Afghanistan: 'UK national security now relies on Taliban preventing terrorism'

The withdrawal from Afghanistan has mercilessly exposed the limits of British military power; the UK alone couldn't even keep Kabul airport open.

This is not huge a surprise. It has long been clear that the UK can only exercise large scale military power in alliance with others, and that is government policy. But in this case there was only one 'other' - the United States. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says he did try to put together an international coalition to support the Afghan government. If successful, this could have heralded a new way of doing things that wasn't reliant on US power. It wasn't successful. There were hardly any takers.

So once President Joe Biden had decided to get out, all the UK could really do was follow suit.

Now the UK's national security relies on whether or not the Taliban will allow groups like Al Qaeda to operate in Afghanistan.

The Taliban say they won't. But if they are unwilling or unable to hold to that commitment, then we are left where we were 20 years ago; attempting airstrikes against terrorist training camps. And 20 years ago that didn't work.

On Tuesday, I asked Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab if the UK was safer or less safe than it was three weeks ago. He said "it's very difficult to judge at this stage, it's very fluid. Obviously we're concerned." 

In the end though, Afghanistan was not a military defeat; there was no massacre of British forces (as there was in 1842).

Instead it was a failure to build a sustainable state, which was trusted and supported by its own people.

It was failure of the concept of 'nation building' so colossal that it's hard to imagine anyone attempting such a thing again.