Dr Will Jones: Trump Halts Migration From all Third World Countries.....

Trump Halts Migration From all Third World Countries and Demands “Reverse Migration” After Deadly DC Attack

President Donald Trump has “permanently paused migration” from Third World countries and demanded “reverse migration”, ordering a green card audit of 19 nations, after the Washington DC terror attack that left a National Guard soldier dead. The Mail has more.

Ele Ludeman:

Where are the protests?

Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, girls and women have been subjected to increasing loss of rights.

They aren’t allowed to work.

Schools are closed to girls and women can’t go to university.

Ele Ludemann: Women excluded 4 years on

Four years on from the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan the UN reports on the total exclusion of women:

Four years since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, waves of directives have stripped Afghan women and girls of their rights and dignity. These restrictions are not temporary; not one has been reversed. The Taliban is closer than ever to achieving its vision of a society that completely erases women from public life. The most severe women’s rights crisis in the world is at risk of becoming normalized.

Ele Ludemann: Where are the boycotts and protests?

Sporting boycotts helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa, Susan Dalgety argues a similar approach is needed to end the Taliban’s inhumane treatment of girls and women:

James Hickman: Meet the Taliban’s new Sugar Daddy - the American taxpayer

It’s impossible to forget those iconic images from the late summer of 2021— helicopters over the US embassy in Afghanistan. Locals dangling from the landing gear of US Air Force cargo planes desperately trying to escape. The US military frantically packing up their gear to leave the country.

It had only been a few weeks prior when the guy with five decades of experience insisted that the Taliban would never take over Afghanistan. But then it happened within a matter of days.

Lushington D. Brady: Is Their Savagery Really as Good as Our Civilisation?

Liberal democracy is a hard-learned process

For a while during the international occupation, Afghanistan hosted one of the most dangerous roads in the world. Not because of IEDs, but because American engineers spent billions building spanking new highways across the graveyard of empires. Afghanistan had just 80 kilometres of paved road in 2001; five years later, it had over 16,000 kilometres.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 6/7/23

Govt dishes up $4.6m to help put the kibosh (or should that be ‘kaibosh’?) on food waste

Sums of government spending feature in three of four new ministerial statements posted on the government’s official website since Point of Order’s previous Buzz report.

One of the new spending announcements deals with waste.

Dave Witherow: Peace In Our Time

The American collapse in Afghanistan has provoked some urgent discussion on the current state of Western military competence. Are our armies fit for purpose? Will they ever again win a war? Or has armed force become obsolete in the world we now see evolving?

Here in New Zealand, of course, these questions are more or less moot. Our participation in Afghanistan was less than enthusiastic, and we have been well ahead of the pack in defusing the legacy of organized violence still associated with armies. Our recalcitrance runs deep, and I remember an auspicious Anzac Day, many years ago, when Prime Minister Helen Clark banned the carrying of real rifles by Army Cadets at memorial ceremonies. Guns, Helen reckoned, might give these impressionable young men - they were nearly all men then - the wrong idea.

Melanie Phillips: After America

Now the US has pulled up its drawbridge, how will the free world defend itself?

Much deserved opprobrium has been heaped upon US President Joe Biden for his shameful remarks on Monday justifying his decision to cut and run from Afghanistan. He blamed everyone but himself for the Taliban’s expedited return to power, and accused the Afghan army — who have lost almost 70,000 soldiers fighting the Taliban — of having 

collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight… American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves… We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

Clive Bibby: The truth about appeasement

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” Only fools would think that it is worth a try.

Here’s why we shouldn’t even give it a passing thought. It has proven to be a failed policy.

Those who are in positions of national leadership have responsibilities to recognise the signs that characterise thuggish behaviour and never allow it to operate unchecked.

Unfortunately, history at this level is littered with examples of failures to protect citizens from these criminals - some are even repeated by those in whom we have mistakenly entrusted the nation’s safety.

The disaster that is unfolding in Afghanistan is the result of irresponsible attitudes towards the evil regimes that want to destroy western civilisation.

There is no other way to describe it.

