the vast amounts of bloody marys I drank that night whole the votes were begin counted and then waking up next day with a skull fracturing head-ache and the news that Joe Biden had edged ahead of Donald Trump and would be the next US president. The writing must’ve begun to appear everywhere inside the Oval Office while Donald Trump was spending his last disgraceful hours in one of the most powerful offices in the world. Though I was happy that America wasn’t going to re-elect that scoundrel, I was apprehensive that he was being replaced by Joe Biden. Joe seems like a reasonable enough guy, well-informed on foreign policies and compared to a clinically insane man like Donald Trump, he appears to look like Einstein, but I had this nagging feeling that he’d make one screw-up that would mar his reputation like scar-tissue from a slit throat. Mr. Biden was not aware that the stroke of his pen across the decision to pull out of Afghanistan would also be the stroke of the knife across the neck of his presidency. If it bleeds to death or not is a matter that will be decided in the coming months once all of this blows over, or not.
It wouldn’t be entirely fair to put the entire weight of this scandal on Joe Biden’s shoulders, he isn’t Atlas after all. The knife was polished by our erstwhile friend Donald Trump when he reached an agreement with the Taliban on February 29th, 2020, just before the COVID virus began sweeping the planet the world stopped being for a year, that American forces will be pulled out of Afghanistan by the 1st of May, 2021 so long as the Taliban cut their ties with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisation and stop attacking US forces. Sounds like a reasonable deal, if handing over a country to a bunch of violent extremists so they can come back and attack you with the full force of their strength when they can muster it can be classed as reasonable. Is it also reasonable to make be making deals with extremists with ties so strong to terrorist organisations that you might as well call them one too? It seems like in that moment a handful of key synapses along the route of reason in Mr. Trump brain died, thus making him forget the age-old phrase that you do not negotiate with terrorists. Only a fool would think that they’d hold up their end of the deal. This entire deal begins to reek of desperation or mischief – depending on which one of Old Don’s moods you swing it towards – when one considers that this deal came after two bombings in Afghanistan on September 2nd and 5th, 2019, killing 26 people in total including an American serviceman. President Trump, the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and some of the top Taliban men were slated to meet at Camp David for “discussions” but that meeting was called off in the wake of those attacks. His gesture was teeming with naivety, or he knew that his presidency was doomed by then and that this would soon be some other bastard’s problem. Because realistically, Trump would’ve never been elected for a second term and even he knew that. So why not leave the White House in a twisted mess for someone else to clean it up with you, just be sure to pick up your $221,400 a year for your presidential pension.
So, on that fateful night of November 17th, 2020 when Joe Biden walked into the White House and found the furniture tumbled over and plaster flaking off the walls like some sort of medium sized tornado had tooled through there, walls spray tagged with all manner of obscene remarks like, “The Orange Menace doesn’t end here!” and “Keep them out!” as well as a razor-sharp hunting knife jammed right into the tabletop with a note reading, “Good luck, you’re going to need it.” he also inherited the deal Mr. Trump struck with the Taliban. After promptly getting the White House all cleaned up and refurbished for his marvellous time as president, he finally turned his attention to the aged piece of parchment which layed out the terms of the deal president Trump made, signed on the dotted line with what looked like human blood. A faded crimson signature written in a smooth cursive script from a fine tipped quill. Rather than tearing the blasted thing up, he decided, most probably because of his own humanitarian reasons, to let the machine keep moving. Why stop it now? We’ve made a deal after all, and goddammit we’re a nation of our word! What sort of crazy hell would come down on us if we didn’t hold our end of the deal with the terrorists?!
It has just come to my attention that this rocket is very quickly veering off course, this dense atmosphere is shooting my attention in unwanted and grotesque direction. I need to get a grip before this whole thing turns into an unsalvageable piece of gibberish. A glass of water would do me quite nicely right about now….
Just a half month before the extended deadline, Biden realises like a student who has never heard of the concept of punctuality, that this assignment is never going to make it till the date set for him, so he just pushes the deadline forward from the 1st of May, 2021 to the 11th of September of the same year. In his mind he wanted to get the American boys out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the cataclysm which started this whole dirty dance in the first place. “We went to Afghanistan because of a terrible attack which happened 20 years ago.” Says he, “that cannot explain why we should be there in 2021.” The more words start spilling out of his mouth like drool, the more his motives become clear. He really wants to put a stop to this war for a number of really obvious reasons.
(1) This war has costed them a pricey $2 trillion. As of 2021 the United States of America is eyeball deep into a public debt of $28.4 trillion – public debt being money owed by the federal government to the public in the form of bonds and also funds owed to intragovernmental departments and other countries holding a share of the US treasury in the form of debt – and as the country is basically selling their future to hold onto their present, every little cut-back helps.
