All right, many thanks for sending us a welcome back. You're still watching the hashtag Y in the morning right here with me, Brian Sarko, but before we get too far, you can start to engage with us on our social media, our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and which are the platform, even YouTube as well, at 4254 channel. And the hashtag to plug in on is Y in the morning and personally at Brian Sarko 101 now. We're going to go straight up into our interview, first interview of the day. We're going to talk about Mattis, local tourism in Kenya. And joining us at Live in Studio to take us through this conversation is Melvin Akkoth, who is also the CEO for Mel Safari's Tours and Travels, which is a company that's actually, you know, playing a major role in the tourism industry right now. Live in Studio, good morning to you, Melvin. Good morning, Brian, how are you? Nice to meet you. I'm good, thank you. Nice to meet you too. How are you feeling? Thank you so much for having me. I'm feeling good, yeah, thank you. Yeah. Welcome to Y254. Thank you very much. All right, let's go straight up into it. If you were to talk about, you know, Mel Safari's Tours and Travels, how would you describe it and maybe just briefly, some of the things that you do behind the scenes that have impacted the tourism sector at large? Okay. Okay, so at Mel Safari's Tours and Travels, we do just like any other normal traveling tour company, we do travels and tour, we do vacations, we do hotel bookings, we do flight tickets, we do staycations, vacations, bush safaris, Airbnb bookings all over Kenya and East Africa. We also do hotel bookings, I said already, and we also do corporate team building and capacity building, yeah. Capacity team building, because you know, I had a friend of mine who was also in that space, but when the pandemic came, he had to switch to another business because COVID-19 was a disaster. It shook so many companies and organizations and it actually put people on the map, employers, companies, et cetera, who had to actually become so vulnerable to a point they had to let go of people. And on that note, how did your company survive that time, that turbulent time of the COVID-19 pandemic? Yeah, COVID-19 was very disastrous. And I think not even just the tourism sector only. Major companies, they had to let employees go home or something of the sort. And the tourism industry, we got hit really bad because now we wouldn't get visitors from outside due to lockdown and everything. And even within the country, we couldn't get people move around because tourism is just moving around, checking new areas and enjoying yourself. But if you're deprived of that freedom to move around, then as people who are in business organizing such, we were really hit. So we did, of course, some of our employees did go home, but now we are trying to bring them back because they were good employees. But when COVID-19 struck, business went down, really, really down, really, really down. But we're just trying to bring in more methods to help us now survive in such pandemics. COVID-19, in as much as it was disastrous, it was an eye-opener. Like when something like that happens again in the future, what will we do? Yeah, so we are trying to recover as well and we are trying to find mechanisms of survival during such periods. Yeah. And the spring of survival, I'm really interested to know some of the things that you guys are doing to get back afloat because like you mentioned, that COVID-19 season was very dark and turbulent. Are there maybe strategies that you guys have employed to ensure that you continue to stay in business? Yeah, majorly, sometimes we mainly focus on foreign tourists, the ones who come from abroad to Kenya. But now we're trying to focus more on local tourists or rather domestic tourists so that when something like that happens again, we still have our own people who can be able to travel Kenya and even move to East Africa just within so that we still have a way of making a living. Right. Yeah. Which is interesting. When you mentioned also of making a living, so many companies that are out there on the map, some of them have a strategy of how they filter out who should come to work with them, who should not, to your company. Maybe if somebody is watching and they'd be interested to come and work at Mell Safari, because they understand you're the CEO. So basically you're the boss and you're in charge of like overseeing or over-siting who's here and who's not here. Maybe if somebody wanted to come and work with you, is it possible for them to come through? Oh yeah, right. If they want to work with us, they can always drop their CVs or rather their papers at our email. We always have our details on all our social media platforms, from Instagram, Facebook, on Twitter, you can find us at Mell Safari's tours and travels. Yeah, so you can just DM us or rather just send your email. Yeah. Which is okay. Speaking of sending emails, how big is your tours and travels company in terms of even the employment capacity? Because I'm sure it could be like a medium, is it a medium, large, in terms of even the numbers of employees right there? I totally understand. We are an SME, where we are just a startup, but we have a small number that you're working with, but we are always ready to take in people. Right. Yeah. So you're flexible. We are very flexible. Now let's talk about some of the gaps that you guys came to fill on the market, because I think it's last week when I spoke to an IT lady who was telling me that, her friend came up with a package or innovation that wants to help people who have lost their IDs. When you lose your ID, you can go and log in in the website and then you can be able to scan through, there's usually a code number on your ID that can be able to tell where the location of that ID is and then you can later on find out where it is and you can go and pick it up and continue with your life. Now, in terms of solving some of the gaps in the tourism industry, what are some of them that you guys have managed to fill or you're currently working on to ensure that the tourism industry stays afloat as well? Okay. Not in the IT relationship, right? Not in the IT, specifically in the tourism travel. