Will those in Afghanistan be helped by the recall of the UK Parliament?

I sat on Sunday pulled between live coverage from Kabul and David Pratt’s excellent article – The Taliban’s Return – whilst remembering those friends, the stories of their lands, tribes, even the two whole sentences I was taught in Pushto.

I remember them “explaining” their history, not as I had learnt from the view of Empire, and their boast that Afghanistan was never conquered, never “captured”. I don’t remember us ever discussing the Persians being there in the BC years, but we were mere teenagers. There was a pragmatic shrug from one, who told me she’d heard it said “we’d wait to see who’s winning and then join them”. Sometimes the joining was negotiated, sometimes it was immediate expediency.

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At the time, I didn’t understand. But I began to, during the Russian invasion from 1979 to 1989, attempting to follow the rival warlords and their inter-tribal horse-trading, along with the mental gymnastics of some as they justified negotiations with the Russians.

Was it of immediate concern to the fighters who supplied their arms, ammunition? I doubt it, since payback would always be “later”, after the fighting was over. And who was that overseas fighter who had pitched up, Osama Bin Laden? Who was funding him in the fight against the Russians? But that fight slipped into the civil war of the 1990s and the emergence of the Taliban. They were then, and they are now, an unelected totalitarian theocracy. And so the West bombed Afghanistan post-9/11, shipped out men and boys to Guantanamo, whilst seeming to promise a self-sustaining, social democratic state with equality for everyone, especially the young, the girls the women.

Within 20 years? With rampant corruption? And still without cross-country infrastructure we take for granted: transportation, roads, hospitals, education, training facilities for the required professionals to maintain and progress their nation. Instead, it comes with porous borders surrounded by states that still view it as a gateway to other countries, with their resources, markets, and ultimately the Indian Ocean. Neighbouring countries view it as a buffer zone between old foes.

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If you witnessed others profiteering and profiting but you’re not paid regularly, your ammunition depleted, not resupplied, your families in unsecured rural areas, the first to fall, would you stand and fight?

With what? And for whom? So maybe that’s where the pragmatic approach comes into play, the immediate expediency required to survive.

How will the recall of parliament here help them there? Just to see more hand-ringing, head-nodding, castigating the “cowardice” of a supposedly well-trained military. I doubt the missing-in-action Foreign Secretary will do more than make the usual wordy speech, unable to disguise another failure of the UK Government this time, possibly the worst foreign policy debacle since the ill-advised, ill-conceived Suez catastrophe.

Will Scotland offer some succour, some homes, some future to a few of the thousands who will inevitably flee? Or will the likes of the PM and Patel in Westminster continue to control decisions and policies that view refugees, asylum seekers, newcomers as a number first, requiring state support, without recognising our generations and what we’ve brought and contributed?

As ever, I believe Scotland will do what little it can whilst confined within the failed state that is the UK.

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh

WHAT next, First Minister, what next?

The conjurers and alchemists of Westminster are now hard at work spinning their web of deceit. It turns out that these same are no friends of an independent, progressive, modern, internationalist and European Scottish state.

In 2014, the Scottish Government made a case for independence in a substantial document of several hundred pages. In 2016, the fanatics and zealots of English nationalist imperialism made their case with an egregious lie inscribed on the side of a bus. It is this same bus that will be used as Trojan horse to smash its way through any notion of independence.

In 2016 we were instructed that we entered the European Union referendum as “one United Kingdom”. In the stark light of day, in the tragic aftermath, the will of the voters of Scotland and of Northern Ireland counted for nothing.

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The “Union of equals” revealed itself for what it always was, and those of the public media who typically ascribe the break-up of the United Kingdom to the machinations of the SNP are thus required to re-configure their proscriptions.

The spores of the present public health crisis germinated in the scorched earth of Westminster’s politically motivated austerity, catastrophic disinvestment, and the hollowing out of the public sector. Public assets, previously held in common ownership, are now commodities traded between private equity monoliths.

These once public assets now engirdle the earth in an instant, while the youth of our nation are no longer free to work and access higher education in the European Union. This is the true investment of the “taking back of control”.

Until Scotland becomes independent, this stigmata of the zealots and fanatics of English nationalist imperialism will remain a permanent brand imprinted upon the youth of Scotland.

The spores of the next pandemic already germinate in the corrupted soil of a Westminster administration of incendiary incompetence and lassitude.

What they sow, we reap.

I am not sure, therefore, that awaiting the pleasure of an insurgent virus or a viral Westminster autocracy is a superior tactic for the Scottish leadership to embrace.

Where to now, First Minister? Where to, now?

Keith Steiner
Cornhill, Aberdeenshire