(2) The whole thing has turned into a doomed affair and he has lost all hope in any progression. The Americans and Taliban had hit a deadlock and apart from small insurgent retaliation and a firebomb hurled here and there, nothing major happened. At that point the only thing the American troops were working on down there was a tan. “Hopefully they’ve forgotten all about us so when we pull out, things can return back to orderly running.” thought Joe Biden out loud in the large porcelain bath tub, floating in a bubbly froth and sipping on some fine Napoleonic Brandy. It seems that most major wars that American has waged in recent memory has ended up with them taking the cowards way out and abandoning it when the going got a bit too stale for them. Vietnam. The war on drugs. They bite off more than they can chew, peak too early and then find themselves in a fatigue of boredom when the task becomes so nebulous that they just can’t be bothered to pursue it anymore. They drop it aside like a bad habit and then go searching for some other kind of kick.
(3) Running a war is one mentally taxing affair, an affair which leads to the fatal case of terminal hopelessness mentioned above. Most people who find themselves at the helm of a war are usually so cracked afterwards that they can’t tell a broomstick from a pen. The lives lost – which is up to 2500 American, 457 British and 240,000 Afghanis – will weight heavy upon the conscience of a man like Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. He’s almost the sort who’s carved tally marks all over his skin that can be hidden underneath the suit for each life lost, but not quite. Or alternatively he doesn’t give a hoot in hell about any of the lives lost but we wants it to appear that way. But it wouldn’t be fair of me to call Joe Biden a soulless bloodsucker when I have no hard proof of anything suggesting as much.
(4) His morals just won’t allow it any longer. Being the fourth president to preside over this ongoing war, he says he doesn’t want to pass down the responsibility to a fifth one. Surely a side-effect of the mind-numbing pain that he endured through after trying to manage the white-hot ball of zinc dropped in his lap by former President Trump. Treat everyone else like you want to be treated, eh?
Just imagine for a moment if Biden isn’t the only one who’s operating on a timeline that ends with September 11th. By the 20th anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks he wanted all his boys out of Afghanistan, a feat which he accomplished by August 31st. That’s 11 whole days until the anniversary. 11 whole days for the Taliban to swarm the country and take it back, a feat which they managed to accomplish by the 6th of September. Let’s imagine for a grim moment if the Taliban have their calendars marked on September 11th for another horrid attack against America. It’s the 10th at the time of writing this and nothing has happened so far… but no one can pre-empt a terrorist attack. It’d be a day of pandemonium if I wake up tomorrow and read in the news that the Washington Monument has burst into flames or dicks have been drawn all over Mount Rushmore by unidentified militants. America won’t stand for this; they’d be stupid with rage and send wave upon wave of battalions into Afghanistan, but this time the Taliban will have the home advantage…
If ugly fireworks don’t go off tomorrow, then it’ll be some other day. There’s no avoiding the inevitable that the Taliban will be back for blood. Their bent desire to take down the West isn’t in their second nature but first. They’ll probably lay low for a while now that they’ve captured the country, they’ll deliver more press conferences to convince us that they’ve changed and are just as part of the world stage as every other country is, all the while they hatch a demon plot to wipe America, Britain, Canada or any other Western nation for that matter which doesn’t accept Allah as their one true god off the face of the Earth. They’ll torture us into believing and if that doesn’t work, they’ll rape then kill us, regardless of age or gender. Because there is absolutely no reasoning with extremists and I cannot believe America have put themselves into this quicksand in the first place, and it won’t be long before they start sinking and viscous, coarse sand jams into their collective lungs. America have been slowly withdrawing troops from the country since June 22nd, 2011 but some new attack or Trouble forces their hand and they end up sending in more. Even their final push out of that arid hell required more troops to be sent in for an evacuation mission because the Taliban turned into a pack of wolves on speed and started killing anyone in sight the moment they realised the American were leaving with their tails between their legs.
Even President Trump said that “a hasty withdrawal will create a vacuum that terrorists will instantly fill”, which is the first bit of sense that has come out of that disgusting sewer hole of an orifice where his mouth should be. And that is precisely what has happened. Washington was completely flummoxed by the rate at which the Taliban took over the country. The Afghan President Ghani fled for his life and the Pentagon assumed that the Afghan security forces would “hold out for a bit longer”. This is interesting wording which suggests that Afghanistan is being abandoned to the Taliban. They knew in their minds that sooner or later the country would fall, and fell it did.
How long will we keep compromising for these terrorists? Give em’ a hand and they’ll take an arm. If America keeps bending over backwards for their demands, before they know it, they’ll be sacrificing a lot more than what they can afford and end up sandbagged by people who snort sand day and night.
No More Space in the Planes. The Ones Who Got Left Behind. Diplomatic Impotence, Who To Blame?