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Now, what we are trying to bring in majorly is to promote local tourism. Number one, I want to, when I ask you, Brian, do you know such a place? I want you to be able to know it. Before I bring people from abroad to check the place, I want you to know Kenya better, I want you to know East Africa better than any other place. So what you're trying to bring in as, let me say, maybe tour agents and operators, we're trying to find ways to embrace local tourism. We're trying to find ways to make people love our own country. You know, it all begins at home. So, yes. So as we look for those hidden gems, as we look for those new spaces, tour-ific spaces, we want you to be able to deploy it to local tourists first before we bring in people, you know, foreigners to come. Foreign tourism. Yeah, and if we measure a lot on local tourism, we're going to build it really strong and it's going to take the tourism sector to another level, who needs to, yeah. Hopefully, I believe you will.  It's about, you know, people from Paris, coming to Kenya or Africa. But some of us haven't even, you know, taken up on that chance to travel and go beyond Nairobi. Exactly. Go beyond Mombasa and Akuru, et cetera. And I love the fact that, you know, you guys are feeling it. And speaking of that, which is some of these amazing, beautiful places that, you know, you think Kenyans should go and visit to just promote, you know, tourism in this country? Oh, my God. I mean, Kenya, we have a lot of spaces that we should explore. Starting with maybe our beach areas, Masaimara, Takawiri in the Nyanza area. We have Chalbi Desert.  Right. Yeah, so I feel like we need to, you know, take you guys fast to those places. Know every particular corner of Kenya. You know, just enjoy our views and everything before we, you know, start bringing people to see our spaces. And that we can only do maybe when we promote even affordability of, yeah. In terms of prices and charges. The first step is, you know, giving someone a common one inch is something that, you know, they don't have to break a namora length too.  And during this holiday season, I know most of the people are planning for a vacation. Well, it's December. Yeah. This month is actually leading, is introducing us to, you know, Christmas, December, which is like a whole festive season. Yes, yes. So I don't want you guys to go home, you should go for December. Just go on to male safaris tours and travel. We have various packages, affordable packages. Please talk about them. The most affordable, the ones that you offer mostly to, let's say a client who has a very low budget to just start them off for a holiday because you also mentioned team building. Yes, yes, yes. Now, first of all, we also have Lepapolepole. You can put in some little money as time goes by so that by the time Sikya trip in Africa you have, you have already jazzered the whole amount. So in this December we have... How does that happen? Okay, so when, let's say you, Brian, you want to go to Watamu, right? Okay. So our package for Watamu for four days, three nights, we're charging 15K only. So maybe by that time, how to manage Kotoa the whole of 15K like this? You know, so you know the Kenya we live. So you can start paying from now and you can start with as low as 1,000 PKRK. So you can... Yes, yes, yes.  And we also give discounts and offers sometimes for travelers when you're making a CC for more than, you know, five times. We offer them discounts as well. So most of our packages are really affordable because we want to tap into the common Wanaichi. Sometimes, you know, traveling doesn't have to be expensive. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't have to be expensive. Each and every time somebody thinks of traveling, they'll be like, do you even have the money for fare? Do you even have the money for accommodation? Exactly.  And security, do you offer security pocket for example, if somebody is using Mount Safari and they want to go to what Tamil like you mentioned, are they guaranteed of a secure stay in their stay cash? Yes, yes, yes, yes. We do, especially for private bookings, we do guarantee you a safe space. The accommodations that we have, they have the best security. Yeah, and if anything happens, we as a company will get in and make sure your safety is awesome. Yeah. Is guaranteed. Is guaranteed, yes. Now, speaking of safety, what are some of the, let's say some of the big achievements that you guys have money to bug for yourself and that you love to share that you would say, you know, this one has really impacted our organization as well as the tourism sector as much. Okay. So, I think we've made strides, which I'm really happy about as a company and as an individual, as the founder and managing director at Melt Safari is to us. And actually this year we managed to bug a nomination as one of the top 30 under 30 CEOs of the year. And I am representing Kenya. Congratulations on that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So I'm looking forward to bringing the award home. Right. Is it like a competition that has other safaris or other CEOs? Yes, yes, yes. Yes, it do have in our category tourism and culture. I am representing Kenya, but we have other competitors from East Africa and Africa. Okay. Yeah, so in as much as, you know, we are different countries and everything, we are looking forward to bringing the award home. To bring the award home. Yeah. Hopefully you do. Yeah, it will. Now let's take a look at some of the things that you concede at before you came up with that, you know, it's a travel, a tourism and travel company. Maybe you are there gaps in the tourism industry that you are looking at to ensure that you feel so that, you know, the tourism industry stays afloat. Even in regards to the, let's say the outgoing CS studies, I think CS Anaji Balala who's recently exited office and maybe other differences in the previous regime that you feel like even this one should try and fill in in terms of, from a perspective of you as a CEO and owner of a tourism and travel company. Are there things that you'd love to be changed that you've seen? Yeah, yeah. I think one of the many things that I'd want our CS to, you know, work on rather is just getting our name out there as Kenya. And I mean, as a country, why do I say this? Because you can see countries like Tanzania, they have Zanzibar, they do market as if, they do market as if there's no tomorrow. Like they want people to visit their home. If you see Rwanda, they're really working hard on making sure their