Way back in 1978, I had a visa to visit Kabul.
Then, it was the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a doomed socialist experiment in the Islamic world.
I planned to travel there via the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, a road trodden in infamy by the British Army.
But I got Delhi Belly in the Karakoram mountains of Baltistan, after eating dodgy goat meat from a bazaar.
The blitzkrieg of the Taliban means I may never visit “the light garden of the angel king” as that benighted country was once described. The Islamic militants’ swift takeover didn’t surprise me.
It’s their country. They’ve bided their time for 20 years, and seized the opportunity of our precipitate withdrawal.
Do you agree? Have your say in the comment section
I agree with Mirror readers who voted almost two to one in a poll we were right to get out. You can’t impose western-style democracy through the barrel of a gun. And I disagree with those who say intervention was a waste of time, lives and money. The destruction of Al Qaeda was a worthwhile objective, and we achieved great social progress.
But we stayed too long, and tried to do too much.
UK strategy is all over the place. Boris Johnson’s response to these tumultuous events was slow, flat-footed and naive. He is a boy in a man’s job, publicly humiliated by the grown-ups in his own party. He offers sanctuary to 20,000 Afghan refugees over the next five years. All well and good, and welcome. But I can’t help feeling the best place for Afghans is Afghanistan, rebuilding their country devastated by 50 years of war.
Get all the latest news straight to your inbox. Sign up to one of the Mirror's newsletters
The economy is in ruins. People live on little more than £1 a day, 50% of spending was splurged on a war now over and donor aid is 25% of the national budget.
That money will dry up, and watch the Chinese step in to fill the gap. But aid agencies will want to go back, and the PM’s instant repudiation of Afghanistan as a pariah state is senseless.
Sir Mark Sedwill, once our man in Kabul and an ex-national security adviser, urges the Government to “swallow hard” and offer political recognition and economic development to the new regime. That sounds about right. Butter instead of guns.
He’s a colourful loss
The death of former Labour MP Austin Mitchell robs us of one of the few remaining colourful figures in politics.
Larger than life, and sometimes twice as daft, he represented Great Grimsby for 38 years.
He fought long and hard for trawlermen, even changing his name to Mr Haddock to win compensation for lost jobs.
A proper journalist and TV presenter-turned-politician, he once bragged to me: “I invented Arthur Scargill! We needed an articulate miner for Calendar News in Yorkshire.
"And I found this clever young man from Barnsley who was just the job.”
The rest is history. Sluffened, I am.
Dirty work
Geronimo – the alpaca twice tested positive for bovine TB –must die after losing a High Court battle.
But heartless officials of Defra who ordered his destruction refuse to do the job.
They want his owner Helen Macdonald to euthanise him. She refuses.
They should do their own dirty work.