“No one gets left behind!” is a saying that echoes over and over again in American military vernacular, but what people aren’t aware of is that it comes with a small print. If you were to take a small magnifying glass to the footnotes, you’d find the full saying goes, “No one gets left behind, unless we run out of space and you don’t show up on time.” You’re either on the plane, or you’re off. And quite a lot of people weren’t on that plane out of the Afghanistan. 250 American citizens and a combined number of 7000 people – British citizens and Afghani’s who are eligible to come live in the UK for their services to Britain – to be more precise. This number doesn’t include vast portions of the Afghani population who are scattered across the country like splinters in a twister who are gripped in horrible fear of the brutality which will inexorably follow with the Taliban in charge. Oppression against women, homosexuals, people who have helped the West during their stay in Afghanistan in some form or another no matter how small, or just about anyone who doesn’t fit within the rigid acceptance of Islam and looks like a target has forced these people to abandon their homes and move disperse across the disagreeable land to get away. A stupendously wide exodus, gigantic caravans of diaspora – men, women, children, infants, elderly, pregnant women and disabled – are on the move like dandelion tufts in a strong wind to get away from their doom. Some are heading to Pakistan, some to Iran, but what all of them will find is a fate torn with uncertainty. Almost all passes out of Afghanistan are manned by menacing looking trigger-happy Taliban soldiers who will ventilate anyone who attempts to leave the country. The Taliban have taken back their country, however the people are yet to be convinced. A united Afghanistan is what these hair-trigger animals are looking for and they will stop at nothing to get it, even if it means shooting down half the population who try to leave.
Banks found themselves draining money as those who can afford it took all their money out of their vaults and split as the currency took a nose-dive. Afghanistan by now has descended into a state – physically and economically – resembling Mordor and the fiery eye of Sauron is sweeping across the ghastly land.
Meanwhile here in Britain, terrible rumblings from Afghanistan are erupting throughout the government, shaking the whole thing up and keeping the politicians up at night, for all the wrong reasons. When a fuck-up of this magnitude goes down, someone has to fall with it and be crushed underneath the mountain of blame. Whether or not they’re directly to be held responsible, that poor fool was just close enough to be hoiked by the ugly tentacle of blame. When politicians find themselves in quick-sand, the best way to ensure they actually sink is to sit back and let them explain themselves, handle the situation as it were with such careless gesticulation that the rest will take care of itself and soon enough those last thick air bubbles will pop. Once odium starts hopping from head-to-head in the public, very little can save the targeted politician from utter shame.
The person who is wearing the lead suit in this situation is Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, who’s just come back from the costliest holiday of this life. While he was living it up in Crete, laying stark naked on a beach and soaking up the sun with gin and tonic in hand, the Taliban were just realising that Afghanistan was up for grabs and began whipping up a brutal frenzy as the American’s scrambled away like rats off a sinking ship, all while thousands of British nationals were still trapped in the country. Like any person on holiday, especially a politician who wants to get away from all the tumultuous craziness that comes wrapped and decorated in political life, he decided to stay for the entire duration of his holiday rather than come back early to deal with this hot new mess.
“Fuck em’! This is my holiday.” Says Mr. Raab while taking a long sip of his gin and tonic, swaying with tipsiness as the sun begins to play lovely tricks with his mind. Totally mesmerised by the tinkling of the melting ice cubes in his glass, he goes on an unstoppable tirade about how cumbersome political life is becoming and that he never finds any real time for his true passion, seashell collecting. Or maybe he had a bit too much faith in his colleagues, thinking that they’d be able to handle themselves in his absence. However, the cabinet was in a terminal state of panic at his absence and found themselves wondering what the hell was taking him so long and whether he’s even fit for his role anymore. Whatever the case may be, he didn’t return from his holiday until the 16th of August, by which time Afghanistan was in the mire of collapse. While the country was falling piece by piece, officials from 10 Downing Street demanded that he should return back home to deal with this developing disease of a problem on the 13th. But why on Earth should he give up two days of luxury out in the Mediterranean? What sort of difference would two days have made anyway? For starters he would’ve managed a head start in contacting government officials and ministers in Afghanistan and Pakistan to try and gain safe passage for all who are trying to flee into Afghanistan’s neighbour. The man was right on the case when he returned, calling people up, pulling strings and getting them out. In the end he got out 17,000 people… since April. That isn’t such an impressive number as that evacuation has been going on for five months. What really matters is how many he managed to get out in the last month. Mr. Frenchy President Emmanuelle Macron suggested that a UN sanctioned zone could be set up to allow safe passage for these people out of the country, but he bit his tongue and swallowed it when he realised that in order to do such a thing, you’d need some form of military presence on the ground, so he decided to shut up and keep his oesophagus blocked to stop any other terrible ideas taking vocal form. Though the number of British people stuck in Afghani mire is in the low hundreds, it seems his skills at evacuation under pressure are like those of a drunkard losing all his pennies at the Claw Machine because that number has held for the last few weeks. Around 13 nationals among a group of 200 got out of the country last night on a flight to Doha, but there’s still quite a lot left for him to get out. There was also some talk about thousands of pleading emails sent to him and his department going unread. Emails from desperate Afghani nationals who were facing death-threats from the Taliban just for helping the British and American forces out as translators and interpreters. This is a very tall and unstable tower of disasters Dominic Raab facing and it’ll take no more than a small cough to bring it all down toppling upon him, which is exactly what was going to happen to him when he attended his hearing at the House of Commons on September 1st. Mr. Raab was well aware that he was walking into his own execution by firing squad, as days leading up to this spectacle many cabinet members had the taste for blood over this ignominy and demanded that Dominic’s neck gets acquainted with the axe.
