Their Last Will And Testament

"I don't know if they're still alive. How would I know if they were no longer alive? Who's going to call me? The Taliban's never called me. Who's going to call? I don't know."

"They were told by the judge that they were not guilty of any crimes."

"So many times we've been told two to three days and then you'll be released ... But it's six months on Saturday." 

"You have to remember their age. Are they in danger? Yeah, they're an elderly couple who are unjustly held ... in captivity. They are not free."

"Their bodies are not used to being put through this, they're being trapped, they're sleeping on a little mattress on the floor."

"My dad has had heart attacks ... he has a stent in this heart. He has had skin cancer."

"So he needs an ECG [electrocardiogram] blood test, EEG [electroencephalogram], CT scans. He needs all of that."

Jonathan Reynolds, London 

 

"Their human rights are being respected."

"They are being provided with medical care. They are in occasional contact with their families."

"Their case isn't anything serious."

Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi

Peter and Barbie Reynolds were arrested in Afghanistan in February   PA Media

 

In 2021 when the Taliban returned to power as the diplomats and military presence of international powers through the NATO alliance led by the United States under a United Nations mandate, Peter and Barbie Reynolds, a British couple whose long residence in Afghanistan led to a dual citizenship, made the decision to remain in Afghanistan. The British embassy advised them that since the embassy was being closed and all diplomatic staff returning to Britain, it would be best for them to return to the U.K. and leave Afghanistan. "Why are you staying", they were asked, "You're on your own."

 

And on their own they remain. They were detained by Taliban authorities and placed in prison, where they've been for the last six months, without having been charged with any offence. Their health is declining ... Peter Reynolds is 80 years of age, Barbie Reynolds is 76. Arrested in February along with a friend, Chinese-American Faye Hall, and an Afghan translator, both of whom were subsequently released in March. 

 

The pair spent close to two decades in Afghanistan, operating educational programs and becoming Afghan citizens. When they were arrested they were returning to their home in central Bamiyan province. Since then, Taliban authorities have refused any explanation as to the reason for their arrest. They were held at first at a maximum security facility "then in underground cells, without daylight, before being transferred" to the intelligence services in Kabul, according to UN experts.

 

Independent UN human rights experts called for the Taliban to release the elderly pair in July, given the "rapid deterioration" of their physical and mental health, noting they "risk irreparable harm or even death". A website called Free Peter and Barbie, to campaign for their release, was set up by the couple's children. There is a countdown of the number of days they have been held, on the website. 

 

Peter Reynolds suffered two eye infections and intermittent tremors in his head and left arm since being detained, according to the UN experts. Barbie Reynolds is "weak and fragile", the experts explain, suffering from malnourishment and anemia following months of being "fed once a day in prison". 

 

They had operated an organization called Rebuild, to provide educational programs for women and children in a country, under an Islamist fundamentalist government that denies education to women and girls.  

Peter and Barbie Reynolds, aged 80 and 75, have been detained by the Taliban without charges since February. Photograph: BBC

"My parents have never thought about their security and safety."

"[It is] no way to treat an elderly couple who've given the last two decades of their life for the good of Afghanistan."

Jonathan Reynolds

 

"How could we leave these people in their darkest hour?

"We came here because we love these people, and that's what we'll give the rest of our lives to, even if it means we die."

British couple Peter and Barbie Reynolds 

US/Biden Foreign Policy in Review

"There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan [in a comparison to US retreat of humiliation from Vietnam]. 

"It is not at all comparable. None whatsoever. Zero."

"Look, the Taliban, per se, is not our enemy. That's critical."

U.S. President Joe Biden

"[Biden has been wrong on] nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

Former U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates

A U.S. Air Force plane takes off from Kabul International Airport on Aug. 30, 2021, the day the U.S. completed its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)

 

When, under the "peace talks" with the Taliban the Trump administration arranged meetings that pointedly excluded the presence of anyone representing the Afghan government of the day, it was clear the United States felt it had surrendered far too much of its time, manpower and wealth on aiding a country that they claimed wasn't interested in helping itself. The US administration was prepared not to notice the Taliban ongoing attacks while professing to be pledging to a pause in hostilities throughout the talks, excluding Afghan government presence.