name is out there. And I'm just feeling like Kenya, we aren't doing that much. We don't have maybe a channel to just show how our country is beautiful because it is surely, it is. So I'm looking forward to maybe the CS and the ministry at large, finding ways on how to market as a country so that we don't get to suffer, maybe looking for foreign clients or rather the other tourists from abroad. Let's make the work easier, okay? Yes, I would love the ministry to market Kenya as a whole. Or just find ways of marketing Kenya out there. Yeah. And I love the fact that you're talking about how we should just embrace our very own. Because we really take it for granted. Actually, most of the people will talk about, if you ask someone what is your dream holiday destination, they'll be like Maldives. Oh, no. It's give a harm to us, but have you visited Nakuru? Have you visited Watangu? Right, have you visited, does this place, it's also unique in Mombasa, in the coastal region. Why is it, why is the name escaping me? It has a lot of good sandy beaches and the environment is so serene with the sun and the ocean scenario is just epic. Yeah, for example, there is snorkeling in Wasini. We can watch dolphins at home. God, why do we want to go outside before we explore our oil? Right. Yeah, so this is a queue. Before you exit Kenya, to Fadal. Please. I'm very excited to talk to you. I'm very happy to talk to you for another day. Now, you mentioned also team building, I'm really interested. I love team building myself. What happens in that space? Okay, so for team building, we just come together, we work together with corporates, however small, however big. So I know we are approaching India and this is the time where corporates and companies want to take their employees out for, activities, team building and capacity building, just to bring them together. And it's part of appreciating basically. Like a get-together moment of thanking. Exactly. Yeah, some nyamy trauma and games and ice-breaking or whatever. And so what we do, we come in and organize that whole package for corporates and companies. We give you a package maybe inclusive of transport, accommodation, if you guys are doing an overnight thing, we can do camping, if you guys want to explore, we can do just a day trip, take you to one of their destinations in Kenya and just have a full day, a day full of activities. And yeah, it's just a bonding moment for the employees. Fun fair. Fun fair. I love it. You mentioned also Airbnb and it's a very common business nowadays. But one thing that has made me remember that there's a friend of mine who years back, they had a situation at a certain Airbnb and it was told that they had CCTVs connected. So people have feared for their privacy and they'd be like, if you are coming to Airbnb, tell us if you have hidden cameras on beds and even at the loo. And I'm like, what is not happening in this Airbnb now? I totally understand. Now what happens nowadays? One of the regulations that are there is that we need to respect someone's privacy. So when we don't need to have a CCTV in the bathroom or rather in the bedroom, whatever they do there, that's their own business. Under the sink and the vinyl and yeah, it's their own business. There's one that showed that, you know, this air con system, no, it's a fun. The fun air con system.  So everything you do in that room is actually being zoomed on. What is not happening?  Then at the end of the day, you'll be the one who will be asked where is this person. So to avoid such issues, some of the AirBnB hosts prefer to put like CCTVs on their properties. But nowadays one of the regulations is to just respect the privacy of your clients. So nowadays it's a rare case. If you find a CCTV, it's just Quaget, Pali. So we make sure to take more of, you know, written details of our clients so that if anything happens, they are traceable with the details that they gave you. I remember something, there was a case of a policeman who was involved in a murder case with someone they went to a lodging. I don't know if it's an AirBnB also, but maybe it was a hotel. And then I was shocked that the whole footage of everything they did was all in the news headlines. I was like, what? Does it mean that all these hotels have hidden cameras in it? And then in front of mine was telling me that all these five-star hotels have hidden cameras in it. So he was trying to tell me, hey, Saku, if you ever go to any five-star hotel and show what you do in that room is actually right. So I was really scared. There's a friend of mine who is scared to actually go to sleep at a five-star hotel even to shower, because you're being monitored.  So it's quite a scary thing. And I love the fact that, you know, you talked about the regulations that should be there. Now let's come back to also ensuring sustainability in the tourism industry as well. There may be some of the things that you are looking for to ensure that, you know, that industry stays afloat in as much as from an individual point of view as a company to just ensure that, you know, you guys are afloat. Yeah, okay. So one of the sustainability measures that I suppose or I think the ministry rather should put in place is just affordable, affordability. Affordability in general. Accessing the parks shouldn't be like, we shouldn't be like paying, saving for like a whole year just to visit a park or other something of the sort. Just affordability. Just make, put in the common monarchy in mind. Yeah, someone who just wants to wake up and visit the national park, Nairobi National Park is here.  