Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 Source Daily Telegraph 31/08/21 Link Taliban celebrations erupt across Kabul As US troops finally departed from Kabul, celebratory gunfire and fireworks erupted over the city as the Taliban declared "full independence". Shaky video footage distributed by the Taliban showed fighters entering the airport, bringing an end to the largest airlift in recent history and closing the final route to safety for many desperate Afghans seeking to flee the insurgents.  "It is a historical day and a historical moment," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference at the airport after the departure. "We are proud of these moments, that we liberated our country from a great power... this is a big lesson for other invaders and for our future generation.  "Congratulations to Afghanistan... this victory belongs to us all." Many Afghans are terrified of a repeat of the Taliban's initial rule from 1996-2001, which was infamous for their treatment of gir...

 If the Taliban embarks on a killing spree, Biden's reputation will take another battering Source - Daily Telegraph - 30/08/21 Link Is it all over yet? So Joe Biden appeared to ask himself as he was caught taking a sly look at his watch during a service to mark the arrival, at an airbase in Delaware, of the bodies of 13 US troops killed in the blast outside Kabul airport last week. Sorry, Joe, but no it isn’t over yet. In fact, the bloodbath in Afghanistan has yet to begin. But the signs, sadly, are there. The Taliban’s intentions are pretty clear from the many reports of their bully boys going from door to door searching for individuals they believe to have worked with Allied forces during the past two decades. According to Ajmal Ahmady, the former governor of Afghanistan’s Central Bank, who fled as soon as the Taliban reached Kabul, several addresses where he lived have already been visited. In an interview with Zenger News a man claiming to be a Taliban commander boasted that t...

  Sir John Redwood is MP for Wokingham, and is a former Secretary of State for Wales. Source - Conservative Home 30/08/21 Link My comments the other day about business needing to pay truck drivers more and improve their conditions of employment have apparently upset some people. It is a curious but now deep-rooted view of many on the Left that the UK should have remained in a free movement of labour zone with the EU. They favour us attracting skilled people from the lower-paid parts of the European Union to fill our job gaps instead of putting the pay up for UK residents, or training more home talent. Since the per capita income of the eastern parts of the EU remains at about one third of UK levels, there is still plenty of scope, as they see it, for us to bid people away from these lower pay countries whilst keeping well beneath our own current pay bounds. I have some moral as well as economic and political issues with this approach. Should we denude Poland of truck drivers, or t...

Liberals who think they can export their values everywhere are making the globe more dangerous Source - Daily Telegraph - 29/08/21 Link Defeat in Afghanistan has prompted many clichés and glib conclusions. With a wise nod, commentators call it “the graveyard of empires”. Despite all evidence, politicians insist, “we must work to moderate the Taliban”. It has become fashionable, too, to deride the suggestion that “history has ended”, famously made by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was the idea, based on Hegel’s belief that history is the progress of reason, that liberal democracy and market capitalism had triumphed and no alternative ideological system could challenge them. It should not have taken humiliation in Afghanistan to realise that history is very much still here with us. At home, liberal democracies are struggling to cope with bifurcated labour markets, stagnant pay and deep inequality. They are struggling to contain social fissures caused by ageing p...

British Cabinet insiders were quoted as suggesting the US president 'looked gaga' and described him as 'doolally' Source - Daily Telegraph - 28/08/21 Link Joe Biden "will remember" comments about his mental acuity emanating from senior figures in the UK, and will "bear a grudge" against Britain, sources told the Telegraph. It came after Cabinet insiders were quoted as suggesting the US president "looked gaga" and described him as “doolally” in the wake of the fall of Kabul. "The Brits have their view. But they should be careful. What's been said is offensive and he will remember it. He actually has a long memory," a US source told the Telegraph. "It's always been his way that if somebody says something really bad to him, or about him, he doesn't speak to them again. He does bear grudges. Boris Johnson should know that." The source added: "The president is not 'gaga'. He's actually picked up h...

