The Fall of Kabul

Journal

Volume 2

Blitzkrieg - Lightning War

I

AFGHANISTAN may be the other side of the world and, therefore, too distant for concern.

Some will be put out that the Fall of Kabul today, Sunday August 15, 2021, has caused inconvenience and ruined their day because BBC News has moved aside all sports news.

My generation, and the one before me, can recall the 1940 Blitzkrieg launched on May 10, 1940, the day the King - Our Queen’s Father - invited Winston Churchill to form a government of national unity, having reluctantly accepted Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's resignation.

II

Given the tumultuous events of that day one imagines the then Foreign Secretary (equivalent to the US Secretary of State) being at his desk in Whitehall. Lord Halifax, a very strong advocate for appeasement, could not be found!

The principal private secretary to the newly appointed prime minister - John Colville - was tasked to "find him - now!”

Eventually Lord Halifax was tracked down - a longstanding appointment with his dentist!

The diary entry by Colville suggests that his new boss was less than impressed. I often wonder what Lord Halifax pondered as he lay back in the dental chair, knowing that just behind him, 80 miles away across side of the English Channel, all hell had broken loose.

It mattered not. His new prime minister promptly relieved him of his portfolio and packed him off to Washington as Britain's ambassador to the USA, where, to his credit, he did do good work and partly redeemed himself.

But he could never live down that had his hand been forced to accept the premiership, he would have, in a short period, been waiting to receive a victorious enemy in Whitehall.

III

Something else happened too, across the Pond. President F D Roosevelt promptly moved that very hostile and anti-British US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Joseph Kennedy, sideways.

Men of steel are men of action

They move with lightning speed... their decisions instant, long-lasting.

We lack such leaders today.

The 45th president tried his best by thinking he could approach every political decision as a business deal. He lasted one term. God forbid the American People, that vain and stupid People,, should re-elect him. They have form. Most do not hold passports. So, while they jet-set from state to state lulling themselves into the illusion of world-wide travel, they could not pinpoint cities or countries, even, beyond their shores even if their lives depended on it.. A peculair people, caught up in the parallel univertse of Hollywood and believing that what they see on their Smart TVs is reality.

In one short period of four years that joke in the Whitehouse - their 45th president - somehow managed to do more to undermine his own determined policy 'to make America great again’ than any of the 12 presidents preceding him in my lifetime. He even believed, during his tenure, that he was America’s greatest president. And millions of his fellow citizens agreed. The world watched on, aping goldfish!

But his communiqué today, an assessment of his successor and clearly not written by the former president - nevertheless causes one to stop, think and reconsider everything.

IV

/// /// The Afghanistan president has fled. The UK prime minister confirms that swift action is underway to safely return UK Nationals, and I was heartened that the prime minister included in this the many Afghan interpreters and their families, whose work helped to keep our British Forces safe.

Nevertheless, I find myself wondering... "Where are the men of stature?"

Where is our Foreign Secretary? Why have we not seen or even heard from him in a week?

Why this train of thought? What has 2021 and 1940 in common?

Well, in a word, Blitzkrieg, or as we say it, ‘lightning war.’

V

This is only the beginning of the next chapter in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history.

But today's awful events remind me of the physical and mental shock of a nation that watched the whole of western Europe crumble; the swiftness with which Paris was captured by the Nazis, and those arrogant and detestable newsreel images of goose-stepping stormtroopers on the Champs de Élysée.

VI

Very, very, very brave people in Kabul have given interviews today, women and men - people in positions of authority, government and academia. To us, in the free world, we might say, so?

But in a closed world where a woman is an education minister and a young professor teaches languages at the the American University in Kabul, it was very clear. They think of the next hours only. As the education minister commented (and this courageous lady was brought up in the USA), it is too far ahead to think of what might be the situation in the morning; a sentiment echoed by the young and eloquent professor.

VII

When religious ideology stalks the world stage, even greater trouble and calamity is not far removed. We know this, because we see this happen in every century.

The Taliban would do well to consider the outcome of their 20th Century running-mates - the Nazis.

On the Champs de Élysée in June 1940 not a single Nazi would have comprehended that within five short years every German city and major town would have been raised to the ground, and on the world's other side, two cities would be anatomised.

Kenneth Thomas Webb
Liverpool and Gloucestershire

June 8, 2022
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© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022

One of the Fifteen Founding Members of the Leaders Lodge

First written August 15, 2021