Yeah, yeah, just like make, we want to make it some, we want to bring in affordability as a factor. Yeah, because it all starts from home and we know in, we want to not make it as more expensive as it is deemed. Yeah, tourism doesn't have to sound that. Look, that is, this is domestic. Yeah. And you mentioned ticketing, does that mean you also deal with flights? Like there's clients who come to you, they want to go to, there's this, there's this location that a lot of people go to a lot. Where? The name is a schedule. Maybe they want to go there and they want to book like a private jet. They don't want to go to like a public name plan. One at a tree layer. Private, yeah. Yeah, do you offer also such packages as well? Yeah, we do, we do offer flight ticketing as well. Maybe you want to move to Alabama or Singapore. Yeah. Maldives. Maldives. Mauritias. Yeah, we will be there to help you with your flight ticketing and details as well. And even local flights as well. If you need to book a flight to Mombasa or Lamo, we will be there to assist. Even outside countries? Yes, yes. Sorry, the East African region. Yes. Like do you guys help people with passports? Yes. We do, if you need a passport or a visa, we do also help you with that. Okay. Yeah, we customize all these details to what you want us to do to you. If you want maybe to visit Uganda, Kampala, that you don't, if someone doesn't have a passport, the passport, they can always obtain the temporary passport from a citizen. That is like 350 only. So if you need assistance with that, we can always assist you. And with also other visa applications and other details that someone might need when they want to move from outside Kenya to another country. And also we do assist our clients who move from other countries coming to Kenya. So we give them a whole itinerary of what to do. From the moment they step their feet in the country to all the activities that they'll engage in and yeah, until they return. Until they're done. And for somebody who's watching at home and they want to actually maybe be a CEO of a tourist and travel company and they want to start it for themselves, where do they start and how can they go about it to a level that you are, that you've also been nominated in a tourist and travels competition as well. Oh, okay. So it all starts with passion. Okay. Yeah, if you love what you do, you will go beyond boundaries. Right. Yeah, so if you're very passionate enough in the travel and tourism sector, it starts, user starts. Look for a mentor. Right. Someone who can guide you from step A to step B. And I think we make these mistakes so that the people who are coming behind us shouldn't make the same mistakes. So if you, someone who wants to start this, just look for someone you look up to and let them mentor you. Let them show you the direction. Let them tell you the mistakes that you shouldn't repeat that you did and let them guide, just guide you throughout. Very funny though. Yeah.  Right. Yeah. Because you know, somebody would think it's a whole research. I have to go, but did you study like a tourism hospitality? Not really. You didn't have like a background in that field? No, I didn't study journalism in campus. Oh, you studied journalism? Yeah. So you should be on this end. Yeah, yeah. Let the diversity of like, you know, be between multi-skilled. And I love it. Now, let's talk about now the investment part of it. How do you go from, you know, exchanging contacts to knowing people, creating conversations, the whole networking shebang, how do you get into it to a point you're now fortified and solidified in this space? They say your network is your network. Exactly. Yeah, you need to talk to people. You need to interact with people. You need to, you know, know people in your area or circle of influence. Just know what this person does. Interact, exchange, you know, views and contacts as well. And I think one of the things that have really helped me or rather helped me grow and reach maybe where I am right now is just, you know, having conversations with people, just networking, having the first Ohanga to want to know who is this person, what do they do? Can we do something together? I do tours. You do this. Can we be able to work together or just partner in some way, yeah? Right. Yeah, and also just to assist each other in life. No money is an island. So one time I'll need you or one time you'll need me and maybe, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. And at some point you mentioned behind the scenes we have this conversation. You mentioned that, you know, you don't have a physical location. You said yours is virtual, which is very unique, you know? Because a lot of tourism and travels companies have, companies have a physical location in town or somewhere else where, you know, like you guys have to do a dispatchment or you guys have to do an assignment where you're going to meet several clients here and there. And how do you coordinate that since now it's virtual in terms of even the vehicles and everything? Yeah, so technically we are moving, it's 2022, we are moving to, you know, technologically we are moving to, you know, somewhere or some point where we will all operate maybe virtually one time. So we are just starting to embrace it as early as now. So we do operate virtually, not fully, because sometimes when you need to meet our clients, we can always organize for that. So for issues of maybe having our pickup points or rather meet up points with clients, normally we prefer meeting clients or rather picking them at their homes or places and sometimes we prefer meeting them in town or rather picking them in CBD in town. We maintain a communication channel with our clients so they are fully satisfied and they are fully, you know, they get the services they need from us fully. Yeah. Right, because also the diversity of it all makes it even more beautiful. Now who has been your biggest, let's say your biggest support system in terms of, because this is an individual startup for me, right? You started it on your own and look here you are. Who would you say has been your biggest support system that you know, put you up to where you are right now, that you can mention them and give them credit and say, hey, you, does this song by, I think it's by Beyonce or Sierra that says upgrade you. You really upgraded me. Yeah. Right. Wow, okay. The list could be long or short, but I think one person or rather, it's not one person, it's a group of people. I think the group of people that have really uplifted me to where I am right now is just my network of other tour agents and tour operators. They've been able to mentor some of us. It's not even just a matter of competition. We, sometimes we learn from each other, we move from point A to point B, holding hands. And I think why it's not for that team, or rather the people, my fellows in the industry, I wouldn't be here. They've been a great support team. And also my dad, he's been able to push me from, you know, I studied journalism and now, you're telling me you're doing tourism. What do you mean? Did you ever see yourself when they're going that direction? No way, no. How much lack of a job? Lack of a journalism job that led you to that? Not really, because I started tourism back in campus while I was finishing. So I got into entrepreneurship before getting into corporate and employment. So when I got into employment and I could balance between my household and also working for someone, it was really, it was, I could balance, yeah? Until now I decided maybe I could focus on tourism for now. Because it was making you money, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my dad kept on pushing me and at first I know it was, it sounded really like, what do you mean?  