NZCPR Weekly: Disunity and Division

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter we look at the developing situation in Afghanistan and reflect on the dangers of tribalism and the He Puapua agenda that is currently being implemented in New Zealand, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Lindsay Mitchell shares the results of her comprehensive investigation into the progress being made by Maori under colonisation, and our poll asks whether you agree that DoC’s $26.5m taxpayer-funded visitor centre at Dolomite Point should be gifted to Ngai Tahu.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Karl du Fresne: Afghanistan? Remind me - where's that again?

First published on Wednesday... 

One of the most dramatic news stories of my lifetime was unfolding yesterday. The collapse of Afghanistan is a massive human tragedy and a catastrophic foreign policy and military failure for the world’s most powerful country and its allies – one that’s at least as humiliating and ignoble as Vietnam.

International media have given Afghanistan saturation coverage, and rightly so. Few countries have endured greater agony, much of it inflicted by the clumsy, brutal and ultimately futile intervention of foreign powers.

But how much time did Newshub give this epic event in its 6 o’clock news bulletin? None, other than a passing introductory spiel that promised (but never delivered) “horrific scenes at Kabul”.

You see, there was a far more momentous story to cover. A man in Auckland had tested positive for Covid-19 and it was suspected (and has since been established) that he had the highly contagious Delta variant.

Ron Smith: War and Civilians

On 17 February, President Hamid Karzai issued a widely-reported decree banning Afghan security forces from requesting coalition air-strikes on ‘Afghan homes or villages’.  This followed the reported deaths of 10 civilians in an airstrike a week earlier on a village in eastern Afghanistan.  It is also in the wake of an ISAF tactical directive of June last year, which forbade international forces from using airstrikes against insurgents ‘within civilian dwellings’.  The Karzai statement was well-received in Afghanistan and in the western media and, particularly (one suspects), by the Taliban and their supporters.  But is it really as simple as this?

Ron Smith: Afghanistan and the SAS

It was entirely predictable that news of the death on active service in Afghanistan of L/Cpl Leon Smith of the NZ SAS detachment would be greeted by an almost unanimous media chorus of questions about bringing the troops home. It was predictable because that was what had happened on the previous occasion (the death of Cpl Grant in late August), and, with variations, on occasions before that.

Almost as sadly predictable was the response of New Zealand politicians, with the exception of those who are actually politically responsible for the deployment at the present time. All the rest, including those who had been politically responsible at earlier times, and who ought to have known better (for example, Phil Goff) dutifully answered in the affirmative, ‘Yes, the SAS detachment should be brought home’. So what are we to make of this?

Ron Smith: Watching the Media

My 25 April blog on SAS involvement in taking prisoners in Afghanistan, who might subsequently be subjected to ill-treatment, suggested that the New Zealand policy of not officially taking prisoners at all was untenable, but that the purposes of the Jon Stephenson Metro article complaining about it, went beyond mere concern for human rights. It was, I argued, part of a continuing campaign by left-wing, anti-American interests, to force the withdrawal of New Zealand troops from the Afghan campaign. Comments by the parties (NZDF and Stephenson and his supporters) over the last week have done nothing to address either of these issues.

Of particular interest to me over the last two weeks has been the performance of National Radio’s Mediawatch. In the first treatment of Stephenson’s story (on 1May), we were treated to a gushing interview, with no probing of the evidence on which it relied and no critical questions, such as why, when his ostensible concern is human rights, he did not ask Colonel M* of the Crisis Response Unit about the treatment of captives in his charge.

Ron Smith: Afghanistan: prisoners and torture

I last wrote on this topic in August of last year (‘What to do with the prisoners?’, 25 August, 2010) when, as now, the matter of prisoner-taking by our SAS forces in Afghanistan was raised as a political and moral issue. The matter has now resurfaced through a long article by Jon Stephenson in the latest (May 2011) edition of Metro magazine. Again, accusations of impropriety are made against our SAS forces, and our political and military leadership, in relation to prisoners taken in counterinsurgency operations, in which our forces were involved, and who were subsequently handed over to US custody, or to the custody of various Afghan Government agencies. It should be noted that there is no suggestion that prisoners have been ill-treated by New Zealand soldiers. The focus of concern is rather on what happened to them after they have been handed over and this because of our legal (and moral) obligations under various international treaties and conventions.