The scene in the House of Commons was two degrees short of hell. It was like a scoundrel was being led into the Colosseum after the wild-eyed bloodthirsty audience were told they could jump into the arena and hack away at this meat sack. The room was electric with hatred and the grand voices of the ministers, cabinet members and other government big-wigs were buzzing in unison, all crying stupidly for violence. Some even took to slamming the desks with their fists, and before long everyone joined into this deafening chorus which sounded like a thumping crazy heartbeat during a heart attack. Pens and paper balls were being thrown down at poor Dominic Raab who stood there facing the music, sweating profusely as with every passing minute the the certainty that he’d walk out of there with his life intact dwindled immensely. Our brave and fearless unkempt monkey of a Prime Minister Boris Johnson sat among the throng with a pensive and haggard expression. He pulled out a gun from the recesses of his suit and fired one shot into the ceiling with immediately placated the crowd like giving Thorazine to a cage full of lions on acid. Dead silence pervaded the hall except for the small pieces of rubble and plaster which fell from the ceiling. The sight of the gun straightened Dominic Raab out as his brain kicked into some basic survival instinct. Boris Johnson put the gun away and the proceedings began…
Allegations were thrown at him like grenades; fingers were pointed like barrels of great deadly rifles primed to riddle his flesh with holes and nasty words sizzled through the air as they embedded themselves deep into Dominic Raab’s consciousness. While face to face with this orchestra of stupendous vitriol, he tried to make his case as best as he could, whenever he could get a word in edgewise. To all the statements that he didn’t keep in contact with the Pakistani Foreign Minister Mahmood Qureshi and other ministers from Afghanistan, he deflected all those as lies and implored that progress was being made in getting the British nationals and other eligible people out of the frying pan. All those emails that were claimed to have gone unread by him, he explained that the email were the responsibility of the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence as these desperate cries in text sat in their inbox, not his. The entire tone of his defence was deeply apologetic because if those sharks in the House seats smelt anything but pure bedrock apology, they’d have really torn him to bloody shreds.
It’s been 13 days since that hearing and nothing tangible has happened to Dominic Raab. He hasn’t been sacked or killed in his sleep because both seemed like the sort of thing that would happen to him in no particular order. However, a fiery brand of disgrace and shame has been burned right onto his chest and this won’t be forgotten by the cabinet anytime soon. No matter what comes out of Raab’s mouth, the pressure that he’s under from all of his colleagues from both side of the political gulf to quit his position or the alternative that Boris should eventually drop him in the new reshuffle of his House coming up, doesn’t help his situation. But we’re a society of the spectacle and the biggest one has passed. They’ll quietly fire him and the news of it will be buried six feet under other salacious and shallow stories that will give us the instant gratification of emotions reaching high mercury in under two seconds. Soon enough the world will forget about Dominic Raab and his fuck-ups will be effaced from memory because someone else will screw up more royally than him. What we won’t forget however, is the bumbling attitude of the British Cabinet and how insecure they are about their diplomatic image. While America have been involved militaristically in the region of Afghanistan and the Middle East, apart from Iraq Britain has had more of a diplomatic interest in the area. They want to prove to the world that not only can they enforce policies at home but away too. This is where such pointless endeavours like trying to eradicate heroin production in the world’s biggest poppy growing area, a province in the south of Afghanistan called Helmand. Drugs are bad and we’ve got to get rid of them! America couldn’t handle their war on drugs so let’s start our own but overseas. Right indeed. Drugs are a bit of sore subject among political figures, it’s like bringing up necrophilia at an open casket funeral, but there’ll be some who’ll get the sense of depraved humour and snigger quietly in the corner. Going headfirst into the nerve centre of heroin with the mission to rid the earth of this scourge is like taking on Moby Dick in a small paddle boat armed with a toothpick. Even Ahab would scoff at this endeavour and say good luck.
In times of crisis when their diplomatic channels turn into sand flowing through their fingers, the British cabinet are more concerned with figuring out who to blame rather than taking any meaningful action against the problem. But what else can you expect from a room full of politicians whacked out on junk. When their supply runs low, all that stands in their way and a fresh batch of soul tingling heroin is a private chartered flight to Helmand.
Back in the USA… A Word From the Man Who Started it All.
The public have been whipped up into a frenzy of rage. Joe Biden is facing criticism and odium from all angles. If there’s one thing that’s becoming excruciatingly clear in this weird saga is that government officials and country leaders in all parties involved are taking a brutal beating. They’re all fucking stupid and now the hammer is falling at terminal velocity. President Biden spent some time in his cosy log cabin at Camp David and returned on the 17th of August to address the nation. With deep bags underneath his eyes and a washed-out complexion from whatever excessive indulgence pulled him to Camp David to unwind from the pressures of the presidential hot-seat, he stared straight into the lens and said that he stands squarely behind his decision to pull out of Afghanistan.