This is something you're going to go with, you know? And I was like, I don't know what to do, but you know, let's do it. I think we are, at this age, it's when we are supposed to take those risks, make those mistakes and learn from them. So if you have to do it now. Right. Just start. You mentioned that, always start any time. Yeah, they say getting the work half done is starting. Yes, it's starting. Because starting it is like the biggest achievement. And I want to say, I want to be a doctor. Can you start researching on how to be a good doctor, right? Before we get to your lowest moments and some of the most uplifting moments in your industry as well, what are some of the strategies that you have in terms of ensuring that you have credible sustainability for yourself individually now, not as a local travel centurism sector at large? Individually. Yes. Okay, okay. I think one of the main things that I've done individually that has helped me even run the company is just trying to be a people's person. Yeah, just when you find attending these gatherings or attending these networking sessions, just go out there and put your name out there. Yeah, put yourself out there. Yeah, put yourself out there. Throw yourself in the deep end. Yes. When you start swimming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, as we wind up your most, let's say your most life-changing moments that were big, that made you like let's say have some good harvest and then most lowest moments that were really also life-changing as well. Okay, I'll start with the lowest moments. Okay. So I think running the company, one of my very, very lowest moments when the cells are not there, just like any other business, you can try as much as you do it, market everywhere, put yourself out there still, but at the end of the day you still find, I don't have nothing at the table. So you find it's very depressing sometimes. And for someone who decided to shift to entrepreneurship, fully, you're like, so you're just there, you're like, was it supposed to be this stuff? It's a duck list. You have to do it anyway. Yeah, you have to, otherwise you have to pick yourself up. And speaking of picking yourself up, that is one of the strongest moments. You will fail, not once, not twice, not thrice. You will fail continuously. But the main thing is, what do you do after failing? Learn from it. Good question. Pick yourself up. What do you do when everything fails? What do you do?  Best people will be like, oh, me I'm done. Me I'm done. Don't quit before the magic happens. So I do pick myself up, see whatever, what do I need to do? Should I change my strategies or something? So I think in that line, then also one of my major highlights, rather high moments, was the very first time I got my international club. Oh, amazing. Congratulations. When was this? I think it was two years ago or something. When we were just starting and, you know, we were embracing local tourists as well. But when the international clients come in, they get your name out there. They're able to refer you to other people. And once you give them a top notch service, trust you, me, you're going to get referrals. And that applies in any other business out there. Make sure your customer service is very perfect. So that the people will receive your services, be your, like, your marketers.  You guys should try that. It was a nice experience. Yeah. So that was one of my highest moments. Yeah. All right. As we exit, because this is the last question. I'd like you to tell people some of the visions that you have for your organization as well. And if somebody wants to access your company, where can they find it, and et cetera. And some of the packages that you guys have that will entice them to enjoy that, John. OK. So, OK. So one of our visions is to make sure we maintain sustainability in the industry. We want to, as I earlier said, tourism doesn't have to be expensive. You don't have to break a leg or an arm to visit Chalbi or visit Mombasta or visit Takawiri. Right. Yeah. Lamu. You don't have to. Watamu. Watamu, Watamutamu. So you don't have to think so much about, hey, am I going to manage or am I going to afford this package? So if you're looking for affordable packages, check on our social media platforms at male safaris, two of them traveled on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And also, you can check me out, Melvin, underscore our course on Instagram as well. And we have two major packages for December. Most of the December packages were private, but we didn't want to leave the common one out. So we have a trip to Watamu and Takawiri. Brian, do you know Takawiri? You know, put me on the map. You know, I want to go to Bahamas, but I even don't know where Takawiri is. Look at me now. Sure, are you? That is how much I need to explore this country. I think we will find out. Are you giving us a package as Y254 so that we go? Because there's the Y in the morning, Tim. If you guys cooperate and you know. I mean, why not? Why not? Yeah, we could give you a package to Takawiri. Takawiri is in Nyanza. It's one of the spaces we discovered. I think two years ago, a year or two ago, it's one of the gems in Nyanza. Absolutely. It's in Rusinga Island. Right. Yes, so as we continue to explore and, you know, unravel and unpackage Kenya, we want to find those hidden spaces that are beautiful to explore. And Kenya, right? Yeah, we decided that this Jamhurri holiday in December, we are heading to Takawiri. Very affordable package. Three days tonight. It's going to be lit. And what time was well? Just check more of our packages on our social media platforms, and we are always online to assist you. Do you have a number because you said you're virtual? Yes, we do have a number. So you can get us on 0702-6745-60 or 0735-168-750. All right, absolutely. We can call it a day now. Thank you so much for your time. And Melvin, our co-CEO of Mel, Sepharis, to us and travel as well. Thank you. Thank you so much for your insights, your time, and everything you've shared. Thank you so much, Brian. It was a pleasure. Welcome. And now we are going to take a short break. We come back to check out what you guys are saying on the social media platforms. Continue to interact with us on the hashtag why in the morning personally at Brian's or Co-101, see you in a bit.


