Afghanistan: War and peace (E399)

The fallout from the dramatic events in Afghanistan continues. One president, Ashraf Ghani, has lost his job; another, Joe Biden, has his jacket hanging on a shaky nail. A former president, Hamid Karzai, is back on the scene, as is would-be president Abdullah Abdullah. And if that wasn’t enough to unravel, former Prime Minister Tony Blair called the actions of the current American president “imbecilic.” So, in an episode devoted to the current situation in Afghanistan, we first invited on Major Stephen Harley, who served three tours there and now advises on military and security matters from Africa, in order to get a military perspective.

There’s lots of talk about the wars we are in now, but very little about how we got into them and what alternatives were available at the time. One man who spent a career studying and teaching an alternative to war, namely peace, is Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford. His seminal book, ‘Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-First Century’ is now in its fourth edition and is a remarkably prescient tome, not least of all about what is happening in Afghanistan at the moment. He joined Sputnik to discuss the global reverberations of the situation in the region.

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Podcast https://soundcloud.com/rttv/sets/sputnik-orbiting-the-world-1