The wind has definitely changed. Less than a year ago Nigel Farage, who aspires to be the British Trump, said this: “I’m not going to get dragged down the road of mass deportations or anything like that…It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people. We simply can’t do it. It’s pointless even […]
31 December 2023 Abandoning the Sahel By Gwynne Dyer On Sunday, the last of 12,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops left Mali, ordered out by the military regime that seized power after two successive coups in 2020 and 2021. They leave behind them 310 Blue Helmets killed over ten years, and a country in chaos. Also
4 June 2023 Australia: War Crimes and Justice By Gwynne Dyer “Guys just had this blood-lust. Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.” So said an Australian soldier about the war crimes committed by the Australian SAS (Special Air Service) when the scandal first broke in 2016. And the Australian Defence Force, bless its heart,
It’s only one year since the fall of Kabul last August 15 and everybody in the countries that sent troops to Afghanistan has already forgotten about it (apart from journalists in need of a topic in a slow news month). This was predictable, but it is also unfortunate. The 20-year Afghan war was never more
16 February 2022 Afghanistan: The Taliban and the Starving Afghans By Gwynne Dyer Because the Taliban have been designated as ‘terrorists’, it is possible for the United States not only to embargo American aid and trade to Afghanistan, but also to block or at least seriously hinder efforts by other countries to send humanitarian aid.
Afghanistan: The Taliban and the Starving Afghans Read More »
8 September 2021 It Didn’t Change the World Forever By Gwynne Dyer ‘Changed the world forever’ is the most hackneyed phrase in journalism, and if you can get through this week (the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) without hearing it half a dozen times you’ll be very lucky. It’s a nonsense phrase because various
1 September 2021 Afghanistan: Keeping the Elephants Away By Gwynne Dyer A man is sitting in a train somewhere in Europe, tearing sheets of paper into little pieces and throwing them out the window. (It could have been in America too, but passenger trains are pretty scarce there.) The only other person in the compartment,
22 August 2021 Violent Islamist movements, as current events in Afghanistan demonstrate, have had some success in Muslim countries that have been invaded by the United States. But they have failed everywhere else, and the whole Islamist ideology is getting long in the tooth. Revolutionary ideologies rarely prosper after they pass the age of fifty.
17 August 2021 The footage on Monday of a giant USAF transport taking off from Kabul airport with desperate Afghans clinging to its fuselage – and then dropping off – will find a place alongside the iconic shot of Americans queueing for the last helicopter on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in
3 August 2021 “I will never kneel before such a destructive force (as the Taliban),” declared Ashraf Ghani, the soon-to-be-ex-president of Afghanistan. “We will either sit knee-to-knee for real negotiations at the table, or break their knees on the battlefield.” Good luck with that, Ashraf. General Sami Sadat, still commander of Helmand province as I