Is the 'gentler, kinder' Taliban already gone?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2021

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

As many had expected, President Biden has not agreed to extend the August 31 deadline despite pleas from Nato allies in today's G7 call. Meanwhile, there are signs that the veneer of the new and reformed Taliban is already beginning to crack in Afghanistan. Katy Balls talks to Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson.

Transcript

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0:24.8	Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots and Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Katie
0:29.7	Balls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson, Isabel Hardman. On Monday, Boris Johnson suggested that he
0:36.3	would lobby Joe Biden to extend the deadline by which
0:40.3	US troops plan to leave Afghanistan. Today, there's been a G7 meeting. There's also been a press
0:45.4	conference from the Taliban, as has become the new normal. And the signs aren't particularly
0:50.9	positive, Ali Isabel, when it comes to how long troops are going to stay?
0:55.4	No, so it was quite a bold move of Boris Johnson's too brief that he was going to request an extension to this deadline, knowing that it was unlikely to be granted.
1:07.8	And we've had a press conference from the Taliban reiterating the warning that it
1:13.1	would be a violation to continue evacuations of Americans after the 31st of August deadline.
1:19.3	Then we had a line from Pentagon spokesman John Kirby that the deadline wasn't going to change.
1:25.7	And the G7 call on which he made this bid has not moved things on.
1:32.6	So it's not been a success from that perspective for the Prime Minister.
1:37.8	And this was something that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and his colleagues in the Ministry of Defense have been warning that
1:44.4	actually there's only really hours left to get people out of Afghanistan. And once the Americans have
1:50.5	gone, that's when everyone else has to go as well. There's not really a question of sort of Britain and
1:55.6	France and so on, continuing in the country beyond that date.
2:06.5	Fraser, clearly the first and foremost issue is getting people at Afghanistan, but in terms of that Boris Johnson intervention, do you think the fact that it has had little impact is something
2:12.4	which can negatively impact the Prime Minister, or was the point here to show that the UK would
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