Despite untold amounts of blood and treasure being expended on trying to turn that Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan, into a relatively civilised country, it is almost certain that the Taliban and their Dark Ages (or worse) version of Islam will retake the country in a matter of ours rather than days. The pulling out of Western powers from Afghanistan has shown that the Taliban were not destroyed. All that appears to have happened is that the Taliban leadership and their supporters laid low in Pakistan, with the possible help of elements in Pakistani military intelligence and bided their time, waiting for the Western powers to make a major error.

The major error has been made. Both Presidents Trump and Biden long ago signalled to the Taliban and to the world that America was going to abandon Afghanistan and pull their troops out. It was almost certain that when this information was communicated, that it would be exploited by the very same enemy that America, Britain and a whole host of other civilised nations and spent over 15 years fighting.

And so it has come to pass. Afghanistan has a government in name only and the Taliban are but hours away from taking the capital city Kabul. The horror of the extreme forms of Islam that the Taliban brought to Afghanistan has returned, but this time the bloodshed will be even worse than last time the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Now not only will the Taliban torture and kill those who do not adhere to the Taliban’s version of Islam, but they will also victimise any Afghan that has had anything to do with the Western backed former government of Afghanistan and anybody who has helped the Western military powers. It is these Afghan’s, those who have seen the value of civilisation over savagery, who the West has openly and publicly abandoned and who will bear the brunt of the revenge of the Taliban.

Despite what both Trump and Biden seem to have once believed, withdrawing from Afghanistan will not bring peace or stability to either Afghanistan or the world. The vacuum left by the withdrawal of the Western Powers will be filled by the Chinese Communists who although they will fight with much less humanitarian rules of engagement than the Western powers did, could find themselves in trouble, if the West is lucky. Afghanistan is now home to not just the Taliban and all the myriad of brutal Islamic tribes that it’s always been home to, but it’s also now home for a number of foreign Islamic militants from all over the world including those extremists from China’s own Islamic minority the Uighurs and from Islamic populations that hail from places like the UK.

China’s admittedly massive army whilst very impressive and increasing in technological ability, has not to my knowledge been properly tested on the battlefield on a large scale recently apart from some skirmishes with India.  The Chinese Communists although they have been involved in the Syrian civil war by supplying special forces have not had to fight, as an occupying power, a guerilla war against an enemy that is religiously motivated and is on home ground that it knows very very well, for a long time.

Whether or not China becomes involved in Afghanistan, there is no good news for the West that will come from the collapse of Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban. It is almost certain that Afghanistan will again become a home for Islamic extremist groups from where will be sent out not just new jihadists but also instructions to those jihadists who have embedded themselves in Western nations to activate. If we thought that ISIS was bad just wait until the terror inspired by those in Afghanistan really gets going. The situation may be even worse than at first imagined. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility for these terror groups to already be in Afghanistan and already plotting what to do now the Western military has departed and possibly activating their overseas terror assets.

From reading some of the claims and reports that are coming out of Afghanistan, I’m getting the uneasy feeling that we might be looking at something like the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Some of these reports state that US Embassy and remaining military officials are burning paperwork to stop it falling into the hands of the Taliban. This is not the sort of action that is taken by a nation making an organised withdrawal from a territory or a nation, this is the action of a nation facing a rout.

I’m old enough to recall the end of the Vietnam War and it was imprinted on my then young mind by my headmistress at primary school coming into every class and telling us about the Paris Peace Accords which marked the start of the end of the Vietnam War. I recall her pointing to a map of North and South Vietnam and telling us that the war, which had dominated news reports for almost my entire life at that point, was effectively over. Because I recall the end of the Vietnam War and the rout of the Americans which it eventually became and the abandonment of the South Vietnamese non-Communists by America, I have grim feelings about Afghanistan. The Afghan war is ending not in peace or by the creation of a revitalised and civilised Afghanistan, but in outright disaster. It’s going to end up with the humiliation of the West, the dragging in of China for good or ill and I sadly predict, a massive rise in Islamic terrorism. This last issue is what worries me most at least in the short to medium term. This is because the security services in the UK are already having to monitor tens of thousands, possibly as high as 40,000 individuals who are of Islamic terrorist concern. Adding into that number a possibly equally large number of ‘clean skin’ Muslims who are radical but who have not shown their hands yet or been activated by any terror groups and there arises the distinct possibility that we may end up with more Islamic terrorists or backroom supporters than the police or Thames House can possibly monitor and interdict where justified.

The fall of Afghanistan will not only be a tragedy for those Afghans who do not want to live in the seventh century world that the Taliban will create, but will be a tragedy for all of us. The entire world will have to live in a world where there is an intensified conflict involving China in Afghanistan which will increase geopolitical tensions. Also many of us in Western nations will now have to live with a greatly increased risk of Islamic terrorism fomented by Islamic terror groups who will and most likely have already found a home in Afghanistan. This terror will be possibly brought here by Afghan or other Islamic terrorists posing as ‘refugees’ and those already resident in Western nations who have been biding their time and waiting for the order to strike.

Nobody but no one is going to win from the return of the Taliban. Geopolitics will become more tense, there will be massive bloodshed in Afghanistan itself and those of us in Western countries might have to get used to a mass casualty Islamic terror attack at least once a month. Things do not look good.