“There was never a good time to pull out of Afghanistan” says he. Granted he’s right to some degree but by breaking the deadlock which the American military high command completely forgot about, this has become the worst possible time to pull out of the country. He continued to say that he “will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little bit more time in Afghanistan would make a difference.” When unseating a terrorist threat you’ve been fighting for two decades, it doesn’t take a bit more time but a lot more to do the job properly.
Public opinion polls suggest that most of the people were in favour of the American’s pulling out, what they’re so pissed off about is the hatchet job they’ve turned this into. American helicopters landed in Afghanistan to shoot down each and every terrorist dog in the street to begin with, and now they’ve left with the business not only unfinished but completely reset. There’s a whole country being run by terrorist dogs now and they’ll be coming back to bite them all in the ass with the all the terror and confusion that comes with rabies. Even that sub-human goon, George W. Bush crawled out of his hole deep underneath the Virginia swamps and contributed some words to this debacle. That bastard is in knots over this as he’s been “watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness.” With how deep underground this termite has been living, it’s a surprise he got any connection or signal down there. But I suppose as a former president he had all the resources and not to mention the government’s tit at his disposal to suck on for the rest of his life and build himself a brilliant mansion so deep underground that the only thing that would register as a knock on his front door is a hydrogen bomb dropped right on top of that plot of land. This man has been engaged with Afghanistan for so long that his instincts are all tangled up into everything that happens there. He in after all the man who began it all, that courageous soul who went up to the girl at the bar and asked for her number. Afghanistan was his baby. And now his baby has been left at the mercy of the sandstorm. He’s rolling over in his grave, completely alive but dead inside.
A Stash of Arms. New Firepower. A Change in Strategy, “Appear More Human.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that these extreme religious freaks are feeling right on top of the world. The Americans not only left them a country ripe for the taking but as the Taliban began spilling through former US strongholds and military bases, they found another present left just for them. A vast arsenal consisting of about a million ways of instant death; weapons, ammunition, vehicles including land and air as well as defence and offense systems. All this stuff in the hands of the Taliban is going to create one ugly scene for America. Loaded up on American weaponry, a dark swarm of killing machines will emerge from over the sharp horizon, frothing at the mouth and pledging that they’ll destroy the West all for Allah.
A rather disconcerting image ended up on the front page of the Evening Standard on August 31st. I was on my way from work and picked up one of the last remaining copies from the stand next to Moorgate Underground Station. I sat down in the completely abandoned tube carriage and whipped the newspaper up before my eyes. Right there in front of me was a picture of what looked like American soldiers in formation. A row standing at the back and a row on their knees in front.
“Why are they posing for the camera in formation” I thought, “Surely this is a time of great disappointment for them, they wouldn’t want to look at anything resembling a camera lens for a long time.”
But upon closer inspection, as the realisation sneaked into my mind through the back door, I was taken aback and yelled really loud, “Christ on a fucking bike, tell me that isn’t what I think it is!” I was lucky the carriage was empty or I would’ve drawn concerned looks from the poor souls riding with me at such a late hour. These weren’t American troops. No sir. These were Taliban troops who were trying on their new war booty. Dressed the part from head to toe in American desert uniform, helmets and visors with night-vision goggles attached, M4 and M-16 assault rifles in hand. This uncanny sight looked like they were on their way to a costume party and all them planned the exact same look to confuse the party-goers. A sick joke indeed which is not outside their realm of play. I read the caption right next to the picture just to make sure and that ugly sentence made my spine sink, “Taliban soldiers at the airport today.”
“Motherfucker!” I blurted out in a paroxysm of disappointment and apoplexy. “How could they be so goddamn careless?!”
Of course, when a large-scale withdrawal of this magnitude is planned, small arms like guns and ammunition are the last thing on their mind. They just want to get the fuck out of there before things spin out of control and anyone bothering to carry a cache of assault rifles with them is just going to slow themselves down and be shot to death by the bullet storm that’s driving them to the border. Those American boys at least had the prudence to disable over 70 aircrafts, some armoured vehicles and a missile defence system before they got the fuck out of dodge. The question remains however, to what extent have they been disabled? Can anyone with a technical hand strip these death machines down to their components of madness and rebuild them? Will we be seeing Frankenstein monstrosities piloted by Taliban freaks soaring across the skies, westbound for America? Probably not. For instance, they left behind some CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters – giant silvery behemoths with twin blades that can turn a person into mince and the wind into torque – and some Blackbirds – also great flying birds of destruction – and they had the temerity to ensure they were disabled and unflyable. So much complex hardware and software goes into operating these things which would leave anyone who is anything short of an encyclopaedia knowledge of military aviation punching the walls until their knuckles turn to dust in a stupid screaming frenzy of defeated rage and confusion at just making the damn thing take off the ground. That’s a gross exaggeration and that sort of thing is natural when I’m at the helm of thing like this. Absolutely nothing can sedate this horrible tangential nosedive off a slippery cliff, so might as well enjoy the view from top to messy bottom. Regaining my wits for a brief moment here, what I’m basically trying and failing to get at here is that from operation to maintenance, a lot of work and upkeep goes into keeping these things on top form of deadliness, and I have a feeling that’s something the Taliban won’t be able to achieve. Or maybe I’m underestimating the technical knowledge of the Taliban soldiers, maybe there’s some among their ranks who know a thing or two about military aviation, and before we know it, they’ll be turning those American beasts against their masters. Hopefully the former American strongholds in Afghanistan will remain a boneyard for these dead machines, and let’s hope for their sake it doesn’t take much mechanical necromancy to bring these back to life or else the boys in America are in deep trouble.
