Is the Catastrophic Withdrawal in Afghanistan due to Failure of Intelligence Services

Mike has been casting his bleak and jaundiced eye over Dominic Raab’s testimony about the current debacle in Afghanistan, and has asked a very serious question: has Raab just told parliament and the British people that our intelligences services have been outwitted by a bunch of desert-dwelling bandits? That’s the conclusion that follows from Raab’s statement that the government was informed that the Taliban couldn’t take power this year. Mike writes

This will upset the racists and Islamophobes.

Foreign Secretary (by the skin of his teeth) Dominic Raab was interrogated on the fall of Afghanistan by Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee yesterday (September 1) – and said information provided by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had told him the Taliban were unlikely to take control of Kabul at all in 2021, even after international forces including those from the UK had left.

Well, they got that badly wrong, didn’t they!

The JIC is a civil service body comprising senior officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and United Kingdom Armed Forces, Home Office, Department for International Development, HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office.

It oversees the work of the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service, GCHQ and Defence Intelligence.

Are we to take it from Raab that none of these organisations were intelligent enough to notice that there were real problems with the Afghan government and military that UK forces were leaving behind?

Is he really saying that the UK’s entire intelligence community was outsmarted by a gang of desert-dwelling bandits?

The plan was to leave Afghanistan defended by its own National Army – but we have discovered that this organisation was badly-trained (by organisations including the British Army, it seems) and riddled with corruption. Was Raab telling us that nobody knew?

After the United States broke the Doha Agreement’s May 1 deadline for leaving the country, the Taliban simply walked into Kabul and took over. Yes, This Writer is oversimplifying, but the amount of resistance provided by the Afghan National Army was minimal – and UK intelligence should have known.

Indeed, it is unbelievable that our intelligence agencies did not.

Still, there it is: Raab said the “central assessment” provided to ministers was that Afghan security was likely to suffer “steady deterioration” after US troops pulled out last month, but Kabul was “unlikely” to fall this year.

That assessment was wrong, and now we need to know who made it, what information they used to make it, and what information they ignored. Then we’ll need to see evidence of reforms to the JIC, to make it more intelligent.

If Raab is going to blame other government organisations for the incompetence we have seen over Afghanistan, then we need to see him make improvements – or we’ll face more humiliations, possibly involving large-scale loss of life, in the near future.

There’s a saying that goes ‘military intelligence is a contradiction in terms’. And sadly the argument that the current debacle in Afghanistan may have been caused by the incompetence of the British intelligence agencies will be all too familiar to readers of the parapolitics/ conspiracy magazine, Lobster. The mag was set up in mid-1980s on the premise that British intelligence, as well as those of the US and other western countries, was out of control and incompetent. This was based on the covert activities of the British state against the left, the disinformation campaign in Northern Ireland and the way decent politicians like Tony Benn and others were smeared as IRA supporters and sympathisers, and the way the same intelligence agencies have never been subject to official critical scrutiny for their subversion of domestic democracy and their failures. The reports compiled for Margaret Thatcher about the Middle East and elsewhere were so poor that the Leaderene never read them. I go the impression that they were also seriously unprepared for 9/11. After the end of the Cold War, it seems that Britain got rid of its Middle East experts and the security services instead decided that they were now going into corporate espionage.

The 7/7 bombings also caught the security services unawares. They stated that this was to due to failures on their part and asked for a massive increase in funding. This was automatically granted, but Blair’s administration did not ask how this money was going to be spent, what restructuring was needed or indeed exercise any real oversight over the security services. They simply accepted the intelligence agencies that parliamentary scrutiny could cause of breach of security and politely looked away and let them get on with doing whatever they wanted.

Not that the American intelligence agencies are necessarily any better. The CIA became notorious for its ‘health alteration squads’, or gangs of assassins. The Americans were also taken by surprise by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The closest they got was a report by the CIA stating that the Ayatollah Khomeini would return to that ancient land to lead a Gandhi-like campaign of passive resistance. If only!

