Only Another 150 To Go

US president Joe Biden recently announced his administration will pull US troops out of Afghanistan, bringing an end to its longest lasting war which started in 2001 and has taken the lives of 111,000 Afghan civilians, 2,000 US Troops and 400 British soldiers all for a price tag of $778bn.
You could be forgiven for not remembering the origins of the war, it was a long time ago and what started it all could be a bit hazy now but what it was absolutely not about at any time was going over there to keep us safe over here.
Let's go back to September 11, 2001 and the planes flying into the World Trade Centre buildings. Al Queada took the credit and as Bin Laden was head of the terrorist group, it was his head that America decided to come down upon.
As Bin Laden was in Afghanistan under the wing of the Afghanistan Government, the Taliban, it was to Afghanistan that America turned ordering the Taliban to hand him over for trial on threat of military action if they never.
The offer was made by George W Bush and Tony Blair that the Taliban would be left in power if they handed him over to the United States and the Taliban offered to trial him in Afghanistan or hand him over to the Pakistan authorities but America rejected the offer and stated that they would not negotiate their demands.
While this was going on, the US and Britain were trying to get United Nations backing to attack Afghanistan but because the UN can only sanction military action as an act of self-defence, the UN never backed it.
A 37-nation poll of world opinion carried out by Gallup in September 2001 found that large majorities in 34 of the countries did not favour military action, only in three countries, the United States, Israel, and India, was there a majority for a military strike.
With no UN backing, it was declared a NATO operation and on October 7, NATO began bombing Afghanistan.
Three days into the bombing, US officials rejected a new offer from the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third country for trial if the Americans halted the bombing.
Nineteen years later and the Taliban may be out of Government but they still run one fifth of the nation and have a force 85,000 strong waiting to swoop back into power but never was it ever about our boys fighting so we can sleep safely in our beds at night. The Afghanistan War was entirely all about punishing the Taliban for not handing over Bin Laden and anything other is an attempt to rewrite the origins of an unpopular and disastrous war.
We shouldn't heap any praise on Biden and America for pulling their invading army out of one country because they still have troops stationed in over 150 other countries so it's a case of saying that's one down, now get you arse's out of the other 150.