Whether or not the Taliban can get those helicopters working again is a completely different question. The fact of the matter remains that they’ve had a huge boost in their morale and arsenal and a look at all the loot the Americans left behind in Afghanistan sends a quiver down the spines of anyone who reads it when you consider that they’ve fallen into the worst of wrong hands. The list compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction – a title which is as vague as it is precise – goes as follows…
Humvees (light military vehicles): 3021
Mi-17 Gunship (Russian made helicopters, what a surprise): 32
C-130 Hercules (gigantic herculean transport planes): 3
MD-530 (light helicopters): 43
UH-60 Blackhawks (medium sized crazy menacing flying beats): 33
A-29 Attack Planes (small Brazilan attack planes which sound like a swarm of bees on crack flying inches away from your ear): 23
AC-208 (light counter-insurgency aircraft): 10
Explosive grenades: 20,440
Grenade Launchers: 1349
M16, M4 and Dragunov Rifles: 7035
And then there’s the ammunition to consider which is numbered in the millions upon millions. One begins to wonder whether the idea was the inadvertently fund the enemy. Once their flight back to America was halfway over the Atlantic, a sinking feeling began to set into the pits of their empty stomachs, the sort of feeling that comes when you’ve forgotten something very important. That feeling came to vitality once again, in full form this time once that ugly little list of weapons and loot they left behind grew into a scroll. Top military advisers considered maybe blowing the whole cache to smithereens and leaving the Taliban to clean up the debris. But with no friendly military presence on the ground that option was no longer viable. “Let the buggers keep it, what the fuck are they going to do with it anyway?” was the prevailing opinion, that blissful forgetfulness when you brush your terrible mistakes under the rug and hope no one – most of all you – trip over them.
A plangent grinding is filling up the air in Afghanistan. It’s shattering windows and causing ears to bleed and people are coiling up into the foetal position and crying until they can’t keep themselves conscious anymore. A truly ugly sound which is coming from the axles of the wheels on the Taliban’s PR machine. They’ve changed – or rather are changing – their strategy. Spreading the contents of the human body over an area of a square meter isn’t the best way to make yourselves come across as a peaceful nation, and it seems they’re realising that – or they’re just pretending to realise that. Old habits sure do die hard and what they want us to eat out of their dirty little hands is that their habits have to die someday. Accept us. We swear we won’t blow you up. All the while they’ve been attacking and bombing places in Afghanistan with wanton abandon, because after all it’s their country now, they can do whatever they want with it. How they are trying to go about and changing their cemented image as brainless religious killers is by holding several press conferences – each of them a divine circus act full of demented and deformed freaks – individual threads which weave together into a tapestry of the most unspeakable evil which would make Dagon piss watery pants.
When it became clear that the field is laying open for them, they held their first press conference, urging, nay begging the world to take them seriously. They wanted to be seen as a proper government. Their entire dialogue is a web of lies so hilariously hollow that anyone caught taking it seriously should consider psychological help. This first press conference beamed all across the world and scattered all around the internet on August 17th, right after the Taliban seized Kabul and President Ghani fled the country with his arms flailing behind him. Most of the talking was done by one slimy oleaginous bastard who goes by the name of Zabidullah Mujahid. For years he’s been the mouth piece for the Taliban, lurking in the shadows like some plague rat and sending faceless threats and messages to people and organisations saying exactly what they’ll do to them once they get their filthy little gunpowder-stained fingers on them. So, for him to show his face to the world all of a sudden is a peculiar little instance which is a symptom for the diseased mentality they are holding onto that they can just convince the world they’re peace-loving now, or as they put it, “we will not allow the soil of Afghanistan to be used against anyone.” Sure. His cold, dispassionate eyes, black pits in the face of a killer, stared wistfully into the camera as he blurted out lie after lie through his rotting teeth. A claim more contentious than the rest that women’s right would be protected, and wait for it, “within the framework of Islamic law”. This is a contradictory statement of sorts which will have a crowd laughing at its ridiculousness if one were to deliver it on stage. What the Taliban have been trying to shove down the throats of all who dwell in Afghanistan is the Islamic law anyway, except it’s their version of the Islamic law. If they had their way, they’d sooner slaughter the entire female population in the country and bury any female child alive than let them have a say in anything. From the outside looking in, the eyes of traditionalist Muslims see women as nothing more than objects to be wed, a symbol of familial respectability and a means to produce an offspring. It goes without saying that not all Muslims are like that but a majority of them surely are. It’s a product of the entanglement of their religious teachings and a grossly anachronistic set of traditional family values. So that twisted version of the Islamic law that these hate-bent extremists are peddling spells trouble for the female population of Afghanistan and then the rest of the world. It’s not just the women either, but the homosexuals, the elderly who can’t contribute to the cause and anyone who even thinks about any idea that isn’t sanctioned as acceptable in their eyes. They want to get rid of any undesirables and keep their race proud, strong and ruthless…. Weird memories are coming back, echoing through the blood frescoed walls of history. Who else was it who had the bright idea of keeping their race pure by getting rid of what was to his eyes an entire orchard of rotten apples?