After a nine-day blitz across the country, the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan. What does the future hold for the country? I speak to a journalist in Kabul and will be joined by an expert on the region. For the second half of the show, I'll be joined by Ash Sarkar. We'll be speaking about Britain's obligation to offer asylum to anyone fleeing Taliban rule and also why we don't hold that much hope that this government will step up to that challenge. However, if you haven't already, do hit subscribe and send us your comments and questions on the hashtag Tisqisawa or in the comments below. After nine days in which the Taliban gained control of all of the country's major cities and provinces, the Islamist group on Sunday reached Kabul. This was the stunning moment that the Taliban released footage of their fighters inside the presidential palace. Those scenes occurred after Afghanistan's president Ashraf Ghani fled to Uzbekistan. Ghani, now the ex-president, was a former world-backed economist and his abandonment of the country was not a surprise to many people living in Afghanistan. His commitment to the country had been doubted by many. In fact, that was one reason why people have said people might not have fought as strongly for the government side as many had expected. His fleeing, though, was a cause of shock and disbelief to his education minister, Ranjina Hamidi. I'm in shock. I'm in disbelief. I did not think that things would happen the way it did. And the saddest part is that I didn't expect this. I didn't expect this from the president that I knew and a president who I trusted fully. Somehow in my heart, in the back of my mind, I still want to believe that this is not true that he left. But if he did, it's really a shame. Those events which led to the remarkably speedy collapse of the Afghan government are a cause for recriminations, both within the country and on the international stage. The most pertinent question at the moment, though, now is with the Taliban in charge. How will they govern? There's spokesperson, Sahil Shaheen, told the BBC on Sunday that under this new version of the Taliban, women will still be able to go to school. There is also a lot of concern from women in Afghanistan, in Kabul. They have been writing to me. They have been texting me. They are concerned that you will reimpose the regime of the 90s back in Afghanistan where women couldn't go to school, where girls couldn't go to school. They couldn't work. Can you give us some clarity on what your plans are for that? We have taken already many parts of the country and also many parts of the country. There are hundreds of schools for girls, universities there where the girls' students are studying. There is no friction on them. They are continuing their studies and they are going to schools. They were going in the past. In Herat, for example, women are telling me that when they arrived at the gates of their university yesterday, Taliban fighters told them to leave and that there would be instructions from Quetta Shura about whether they could attend university or not. That is what the fighters on the ground are telling the women of Herat. What I am telling is the policy. The policy is that women can have access to education and to work and, of course, they will observe the hijab. That is it. When you say the hijab, do you mean a headscarf on their head or a burqa covering their face? No, burqa is not the only hijab. There are many types of hijab. One of them you already mentioned. Those words might sound somewhat reassuring. That is when compared to the Taliban's rule in the 1990s. No one should condone women being forced to wear anything. But in terms of the differences between what the Taliban did in the 1990s and what they are pledging to do now, not everyone is convinced. This is Afghan teacher and human rights activist Pashdana Durrana speaking to the BBC. What they say and what they are putting in practice, there are two different things. Girls in Herat, they were not able to go to their universities. Girls in Kandahar, they were asked to go to their home and their male relatives were asked to fill in for their positions in the bank. So what they are saying, of course, they are looking for legitimacy from all these different countries to be accepted as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. But then at the same time, what are they doing in practice? A, either they don't have a control on their foot soldiers or B, they really want the legitimacy, but they are not willing to do the work. Those are two different things. I don't think so. They are pretty much like, you know, every time they talk about women rights, they are being very vague about it. What sort of women rights are we talking about? The mobility rights, the socializing rights, their political rights, their representative rights, their voting rights. Are all these acceptable to you or are few acceptable to you? At the same time, what about women representation? How are women going to talk to the Taliban government? Why aren't there any women in your government to talk to the Afghan women? And apart from that, educational rights, if Afghan girls are going to go to school, can they continue with their educational curriculum, the some general education curriculum?  