Is there a government anywhere in the world that is more feckless, short-sighted, self-serving, and set against its own citizens than the Biden administration? Why yes, there is: Boris Johnson’s reign of error in London is giving Biden’s handlers a run for their money in the race to be the most catastrophic, incompetent, and treasonous regime. Now that the Taliban is in power in Afghanistan and has set about terrorizing its own people, Johnson’s government has decided that now is the perfect time for it to double Britain’s humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, bringing the grand total to $393.3 million.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab made the announcement in a tweet on August 18, three days after the Taliban entered Kabul: “The UK,” Raab wrote, “will double its humanitarian and development aid to Afghanistan to £286m this year. We call on others to follow our lead to ensure the most vulnerable Afghans receive the humanitarian assistance they need.”
If this seems insane to you, you’re right. Raab didn’t explain how the British government proposed to make sure that “the most vulnerable Afghans” received this aid. At a time when NATO forces are completing a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and a group that considers the Western countries its enemies is consolidating its power, there is no possible way for the British government to ensure that this money will go anywhere except to the Taliban for its jihad.
Raab, however, remained determinedly clueless. He told the BBC: “I think it’s important through direct and indirect means to be able to engage. We will hold the Taliban to the commitments they made in the Doha agreement, commitments never to use their territory as a base for terrorism, to have a more inclusive regime going forwards. They made a range of commitments.” Amid this cloud of naivete and wishful thinking, he did concede that it was unlikely that the Taliban would adhere to these agreements: “I can’t say I trust them to follow through on them.”
In fact, the British government is so savvy, so unwilling to be fooled, that it isn’t giving the Taliban’s “security capacity” any money at all: “We will reconfigure our aid budget, we will of course not give the security capacity building money that we previously gave to the government to the Taliban… clearly we wouldn’t want to continue that funding.” However, “the other thing that we will do is we make sure that we increase our aid budget for development and humanitarian purposes, probably by ten per cent is what I have on mind, on last year. We want to try and make sure it won’t go through the Taliban but we want to alleviate humanitarian suffering.” As it turns out, the increase was by much more than ten percent, as he announced the doubling of the aid the day after this BBC interview.
Does the Johnson government not understand the basic principle of economics, that money is fungible? They may not be giving money for the Taliban’s “security capacity,” but giving it (and there is no one else to give it to) money for “humanitarian and development purposes,” even if it really is used for such purposes, just frees up other money to be spent on aiding the global jihad that threatens Britain as much as it does any other non-Sharia polity. Has Dominic Raab really not learned the lesson of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which used the billions that Barack Obama showered upon it to strengthen its military forces and to finance global jihad terror groups, including Hizballah and Hamas, instead of using it to alleviate the poverty and misery of its own people?
Yes, of course Dominic Raab has not learned that lesson. The foreign policy establishment wonks on both sides of the Atlantic never, ever learn from experience. They keep making the same mistakes again and again, lurching from defeat to defeat, applying the same wrong and failed analyses again and again, and instead of being forced to resign in disgrace, they are given awards, get promoted, and do the same thing still another time.
Related: Afghanistan’s Fall to the Taliban Is Also Part of Barack Obama’s Legacy
The question is inescapable: Is the British government really this abjectly stupid, or is it something even worse? Announcing that aid is being doubled to Afghanistan three days after the Taliban took Kabul again raises the question of whether the fall of the graveyard of empires to this jihad terror group is something that the elites in Washington and London actually want. Surely that’s inconceivable. Isn’t it?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member