When they claim that there will be no reprisals or attacks, that they have embraced peace and love as swiftly as a square after their first acid trip, there’s such spectacular irony holding that statement up that it leaves the mind in a vacuum of incredulity. The very chair Zabidullah Mujahid sat in to deliver those hollow sermons was the chair which seated the director of Afghanistan’s media and information centre, Dawa Khan Menapal until he was assassinated by the Taliban. As is to be expected, the Taliban take responsibility of the killing when this Mujahid character said that Menapal was “killed in a special attack.” Special? My mind seems to cower away from my imagination when I try to wonder what sort of special means they used to silence that poor man.
Then came the second appearance on September 1st when we humoured this nonsensical talk enough to let another Taliban spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen, have the eyes and ears of the British viewing public for 15 minutes on Good Morning Britain. Talks unfolded a little like this; more desperate reassurances that the rights of women would be protected and that they’d be allowed to gain an education and work as long as it met the conditions of Islamic law, people would be allowed the leave the country provided they had the proper documents, and finally the classic schtick that there’d be an end to the violence. He went on to urge the Afghani people to stay in the country so they could “rebuild” their home together. A menacing edge in his vice during that statement made that sound more like a threat then an entreaty. Once he had his time and the act was over, a Conservative MP, Tom Tugenhadt who is the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and also formerly served in Afghanistan saw the whole thing for what it was and went into an indignant tearing spree, calling out these claims for the stinking lies they are. This “slick PR operation masking a vicious death-cult” as he put it, is throwing as many punches as they can upon us while they continue their dirty business within the bounds of their country, an almost sound-proof echo chamber where they have such a violent grasp of the media and information that they will go leaps and bounds to make sure their “human” image projects as far across the world as the waves can carry it, and if anyone happens to report on their true activities, well just cut their heads off and bury them in the desert. Because this whole time they’ve been terrorising the Afghan population with random house-to-house searches, blood freezing threats of death to those who worked with NATO and Western forces if they don’t hand themselves in, public figures being assassinated such as most recently a folk singer named Fawad Andarabi being killed right after the Taliban place a ridiculous ban on the performance of music. There’s a long and ever-growing hit list which the Taliban are crossing names off using the blood of their enemies. But what they don’t realise is that they’ll never run out of enemies, it’s just the way their ideology spins on its axis.
What starts to become spine-chillingly clear when listening to their vague words and horrible language through the ages of their presence is that their ideologies are in constant flux. There has never been one solid codex they’ve been following; it changes shape and form anytime they have a new enemy and decide to oppress a new opponent. A vast and never ending re-write and re-draft has characterised the evolution of their beliefs, changing their stance from one moment to the next in order to convince us of whatever they’re trying to tell us.
A high levelled Taliban leader walks into a store. Storming in like he owns the place he locks his eyes onto the timid bespectacled shop keeper. He demands for some chewing tobacco. A cold chill runs down the shopkeeper’s spine like the tip of a whip and turns his legs into jelly as he realises that he just sold the last pack of chewing tobacco to that fat obnoxious man a few hours ago. Gulp. Beads of sweat form on his brow and flow down his face in rivulets as he fearfully trembles out the words, “I… I don’t… don’t have any left sir…” The Taliban leader’s eyes turn into empty wells as a crazed sort of anger crawls into them. He demands the shopkeeper to produce some this instant or meet his end. Not another full word comes out of the shopkeeper’s mouth before the gorilla of a terrorist pulls out a pistol out of his turban and begins waving it around, shooting idly into the isles of the shop as a barefaced threat. Hands trembling with abject fear, the shopkeeper takes off his glasses as they’ve steamed up from the sweat and pleads to the Taliban officer that he doesn’t have any left but will get him some later free of charge, when his deliver arrives. A steel-melting scream of anger emerges from the gaping mouth of the terrorist and he promptly shoots the shopkeeper through the throat. Returning to his headquarters, he recounts the disrespectful incidence of a short shopkeeper with glasses refusing him service to other leaders of his rank and they all put their heads together to decide that not only will chewing tobacco be forbidden to anyone except them but also wearing spectacles will carry the death penalty. In the following days leagues of Taliban soldiers roam the streets gouging out the eyes of anyone wearing glasses and those among them who happen to be visually impaired, well tough, there’s nothing much to see here anyway. All the while they sit on a mountain of chewing tobacco.