So it's a lot of different vague and confusing statements coming from them, but they don't have any solid plan or they haven't said it up until now. So I wouldn't trust them on this one. We said earlier, you're in a secret location because you fear for your life. It's clearly not stopping you speaking out though. Oh yeah, definitely. Somebody has to speak up. Somebody has to speak up because it's time. It's time that they understand that women won't be silenced. Today it's my education. Tomorrow it's going to be my daughter's education. My sister's education. My political rights are right now taken away. Tomorrow it's going to be my daughters, my sisters, people, the next generations. So of course I have to put up a fight today so that the next generation doesn't have to face all this conflict. If you watch Friday's show, you would have seen another clip with Pushtani Durrani, who's obviously an incredibly brave activist. She's incredibly skeptical about the promises given by the Taliban. Only time will tell. What's already clear is there are many people who are right now desperate to leave Kabul. These were the incredibly chaotic scenes today at Kabul airport. So you can see here, Afghans trying to board the few commercial airliners leaving the country. Obviously a lot more people are trying to get onto that plane than there is space for. It all looks frankly quite hellish actually. You can also see here which is an even more shocking scene. The moment crowds surrounded a US Air Force plane as it evacuated diplomatic and military personnel. You can see here people trying to grab onto the side of the plane and footage which was shared very widely on social media which we're not going to show here and now showed two people falling from the side of that aircraft in mid-flight at a height at which death would be almost certain. Really, really horrific scenes. Apart from the tragic scenes at Kabul airport though, what has life been like in the rest of Kabul? Earlier today I spoke to journalist Ali M Latifi in Kabul. I started by asking him about his experiences of the Taliban's first full day in charge of the city. Today it was just a feeling of well what is day one going to be like? And so there were people out on the streets for sure. They were going and they were seeing the Taliban and meeting them and taking pictures with them and asking them for selfies. Some had put up the Taliban flag and put up Taliban devotionals from their cars, you could hear that. But really everyone in the city was gauging what would happen. And so far the first day has been calm as far as we know in the city itself. And the Taliban have so far kept to their word based on all accounts. So people right now I think are just being cautiously, if not optimistic, cautiously, they're just being cautious. They don't want to be in a situation where if the Taliban does go back on its word that they're somehow caught in that. So I feel like over the coming days we'll see more people going back out onto the street. We'll see more businesses reopening and hopefully daily life starting to resume fairly soon if the Taliban keeps up with the way they've been acting and doesn't somehow revert back to their strict rule and any kind of fearful practices. There seem to be two interpretations on how the Taliban are going to behave. So one is that they're just saying that they're going to be different to the 1990s to try and gain international legitimacy and then on the ground they're going to be doing something very different. And the second is that they actually recognize that the way they behaved in the 1990s undermined their regime in numerous ways. So they are going to be different this time around. What point do you think we'll know which one of those is correct? I don't think we should believe them flat out. We can give them a chance, a cautious chance and hope that they have changed but be very cognizant and be very vigilant for any kinds of infractions or anything that would show that they're going against their word so that it doesn't somehow become much bigger. And I think the Taliban has to give us reason to believe them. So the only way people will believe them is if things continue the way they have been so far which is to say that they've been fairly normal and fairly hands off with people. If that continues then yeah, people will slowly start to believe them but whether or not people believe them is as much on them as it is on us. Negotiations going on in Doha. The Taliban have suggested they're willing to share power to some degree. To what extent do those negotiations matter and to what extent does it matter what kind of political settlement is arrived at now? I think those negotiations will be very important and very telling because that's one of the other things that sort of gave people a sense of calm. Yesterday was these lists that were being passed around possible government structures and the fact that it included political figures from the last 20 years who have roots in the Kingdom Times and in the First Republic Times and in the last 20 years. So the belief and the hope is that if people like that can come into the fold with the Taliban then hopefully their presence will sort of stave off the Taliban from any kind of move back towards 1996. We've been seeing images today, horrific images of people trying to cling on to the side of US Air Force planes with tragic consequences. How many people at this point do you think are planning to leave Afghanistan because the Taliban have entered or do you think people are more waiting and seeing how they end up governing? What's going on in terms of people wanting to leave is a few things. One is that all of these embassies, the US, Canada, the UK, France so many other places in Germany gave people hope by announcing these visas saying we're going to give you visas to women and we're going to give visas to journalists and to rights workers and to people who work as translators and linguists and so on and so forth but so many of those are not clear cut. They don't have simple, obvious processes. And so that means a lot of people were left behind and a lot of people were also sold a false hope because they didn't realize what a lot of the fine print of these things entailed and they also didn't know that for a lot of these potential visas getting in contact with the respective embassy would be extremely difficult for people who are working with trying to get the SIV with the US reaching the embassies almost impossible at this point. And then the requirements, you have to know exactly when you worked for some kind of a project or a company that was funded by one of these countries you have to have contacts with people who would be willing to write letters to vouch for you and for a lot of people they can be really difficult because they may not worked in these places for a long time. So there's that issue and then there's also just the issue of people so afraid that the Taliban will revert to the way they were that they're just looking for a way out that they just need a way out. And so for whatever reason they felt like