MPs reaction to Trump’s Afghanistan comments misses everything important

UK MPs butthurt reaction to Donald Trump’s comments on Afghanistan is telling. They’re more worried about besmirched military honour than the fact the world is falling apart. And that the war they are defending was an unmitigated disaster.

The only thing Donald Trump loves more than Donald Trump is trolling people to their faces. In fact, it’s his more redeemable quality. But for UK MPs he just gone too far.

Commenting on NATO troops in Afghanistan Thursday, Trump took a swipe at NATO:

 I’ve always said, will they be there if we ever needed them?

That’s really the ultimate test, and I’m not sure of that.

He went on:

We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them.

They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan… they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.

Clearly he was on a wind-up mission in the wake of a messy World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos. The NATO and European elite’s story of that meeting is that Trump was wrecking what passed for a global order — particularly over his plans to take over Greenland.

The truth is that that order never really existed. But to the degree that it did Gaza, not Greenland, put the final nail in the coffin.

But back to Afghanistan…

How dare he?

Cue a gigantic hissy-fit from British MPs. Like any fading power — like the US, in fact — the UK obsesses over its military esteem. And nothing triggers British leaders like a swipe at this sacred cow.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey pointed out Trump’s draft-dodging in Vietnam:

Trump avoided military service 5 times. How dare he question their sacrifice. Farage and all the others still fawning over Trump should be ashamed.

A number of the MPs also served in the war. Tory MP and Afghanistan veteran Ben Obese-Jecty felt:

sad to see our nation’s sacrifice, and that of our Nato partners, held so cheaply by the president of the United States.

Ex-air force Labour MP Calvin Bailey said Trump’s words bore:

no resemblance to the reality experienced by those of us who served there.

Trump is wrong, of course. NATO troops did fight on the ‘frontline’ – though the frontline line in a counter-insurgency is a nebulous concept. 457 Brits were killed in the war, many more were injured.

But the story is much more complicated than Trump or his critics let on. If you listen to those raging at Trump it is a story of military sacrifice, duty and honour. Yet this is the real lie underneath all this inane back and forth.

Corruption and abuse

As an Afghanistan veteran myself, I’m still a student of that war, and of the Forever Wars it was part and parcel of. The twenty years which have passed since I first went to Afghanistan have taught me many hard lessons. If I could sum it up now, it would be:

UK troops fought bravely to ensure Afghanistan became a leading narco-state. We courageously trained up its paedo cops while the corrupt ruling class we hand-picked sifted personal fortunes into Gulf bank accounts, before handing the country back to the Taliban. How dare Trump?!

— the great Keithulhu (@jjgjourno) January 23, 2026

Obviously I’m half taking the mickey out of MPs in this tweet. But I also have the receipts. Seth Harp’s excellent 2025 book The Fort Bragg Cartel talks about how foreign occupation effectively created a power narco-state:

Under U.S. occupation, Afghanistan had become the world’s leading narco-state, with an economy almost entirely dependent on the drug trade. Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster, opium production had returned to record levels.

The result?

By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. In 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons.

By way of comparison, Mexico, in a far-distant second place, produced just fifty tons that year, while third-place Myanmar put out a mere twenty-four. Colombia, the only other significant exporter of heroin, barely topped two tons.

The US-picked Karzai government we were supporting, it must be said, were deeply involved:

 the United States installed Hamid Karzai, a mercurial monarchist clotheshorse and rumored heroin addict on the payroll of the CIA who exercised power and extended the new government’s writ out from Kabul through a patronage network of warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, smugglers, and tribal mafiosi, many of whom were major drug traffickers.

This was what NATO troops, including UK troops, died protecting.

We also trained and supported internal security forces with a chilling record of child sexual abuse. The Afghan National Police (ANP) were famous it for it.

Here’s the abstract from a report by the US Army War College in March 2025:

Based on interviews with United Kingdom veterans, this special commentary offers a new interpretation of war trauma. Few studies investigate the emotions soldiers experience when witnessing child sexual assault.

During the Afghan campaign, personnel witnessed acts of rape by allies in the Afghan security services on boys—usually excused as the local practice of bacha bazi—and were directed not to intervene.

Read on with caution if you feel compelled.

Swollen Dubai bank accounts

The west also produced a gold rush of corruption in Afghanistan — $19 billion — yes, BILLION, in aid and reconstruction contracts. For your average Afghan, these never trickled downstream. The steady flow of foreign investments was instead funnelled into personal bank accounts in Gulf monarchies.

The dissipation of funds earmarked for public projects is clearly laid out by the investigative outlet, LightHouse Reports:

U.S. government auditors say at least $19 billion of American reconstruction funds were lost due to waste, fraud or abuse in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2019.

Much of that money quickly made its way to Dubai — a convenient three-hour flight from Kabul and with a glistening construction boom primed to absorb massive infusions of cash.

Corruption is just an Afghan impulse, you might say. Wrong. Also, kind of a weird thing to say. Here’s the truth:

One anti-corruption expert, speaking to us from hiding in Afghanistan, said efforts to crack down on fraud and corrupt politicians were thwarted by Western advisers who argued it was important to maintain what “little political stability” existed in the country.

There’s a lot to criticise about NATO, as well as the war in Afghanistan, and not least, Trump and craven British politicians. But the spat over Trump’s comments, and selective outrage, is so far off the mark it doesn’t even begin to capture the real conversation.

We have seen no such ferocity over Gaza, ICE, or Venezuela or any other international issue.

By all means slam Trump — there’s plenty of material to work with — but can politicians, for once in their damned lives politicians, spend energy on things that actually matter.

Featured image via the Canary