Unfortunately, it is only too plausible that the Taliban’s rapid seizure of power and our consequent scramble to leave is due to colossal errors by our intelligence services. Quite apart from the negligence and sheer incompetence of Boris and his wretched crew.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2021/09/02/did-raab-really-tell-us-the-uks-intelligence-agencies-were-outsmarted-by-arab-terrorists/

Boris Johnson, Brexit, and the Lies and NHS Privatisation of Daniel Hannan

Mike has put up two pieces today reporting on the antics of Boris Johnson and Daniel Hannan. BoJo has violated ministerial rules in allowing a pro-Brexit, free trade organization, headed by Hannan, to take up residence in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The rules, however, state that it is absolutely forbidden to give government or ministerial aid to organisations, which are against government policy. This has resulted in the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, making a statement that he intends to investigate this breach of the ministerial code. Mike is sanguine about what this will actually mean. He expects that rather than be severely reprimanded, BoJo will be let off with a slap on the wrist.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/09/30/civil-service-head-will-investigate-alleged-breach-of-ministerial-code-by-boris-johnson/

Knowing how libidinous Boris is, and his complete inability to take ‘No’ for an answer, he’ll probably take it as some kind of come-on.

As for Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP for Dorset has managed to show his ignorance and complete lack of any understanding for how Brexit will affect ordinary people by comparing leaving Europe to moving house. It’s painful, but better in the long term. This has drawn widespread ridicule, as Mike shows in his blog.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/09/30/brexit-buffoon-hannan-bombarded-with-ridicule-over-nicer-home-claim/

In fact, Hannan has some very unpleasant right-wing views. He used to have a regular column over at the Telegraph Blogs, where he treated his online readers to his Eurosceptic views. Buddy Hell, the French philosophical feline over at Guy Debord’s Cat, has posted numerous piece attacking his posts. Like many Tories, Hannan has told any number of lies trying to convince people about how wonderful Brexit is, and the massive increase in prosperity that will result if we privatize everything and remove whatever’s left of the welfare state. So frequent is he with these untruths and falsehoods, that the Cat gave him the soubriquet of the ‘lyin’ King’.

And one of the things Hannan is in favour of is the privatization of the NHS. This has been pretty much Tory – and Blairite – policy ever since Thatcher took power, though they’ve kept very quiet about it and gone about it piecemeal, for the reason that if the general public realise what’s going on they’ll never be elected again. But Hannan, like the current Health Secretary, is all in favour of it. Though I expect that, like Jez, if he’s pressed on it he’ll probably talk in public about how much he ‘treasures it’, leaving his real views to be discovered only be people, who have actually managed to read what he’s written about it.

The fact that BoJo has given his ministerial blessing to the Lyin’ King, or as I think of him, Dan, Dan, the Sanitary Man, after one of the characters from Carry On Screaming, also shows what BoJo really thinks of the health service, as well as his support for Brexit and free trade.

Neither of them should be anywhere near government. Boris desperately wants to be PM, but would be an utter disaster for this country of the same magnitude as Trump.

The Israel Lobby, Liam Fox and the Planned Bombing of Iran

I found a few more bits and pieces on the Israel Lobby going through some more recent back issues of Lobster on the net. I know there’s a risk of sounding fixated with them, but much of the hostility against Jeremy Corbyn from the Blairites is directly due to the Blairite’s strong connections to the lobby. The lobby’s influence is also extremely strong in the media, which is why, apart from the space given to ludicrous allegations of anti-Semitism against perfectly decent people, you rarely hear reports condemning the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And it seems that it was the machinations of the Israel lobby that nearly got us involved in an American-Israeli plot to bomb Iran.

Liam Fox and Werrity Scandal

Remember the scandal that erupted a few years ago over the improper relationship between Dr. Liam Fox, then Secretary of State for Defence, and his adviser, Adam Werrity. Werrity had been Fox’s flatmate. Fox was nearly prosecuted for breaching various ministerial codes of conduct over his relationship with Werrity. He met Werrity over 40 times both abroad and in the Ministry of Defence, and a full report revealing Fox’s misdeeds was published by the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell. This revealed that Fox had not informed his permanent secretary that he had tried to obtain funds for Werrity, and had blocked other civil servants from attending meetings alongside him. Fox had also ignored calls to distance himself from him.

See Lobster 65, ‘Tittle-Tattle’, by Tom Easton.

All that was covered in the media, if I recall correctly. I think Mike also wrote a few pieces about it, as it’s yet another example of the ministerial corruption that soon accompanies the Tories into office.