The American government chose not to notice the savagery and atrocities visited on Afghan civilians and Afghan military personnel by the Taliban, despite and during the talks, as long as the Taliban had the great good sense to avoid harming any American troops. The agreement reached in the absence of any Afghan government agency, between the US and the Taliban during the "peace talks" demonstrated US sanctimonious goodwill and vicious Taliban perfidy.

Throughout those talks, the US ignored the Afghan government's anxieties to be present at the talks that would lead to the future of their country thereby permitting the Taliban to continue its attacks and to undertake a surge in its terror operations, violating the agreement reached -- again and again -- while the people of Afghanistan shuddered with the certainty that the civilized life they were introduced to in the past twenty years was an experiment past its prime.

"Somebody else's civil war", just wasn't persuasive enough to salvage the twenty years of NATO and UN involvement in the war-torn country, against an Islamist insurgency devoted to slaughter in honour of the signal principle of Islamic jihad. When American troops were precipitously pulled out of Afghanistan, and its UN and NATO allies followed suit, Joe Biden simply blamed the Afghan military for its unwillingness to fight for its own nationhood.

When, on August 15, 2021 Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled and the Taliban entered Kabul, CH-47 helicopters were frantically shuttling diplomats from the US embassy compound to Kabul Airport where bedlam reigned. And where thousands of fearful Afghans massed at the gates with their documents that turned out to be useless. Some rushed the runways clambering onto wings of departing aircraft. It's how some were killed.

 

A man carries a bloodied child as a wounded woman lies on the street after Taliban fighters fired guns and lashed out with whips and other objects to control a crowd outside the airport in Kabul August 17.Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Shutterstock

 

Two were shot by American soldiers, another two fell from wheel wells of a departing US air force C-17 transport plane ascending to the sky south of Kabul. Tangled in a C-17's landing gear a corpse was later discovered. It was during that desperate time of pleading and praying and hoping and the final fearsome realization that no one would rescue them, that the breakaway Taliban faction, the Islamic State - Khorasan Province killed over 180 Afghan civilians in a suicide bombing.

Today, of Afghanistan's 42 million people, 28 million face starvation, requiring humanitarian aid to survive. Women are once again enslaved by Taliban rules. Virtue and vice squads roam the streets, and the country's health services are unable to even limp along tending to the most basic needs of the country's residents, in a collapsed economy.

"We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety.  That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible.  No nation — no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.  Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today."

"The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals."

"For weeks, they risked their lives to get American citizens, Afghans who helped us, citizens of our Allies and partners, and others onboard planes and out of the country.  And they did it facing a crush of enormous crowds seeking to leave the country.  And they did it knowing ISIS-K terrorists — sworn enemies of the Taliban — were lurking in the midst of those crowds."

U.S. President Joe Biden, The White House, August 31, 2021

Taliban officials declare victory over the United States from the tarmac of Kabul's international airport on August 31. It was hours after the last American troops left Afghanistan.

Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times/Redux

The Degrading Downfall of Afghan Hopes

"He said the Taliban are hiding around these houses, they will open fire, you need to leave."

"I was thinking that the regime has changed. Everywhere I saw the white Taliban flag and armed fighters."

"I asked my husband has the government collapsed and we weren't told?"

Habiba, from Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, Kabul refugee

"The Taliban have recognized that all they need to do is keep the pressure on, wait us out, and launch simultaneous offensives around the country."

"They have broadly achieved their objective without the U.S. getting meaningful concessions in return. 

[The situation is] increasingly dire with each passing week."

"I fear we will look back and regret the decision to withdraw.The onset of what is going to be quite a brutal civil war, considerable ethnic and sectarian displacement, assassination of government officials, millions of refugees flooding into other countries, particularly Pakistan."

"We will see the return of al-Qaida and the Islamic State, though I don't see an immediate, domestic security threat for the U.S. in that regard."

David Petraeus, former U.S. Afghanistan commander, former head, CIA

"There is us and only us to fight the Taliban. That acknowledgement and realization was important."

"It is far from reality that the Taliban will be in a position to force the government to surrender. They may win the battles, but it's impossible to win the war."

Afghanistan government official

Before and after maps of Afghanistan; left Taliban controlled areas in April, right Taliban controlled areas in July ... Council on Foreign Relations

 

Close to 300,000 people have now fled their homes as a result of the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan that gave the Islamist fanatic Taliban the opportunity they have long waited for. Not that they were ever quiescent; they kept the memory of their presence alive and well, from forcing farmers in areas they continued to control in Afghanistan to grow salable poppy instead of edible crops, to threatening the rural population and destroying Western-built schools while launching suicide attacks.

