THE developments in Afghanistan have rightly been headline news in recent days, with the world witnessing the huge distress of desperate people at Kabul airport and elsewhere across that war-torn country. David Pratt’s direct experience, as ever, has been among the most helpful versions of current events. But, while the UK and US governments have excused their delayed activity on the speed of the Taliban takeover, their inactivity is an all too typical response to major crises.

We witnessed the same failure to understand what forces they were unleashing from UK prime minister Tony Blair claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and US president George Bush in 2003 talking about the Iraq war in front of a banner saying “Mission Accomplished” ahead of years of destructive tension and violence. Recently, we have heard UK prime minister Boris Johnson claiming that UK military involvement has supported the achievement of fundamental changes in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban were not “guaranteed the kind of victory that you sometimes read about”.

This real story of people living and serving there has been one of continuing danger and instability in Kabul, the main city of Afghanistan, which is at odds with the statements of politicians about the progress made by our troops serving in that country. The true recent history also explains the speed of the Taliban’s return to power and should have made it much less surprising. Where, therefore, were the contingency plans by the UK and US governments for an emergency evacuation of their own citizens and of those local people employed by them during their occupying years?

Events in Afghanistan reflect the response to the Covid pandemic. The history of pandemics over the past thousand years is one of huge outbreaks at least once a century and in the past few decades we have experienced bird flu and SARS epidemics. Where were the contingency plans by the UK and other governments and stores of emergency supplies when Covid-19 started to spread across the world? Why was there so little immediate action in the UK as the spread reached crisis point in Italy and then Spain?

The Brexit experience is yet another example of major economic and employment problems being predicted, not as baseless scare stories but grounded in detailed fact-based analysis. The response from the UK Government is yet again too slow and too late and we are already experiencing the predicted crisis in trade and workforce availability.

The biggest global risk of all is from climate change with the threats increasingly well documented over the past 50 years and following the first Montreal conference in the 1980s. While there are issues about delivery, at least we have a Scottish Government, with an SNP/Green arrangement, which has better plans than most other governments. Following UK Government failure to plan and respond adequately to major crises throughout our lifetimes, what confidence is there about the response to the biggest threat the world has ever faced – the climate emergency?

Andrew Reid
Perthshire

“THE French government began evacuating its local Afghan staff on May 10, including cooks, drivers and cleaners. The aim was to have only French staff remaining by July — and indeed a final evacuation flight for non-essential staff took off July 17, when the Taliban already controlled large parts of the country, four weeks before the fall of Kabul,” Politico reports.

Where was the equivalent evacuation plan for the UK? In my view the failure of the UK government to act sooner is criminally incompetent in light of the Taliban’s previous murderous behaviour to those suspected of aiding their enemies. What were the UK’s military and diplomatic advisors telling the government and when?

There are fools in charge of the UK whom we have to suffer, but nothing like the suffering any Afghan allies we abandon will experience.

Andy Pearson
Edinburgh

I WRITE in response to the letter from Neil Munro on August 27. He says that Biden is to be applauded for facing up to the fact that another 10 years of war was not in anybody’s interests.

We must NEVER applaud the warmongers in the White House, as that just encourages them to bomb more babies, more wedding parties, bomb more countries into the stone age so that they can give contracts to American companies to rebuild the infrastructure they have just destroyed, and then BETRAY those who have helped them.

Until the rest of the world stands up to the aggressive, militaristic, imperial foreign policy of the USA, the rest of the world will have to put up with more of what is happening in Afghanistan.

Margaret Forbes
Via email