Ah, wild and unbridled fascinations and scenarios spiralling out of my head like electric springs. But somehow this sort of behaviour doesn’t seem at all out of their character. And if they indeed start a nightmarish witch-hunt against bespectacled people, I better come to grips with wearing contact lenses.
Welcome to the Heroin Fields. The Comedown, A Return to Reality. The Crude Epilogue to this Stupid Saga.
News is slowing down. That initial rush which attached me to this story like a hook through the mouth of a trout is starting to fizzle out. No more front-page spreads of developments in Afghanistan. No new developments. No more winds given rise to by unfathomable stupidity for me to ride upon. It was around September 3rd that the story began to fall out of the front page and found itself buried a dozen pages into newspapers, under stories far more titillating. Today the front page is a ghastly picture of Kristen Stewart at the Venice Film Festival looking like she just kicked a 5-year long heroin habit last week. Well good for her, but what about me? I sustain myself on the pure power of disaster. I can’t get enough of the world fucking up constantly, and it seems that everyone is almost behaving themselves right now. I suppose I can sit back and enjoy this peace safe in the knowledge that soon, just around the bend, there will come another terrible saga for me to surf on.
Fine music is blasting out of my stereo, shaking the very walls and making the ice cubes dance in my rum as I the up these last few words on the very edge of a stupor. And all of a sudden, I’m gripped by another one of those strange whispers turning into screams out of the echoes of history. All this monkey business has happened before, and under eery similarities. It was 1973 when the Americans pulled out of Vietnam and in under 2 years Saigon had fallen. My drunken mind is making preternatural connections which other journalists have made under the crystal thinking of sobriety. America pulls out of Vietnam once they realise there’s no more fun to be had there, resigning the country to its fate and hoping that it would hold out against the VC for longer than it actually did. Those scenes of heightened Pandemonium were as similar in Vietnam and Afghanistan as the screams of the fearful people were when they pleaded the Americans to take them with. Desperate Hands grabbed onto helicopter wheels as they took off, sending people falling to their messy death, much like the same hands in Afghanistan that grabbed onto the landing gears of airplanes and helicopters as they flew out of Afghanistan. The Pentagon was chasing their tails in a stupid confusion once VC flags were waving in the humid air over Saigon, much like they were once the Taliban took over Kabul like a nest of hornets on DMT. Evacuation missions were needed after the American pulled out in both cases. Embassies abandoned, information lost, whole countries left in turmoil and strife. The only difference is that while in Vietnam the fields bore rice, in Afghanistan the fields bloomed with heroin.
One would think that after Vietnam the Americans would’ve learned how to compose themselves in such a situation. But I suppose after such a monumental fuck up as that, even I would repress every memory tainted with its remembrance. Vietnam would’ve almost been a free pass for them had they not made the same blunder in almost the precisely same fashion. How is one supposed to reconcile this fact that the Americans just cause trouble wherever they go? When will they come to their senses and clean up their own messes rather than letting the slow tide of history wash it out to sea like the deplorable jetsam that bobs across the ebbs of time? And when will I stop trying to gain passage onto these tenuous rafts and attempting to voyage across these murky waters stained with the combined hubris and insanity of the human race? I suppose when pigs start flying, but that doesn’t leave me with much time at all when one considers that police can ride helicopters.
*Post-script*
After a long ride with the specimens involved, I’ve grown close enough to them to want to witness their own execution and maybe bow my head if the solemnity finds its way into my heart. I want to take a look at where these people are now.
Joe Biden had made possible the biggest and most costly screw-up just under a year into his presidency. But he is resolute in the conviction that he’s done the right thing, and if karma exists and adjusts itself to the personal moral compasses of people, then hopefully Mr Biden will get what he deserves, for good or ill.
Boris Johnson reshuffled his cabinet on September 15th – just two days ago - so that the shameful odour of the individuals under his command don’t pervade the parliament any longer. Amidst this shake-up, Dominic Raab has been demoted from the position of Foreign Secretary… but has risen from the ashes like a hybrid between a phoenix and a cockroach and has assumed the post of Justice Secretary, Lord Chancellor and, here’s the kicker, Deputy Prime Minister. This is evidence enough that the brain inside of Boris Jonhson’s skull isn’t that of a human but of an ostrich.
Meanwhile the Taliban have kept their country watertight, continuing with whatever lamentable business that goes one behind closed gates and hatching some plan or another to yet again convince us that they’re not conniving assholes who will stab us in the spines the first chance they get. In between their talks, they’re wacked out of their heads on some good heroin – and chewing tobacco – which they won’t share with the rest of the world.
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