News from "Declassified" August 2021

August 2021

This month we’ve been quieter on publishing new material and have been preparing for the launch of our new, stand-alone website. This is now nearly ready to launch, which we’ll be doing with new revelations we’ve been working on for months. Watch this space!

We have of course been closely monitoring events in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover of the country. Like everyone else, we’ve been shocked at UK policy (even in light of the standards we’ve come to expect). In one article, our chief reporter Phil Miller argued that UK officials, ministers and military personnel knew the occupation of Afghanistan was not going as well as the national media was telling the public, but there was a conspiracy of silence.

In particular, what happened to those 300,000 Afghan troops the UK and NATO claimed they had trained and who, we were told by government and media, were meant to be providing security? Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted they “melted away”.

Like much else about UK/US policy in the country, and the progress it was claimed to be making, it was a fiction. Afghanistan remained one of the most corrupt countries in the world, essentially a narco-state, after 20 years of occupation.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan shows how deluded the British elite’s view of its global power is. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan, in addition to the interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria, raises fundamental questions about the UK’s military and foreign policy.

In another piece I wrote with Phil, we say that a key reason these four interventions have been calamitous is because UK policy has no moral consistency — friends and enemies are interchangeable over time, based purely on short-term pragmatism and rarely on ethical concerns or the national public interest.

It is plainly obvious that it’s high time for a fundamental transformation in the UK’s role in the world. Of course, this is why we set up Declassified UK and it’s why we’re encouraging everyone to support us and to develop a bigger community of concerned people.

We will now step up the series of articles we have been commissioning on Alternatives – outlining how and why UK foreign policy must change to promote the true national interest, and decent human rights-focused policies abroad.
Paul Rogers, one of our key advisers who has been a voice of reason over the past few months in his analysis of the Afghan catastrophe, is producing the first of these new analyses for us.

We want to stimulate a new debate in the UK on the need for an alternative foreign policy – and I’d welcome tips from you on how we might best do this.