Britain has grown used to a strong America. Now, it must contend with a weak leadership in retreat Link DOUGLAS MURRAY 27 August 2021 • 8:00pm The White House’s press spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, made an interesting claim earlier this week. Asked about America’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan, she refused to hear any criticism. The US was overseeing an operation that is now on track to be the largest airlift in American history, she said. “So no, I would not say that it is anything but a success.” That is an interesting redefinition of the word “success”. Though it is in line with a style that has marked out America of late. The nation’s sporting stars like to single themselves out for a range of skills: best taking of the knee; strongest raising of the fist; fastest turning of the back on the national anthem. The world’s other nations send their athletes to international events in order to win. While America each time gets caught up in another round of self-absorbed gesture-politics. Sim...

With the integrity of Nato up for question, hostile regimes are busy probing the West’s weak spots Source - Daily Telegraph - 25/08/21 Link Early on in his presidency, Donald Trump dropped the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan – a prelude, it turned out, not to a tougher line on the Taliban but cutting a deal with them. His foreign policy always was erratic and impulsive, which has its merits: America’s enemies could never quite tell how he’d react. Joe Biden is more predictable. He wants to rebuild at home, with fewer overseas entanglements. His foreign policy can be summed up in two words: less America. The horror at Kabul Airport gives a vivid example of what “less America” looks like – and this will just be the start. A few days ago, the G7 met – not to agree any plan of action, but to beg Biden to hold the airport for a few days longer. He refused. Without America, the rest of the G7 has nothing to say. The same is true for Nato. Biden says he is diverting his attention to Chin...

 The end of freedom of movement is forcing us to think properly about immigration policy. That's a rather good thing Source - Daily Telegraph 25/08/21 Link Britain is preparing itself for yet another bout of panic-buying as supermarket shoppers hoard supplies of goods they fear will be in short supply in the months ahead. Even McDonald’s has run out of milkshakes, thanks to the shortage of HGV drivers. It’s all the fault of Brexit, according to those still not resigned to our new post-EU reality. And speaking as someone who campaigned for Vote Leave, I accept they have a point. But not a particularly powerful one. It is obviously true that by ending freedom of movement, which was a mandatory part of being an EU member, immigration to the UK has dropped. And among those numbers of people no longer arriving to live and work here are individuals on whose labour we previously depended, including lorry drivers. The logic deployed by people with “FBPE” (follow back, pro-Europe) in their ...

China and Russia ultimately have more to fear from the Jihadi destabilisation of Central Asia than the US Source  - Daily telegraph 24/08/21 Link It is not easy to defend anything about Joe Biden’s tragically-bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, nor to argue that the long-term damage to both America’s strategic interests and Western credibility is probably negligible. But I will take a stab. One thing you learn covering foreign affairs for more than 40 years is that quick judgments based on emotional scenes invariably lead to false geopolitical conclusions. The President told White House reporters on Sunday night that “history” would vindicate his decision to wind back decades of imperial overstretch, cutting American losses in an intractable corner of the world, and ending a 20-year war that has diverted $2 trillion of taxpayer money from more pressing strategic priorities.  He also stated that China and Russia will view the US withdrawal with some concern, belying the reflex...

The media outlets which sold the wars, and sold Biden’s candidacy too, are now whispering that he’s past it. Source - Daily Telegraph 23/08/21 Link Joe Biden’s extended honeymoon with the US media is over. Amid the fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the fact-checkers have turned on him. There will be no turning back.  Most of the American media were so unhinged by their loathing of Donald Trump, and so excited by the prospect of reviving the Ray-Banned glory days of the Obama administration, that they promoted Biden as the ‘normal’ candidate and protected him from questions about his record and abilities. No longer.  The question is, why? It seems unlikely that the pro-Democratic media have had a momentary fit of reflection, let alone conscience, and suddenly abandoned their posts as self-appointed propagandists as precipitately as the staff of America’s embassy in Kabul made for the helicopters.  The answer may lie closer to home. In withdrawing from Afghanistan, Bide...