About a year and a half previously, in Lobster 62, Robin Ramsay in his ‘View from the Bridge’ column, discussed a piece about the Werrity scandal by Craig Murray in his blog. Murray was the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who lost his job because he dared to start making waves about how corrupt and brutal the Uzbek dictator was. It was information that the British government and business establishment really didn’t want to hear, or the public knowing, as they were desperate to conclude various trade deals. So Murray got the sack.

In his article, Murray revealed that at last someone in the mainstream media had had the courage to talk about the possibility that the Werrity affair was part of a operation by the Israeli secret services, and stated that this had been a major concern of the MOD and government officials. He wrote

‘A mainstream media source has finally plucked up the courage to publish the widespread concern among MOD, Cabinet Office and FCO officials and military that the Werritty operation was linked to, and perhaps controlled by, Mossad – something which agitated officials have been desperately signalling for some days.

“Officials expressed concern that Fox and Werritty might even have been in freelanced iscussions with Israeli intelligence agencies” write Patrick Wintour and Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian.

As I have been explaining, the real issue here is a British defence secretary who had a parallel advice structure designed expressly to serve the interests of
another state and linked to that state’s security services. That is not just a sacking offence, it is treasonable.’

Ramsay goes on to state that in a later article, Murray cited answers to questions he and Jeremy Corbyn had put to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to show that the Werrity scandal wasn’t an intelligence operation, but part of the preparations for an ‘Anglo-British-Israeli’ attack on Iran. I think Ramsay might mean that the attack was planned by America, Britain and Israel. Unless Scots, Northern Irish and Welsh devolution had gone much further than everyone knew.

Ramsay then remarks that Murray didn’t comment on the incompetence of using Werrity, the Defence Secretary’s bagman, as part of the plot, and suggests that the bizarre dealings had been deliberately exposed by Whitehall civil servants determined to stop the attack going ahead.

This seems all too plausible to me. Netanyahu was desperately trying to get America to attack Iran, including scaremongering about Iran being a few months away from having a nuclear bomb. This was rubbish. Netanyahu’s generals and his own intelligence services told him so. But this didn’t stop the old butcher turning up in front of Congress or the UN with entirely fraudulent diagram to hawk his lies. Fortunately, nobody believed him, which is why the situation in the Middle East hasn’t become very much worse.

This little incident also adds yet more information explaining why the Israel lobby has such desperate hatred for Corbyn. Not only is one of the few politicians genuinely trying to stand up for the rights of the Palestinians against their oppression and brutalisation by the Israelis, he’s also an obstacle to the foreign policy objectives. Netanyahu, his hawks and the neocons in Britain and America wanted to attack Iran, and he and Murray helped prevent them from doing so. Hence the splenetic attempts to portray him and his supporters as anti-Semites, when they are no such thing.

More From Lobster on New Labour’s Links to the Israel Lobby

Yesterday I put up a couple of pieces about items on New Labour and its connections to the Israel lobby. One of these pieces discussed James Purnell and James Harding, former Labour politicos and now directors of the BBC, who were involved in attempts to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn when they were councillors in Islington in the 1990s.

Robin Ramsay’s ‘View from the Bridge’ column in Lobster 58 for winter 2009-2010 has further information on the connections between Blair and Brown’s entryist clique and the Israel lobby. He reported that Grim Gordon had appointed Ivan Lewis as the responsible minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for Israel and the Middle East. Lewis was the vice chairman of Labour Friends of Israel. (pp. 109-110).

In the same issue he also reports that Channel 4 had broken one of the last great taboos of British journalism, and broadcast a documentary on the Israel lobby. He states that the accompanying booklet is ‘seriously good’ and should demonstrate that the Israel lobby is ‘real and significant’. It was available from as a download from and .

I don’t know whether it’s still available after all these years. Probably not. But it could still be worth a look. (pp. 110).

The Blairites were deeply entwined with Labour Friends of Israel, and the current anti-Semitism allegations, which have now resurfaced again with Liverpool MP Louise Ellman, are all about preserving their influence, against opposition from both gentiles and Jews.

That issue is Lobster is available free online. Go to Lobster’s webpage and select it from the numbers listed.