The presence of U.S. and NATO-member troops kept the Taliban from fulfilling their ultimate goal, but now that all are leaving after committing to a two-decade stay resulting in a stalemate, their time has come. Ongoing, relentless attacks are being launched across the country with greater vigour and determination. For that matter, with the certainty of a U.S. withdrawal even while negotiations were taking place in Doha between U.S. special representative to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban delegation leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Taliban attacks on Afghan government installations were rife.

Signals, if any were needed of the pretense of negotiations, illustrated by the Taliban refusal to negotiate directly with the government of President Ashraf Ghani until the U.S. committed to its promised withdrawal, a promise that the Taliban decorated with its pledge to honour the U.S. demand that Afghanistan never again become a springboard for Islamist terrorists to launch attacks against the U.S. Now the Taliban gloat and praise themselves for having vanquished the U.S. to enable them to step up their relentless attacks.

An Afghan policeman keeps watch at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kabul.   Reuters

 

Only the overwhelmingly anxious intention of the U.S. to decamp finally and forever from Afghanistan, the war that would not end, deadened them to the absurdity of 'negotiating for peace' with the fundamentalist terrorists that call them selves the Taliban scholars. The U.S. was so anxious to escape the Kandahar air base without attacks on its personnel in the process, that it failed to alert the Afghan military until the base was emptied of its American personnel.

In the process, leaving armoured vehicles and all manner of other military equipment as a gift to the Afghan military, which not having been alerted, was unable to mount a guard over the base which was then ransacked upon the withdrawal, and tools of war ostensibly meant to benefit the government of Afghanistan fell into the possession of its enemies. An inexcusably botched operation from start to finish, despite American avowals of continued financial assistance to the Ghani government.

A country embattled by the global pandemic, by a crop and food and medicine shortage, which has been placed on siege notice. The residents of Kabul have seen foreign embassies withdraw personnel while others take stock of supplies and try to secure sources of both food and gas, even as streams of Afghan refugees are flooding the city in search of sanctuary from the ravages of conflict pitting the military against the Taliban terrorists.  Severe drought stalks the land adding to food shortages.

The Islamist terrorists take no prisoners; execution is far more efficient and any military who fall into their hands know their abrupt fate. A resistance from the country's warlords against the Taliban ascendancy once again is in the works, a replay of a two-decade-old drama re-enacted. The warlords' reputation is one of greed of possessions, motivated by power and influence and riches, as opposed to the Talibans' single-focus power-grab with influence and financial assets following.

The country's border crossings are in their crosshairs, cutting off the government's source of income through customs revenues. Taliban control is consolidating in spheres previously held by NATO allies in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The Taliban bombed the home of the acting defence minister on Tuesday at a guarded upscale Kabul neighbourhood, missing the minister but killing and wounding many others. More recently the director of the government's media centre in Kabul was ambushed and killed.

The pretense of peace negotiations that the U.S. and the West uses as a screen to mask their desertion of Afghanistan is laughable. The Taliban is growing its territory and power base in leaps and bounds of military success. They have no reason whatever to negotiate for a shared peace agreement leading to a co-governing solution to the conflict roiling the country. It has always been nothing but a transparent sham, aided and abetted by the Pakistan Interagency Intelligence unit intent on fully destabilizing its neighbour.

The Taliban which swore it was committed to the peace process, assuring the Americans by telling them what they knew was wanted to salve their conscience and enable them to hold up a banner to the world of a promise to power-share, to honour the human rights of Afghans, to ensure the country would never again be used as a base from which to plot and attack the West, is set to reverse that pledge at the earliest opportunity.

The West has been warned time again to remove its blinders and deliberately fails to. Wherever the Taliban has taken control it has restored its medieval theocracy, women have been banned from school and work and public representation. Islamic State and al Qaeda, both firmly ensconced in the country now have an assured place of honour until such time that they too begin to turn against the Taliban with intention of replacing them as marginally more human rights-abusive tyrants and threats against Western interests.

Taliban fighters attend a gathering to celebrate the U.S.-Taliban deal in March 2020. Wali Sabawoon/NurPhoto/Getty Images