The Taliban will be celebrating on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 Source - Daily Telegraph 22/08/21 Link It seems likely that the twentieth anniversary of the Al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States – the event that brought the American military to Afghanistan – will be remembered for the start of the second Taliban emirate. Just how fundamentally flawed was US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad’s strategy for negotiating with the insurgents is now laid bare. It was driven by the United States’ desire to withdraw its troops, meaning the US had already given away its main bargaining chip before it came to the table. Even more dangerously, it gambled on the Taliban actually wanting to negotiate an end to the war rather than try for military victory. Stemming from that desire and that assumption came first, Khalilzad’s caving in to Taliban demands to exclude the Afghan government from negotiations. From those talks emerged the bilateral US-Taliban deal signed in Fe...

 It's important to remember just how much stock the SNP puts in GERS figures...   The SNP won't admit the brutal economic logic of what independence would really mean   Whatever the evidence, the SNP faithful will close their eyes and blindly recite the catechism Source CAPX 19/08/21 Link Yesterday was a very special day in Scotland’s political calendar. GERSday comes but once a year but when it does, the air is filled with much excitement – and an equal degree of disappointment.  Before considering the various political reactions to the Scottish Government’s annual analysis of what’s been spent and raised in Scotland, we should remind ourselves of the importance and legitimacy the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland figures enjoy in the nationalist community. In the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum, the SNP produced its definitive argument in favour of a Yes vote. That weighty tome prefaced its own analysis of the GERS data thus: “GERS is the autho...

The craven behaviour of the USA’s court media has hidden for too long the president’s deep flaws. Source - Daily Telegraph 20/08/21 Link The world appears to have woken up to an important truth this week: which is that Joe Biden is a truly terrible president. It is a shame that it took America gifting Afghanistan back to the Taliban for so many people to realise this. To be charitable, there were perhaps two reasons why this had not become more obvious before. The first is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and for a lot of the planet that seems to be recommendation enough to occupy the Oval Office. A break from the Trump show appealed to an awful lot of people. But the second reason why too few realised what the world was going to get from a Biden presidency is that the US media simply didn’t ask the questions it needed to ask. Before the election a near entirety of the American media gave up covering it and simply campaigned for the Democrat nominee. It was the same with the Big Tech...

At home and abroad, the most Left-wing White House in history is actively driving America’s decline Source - Daily Telegraph - 19/08/21 Link The past few days have been among the most painful in over half a century for the United States on the international stage. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a humiliation for the world’s superpower. It may take decades before America’s standing is restored, and faith in American leadership is fully revived. The fallout from Afghanistan will exceed even that which followed the end of the Vietnam War, not only in terms of the damage to America’s self-confidence but also the threat it will pose to its security. The Taliban will inevitably turn their country once again into a safe haven for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to strike against the US. Nato has also been undermined. The retreat from Afghanistan has weakened the alliance, and squandered nearly 20 years of collective effort by its 30 member...

The US is in retreat on all fronts, and its incompetent politicians are incapable of reversing the decline Source - Daily Telegraph 18/08/21 Link No empire is eternal: all eventually fall amid hubris and humiliation. The heart-wrenching, humanitarian calamity that is the botched Afghan retreat is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending: Washington is no longer the world’s policeman, and an unsettling future of clashes between expansionist, authoritarian regional powers beckons. It is a far cry from the late 1980s-early 1990s, when America’s global clout peaked. The Reagan rebirth, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the termination of communism and its gulags, the rise of Silicon Valley and the invention of the internet, the liberation of Kuwait: these were the anni mirabiles of the US hegemon, the glory days of Pax Americana, bookending humanity’s most turbulent century. Hollywood held its head high, and everybody wanted to be like America, vote like America and consum...