Hello everyone, welcome live to the show. I'm not actually in London, I'm actually currently

in Sheffield where I was born, a plastic Yorkshire man, but good to be back in my home domestic

happy environment. But it's great to be able to talk to you today about a very, very,

very important issue, of course, which is the future of Afghanistan, which has now fallen,

of course, to the Taliban. Now, we've got two absolutely fantastic guests today, including

someone who is live, of course, incapable and will talk us through the developments on the

ground, what's actually happening, and the situation that faces Afghanistan. And we're

going to be talking about the broader context. What this means for the US Hegeman, which

of course, has been the Hegemonic power since World War II after the defeat that they suffered

in Afghanistan. And of course, about the British parliamentary debate, I wrote a column

this week for the Guardian, about how divorced from reality, much of those parliamentary

proceedings were, there was no attempt to, or very little attempt to place it in the context

of two decades now foreign intervention, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the broader so-called

war on terror, about the situation that specifically faced Britain in Afghanistan, Britain, essentially

themselves withdrew from Afghanistan, of course, many years before the Americans did back

in 2014, leaving only a skeleton force in their wake. None of that was present in the

debate. And instead, we had a former prime minister, Theresa May, being applauded for talking

about global Britain, about how global Britain somehow could have unilaterally acted in

Afghanistan, whether it be by somehow convincing Joe Biden to renege on his campaign promises

or somehow to go alone, as though Britain has had an independent foreign policy when it

hasn't since 1956 and the Suez crisis. We've got a lot to talk about today. Before I bring

in the guest, because we obviously going to hear from actual specialists rather than myself,

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