3 days ago, I published an op-ed talking about the situation in Afghanistan. Then, I thought it would be weeks or months before the Taliban regained control, but no. Less than 72 hours after publication, the Taliban declared victory. President Ghani and Vice President Saleh resigned and fled the country and the Taliban waltzed right into Kabul and declared their Emirate as the ruling government of Afghanistan. It now seems that the situation in Afghanistan was even more dire for the coalition-backed Republic than we thought. So now I'm going to do a bit of a deconstruction here, talk about why this has happened and a bit about the future of Afghanistan and the world.

This has been said before, but I will say it again. Afghanistan is the Graveyard of Empires. And we have seen that nickname bear true again. This time, it's been the Western Post-Imperialist Interventionist Empire that has been defeated. A policy that started all the way back in the wake of World War II seems to be facing a crisis. For decades, the US and its NATO allies, including the UK have seen themselves as the shepherds of world peace - instigating conflict in order to bring an end to conflict. First it was Communism - Truman and Stalin, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev. Then, it was Islamism with the Persian Gulf War. And in the last 20 years, it has been Terrorism. We overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan, we toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and we helped overthrow General Gaddafi's regime in Libya. But then, the wars never stopped and in many cases, they got worse. Afghanistan dragged on as the Taliban withdrew to the mountains, Iraq dragged on as Dubya broke with his beliefs that the US shouldn't be involved in nation-building and kept troops in Iraq to nation-build, which later developed into a full scale war as ISIL started taking large swathes of territory in the Levante, and Libya escalated into a civil war which raged for 6 years before a ceasefire was declared and national unity government was formed.

These last 20 years have quite clearly been a disaster for the image of the West in the Middle East. Invading Afghanistan and Iraq, NATO forces were seen as liberators from the tyrannical regimes of the Taliban and the Ba'athists respectively. But as the NATO military presence grew and the wars raged on, more and more were dragged into the arms of radicals and fundamentalists like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The assassination of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 didn't end the terrorist threat, but only created a martyr for Islamic fundamentalists to rally around. For every terrorist killed, their death helped in the recruitment of two more - a Levantine Hydra, which meant NATO had to sink more and more money and more and more troops into the area.

The same happened in Afghanistan. I and many others in the west assumed that the Republic had the support to ensure that, upon coalition troops leaving the country, the Taliban would not be able to regain control. We were wrong. We were oh so very wrong. Over the last 20 years, the Taliban have gained in strength. Their forces are greater now than they were when they were deposed in the 2001 Invasion. Their forces are so great that they simply walked into many major cities and took them. No fight, no resistance. This was a severe underestimation of the Taliban's power.

So what is going to happen now? To put it in two words: fuck knows. What the government and indeed the world can do now is simply respond as the situation in Afghanistan develops. One can hope that the Taliban try to uphold the status quo somewhat and make this a swift and painless transition. However, I am doubtful, but I hope I am wrong.

A part of me thinks that nothing could've been done, but that doesn't make me feel any less guilty. The future has never been more uncertain and this is a definite example of that uncertain future. Maybe that's just my pessimistic viewpoint but we can only wait and see.

Rt Hon SomeBritishDude26 MP, Secretary of State for Transport