maybe if we just show up at the airport these airlines in the US and the UK which essentially control the airport at this point will feel sorry for us and take us on board and that's not what's happening at all. What's happening is a thousand people show up to get on a 300 person local airline going to Istanbul or where you see horrendous video footage of men grabbing onto wings and tires of ascending US military planes. And you actually see in one of them one of the men literally fall from the sky. It's a sense of fear, it's a sense of hopelessness and it's also a result of bad policy, a bad implementation of bad policy of what some people would say offers that weren't made in good phase. Two of the big questions about how the Taliban are going to rule is one, how oppressive are they going to be in general especially to women. The other is how much are they going to take reprisals against people who historically had fought against them. People who had been critical of the Taliban or people who had fought alongside the government. To what extent could we now see a rounding up of critics of the Taliban and then horrific human rights abuses? Is that something we're likely to see in the next weeks and months? The Taliban claims that there won't be reprisals. I actually spoke to some of them today and asked them specifically about this. I said, listen, how should people feel about going out on the streets should they be afraid? And they said, no, absolutely not. We won't bother anybody that doesn't bother anybody else. And I said specifically this question of what about someone who had worked for the foreigners or what worked for the security forces or what worked for the government? And they said, no, we don't want anything against anyone. We're willing to come in with an amnesty so far as they act responsibly towards society. And so again, this will be a major test for them. This will be something that they will be measured against. How much they keep to this word. That will be very important in terms of what you had said earlier about people believing or having trust in the Taliban. This is a way that they can build that trust with the people by showing that they won't somehow have reprisals, basically. That was Ali Latifi speaking to me earlier from Car Bull. I'm joined now by Paul Rogers, who's Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University and a security columnist at Open Democracy. Welcome to the show, Paul. I want to start with a question about the Taliban. As Ali and Latifi there said, there's a lot of uncertainty about what they're going to do next and whether they're going to stick to their word that they're going to be different from the 1990s. Now, whether or not we should believe them kind of depends on how we analyze who they are. There might be people who think, well, if they let girls go to school, if they do these things, then what's the point in the Taliban? If their overriding aim is to implement a medieval type, very, very harsh conservative society, then is it possible to have a Taliban rule which isn't harshly conservative? How would you answer that question? I think it's actually very difficult to answer because we simply don't know. There are plenty of indications and has been touched on already that in some parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban have been open to girls staying at school and there's even been one television station operating, but it's simply too early to say how they're going to act more generally. It's certainly true that when they were last in power, they were very different circumstances. They were still fighting the Northern Alliance. They had all the Arabs from other countries in helping them. And in a sense, even by 2000, they had their backs to the wall and were very rigid in what they were doing within Afghanistan. They will feel a lot more confident this time. Also, because they've had the office in Doha at the more senior level, they've been interacting with diplomats in many parts of the world. And this has continued recently. One of the first people to basically talk to the Afghan leadership such as it exists so far in Kabul this morning was the Russian ambassador who has stayed on in Kabul. Three weeks ago, the Taliban had a very senior delegation which went to China's invitation to meet the Chinese Foreign Minister and engage in discussions about the long-term relationship with China. So what you can see at least is that the Taliban, whatever they're doing domestically, are looking outwards and aware of wider opinion and their wider position. It's possible therefore that they will be more cautious, at least at the senior level, in what they do in Afghanistan in the coming months. Now, there have been a number of reports, very unpleasant reports, very nasty reports, that in parts of Afghanistan there have been local Taliban who have been apparently reverting to the old ways. What we simply don't know, and this is a crucial thing, is when the senior leadership is in Afghanistan and many of them are still in Doha, will they actually enact what they're saying they're going to do and in a sense lay down the law. And as you said, Michael, if they do, well, what sort of Afghanistan will it be? It would not be the Afghanistan in the kind of tradition that the Taliban seemed to want, a kind of medieval situation. You could argue that in fact other, some Islamic republics are pretty close to Islamists. Saudi Arabia, for example, which is both sort of early 21st century and well, maybe 18th century as well. What I'm saying is we simply don't know, but the situation now is different to the situation 20 years ago and there's maybe a chance that things will be rather better. But I'm bound to say only time will tell, maybe a month or two will have a clearer idea. And what will determine which one of those come out? Obviously there's the intentions of the Taliban, which it's quite difficult to ascertain at this point, but there's also, as you say, international pressure and then potentially internal opposition of those two sort of determinants of what the Taliban might decide, international pressure and domestic pressure. What do you think will be more important? Will domestic pressure matter at all? I think there will be factions, but one has to remember that after the 9-11 attacks in what's September 2001, there was a period when the United States was determined to extract bin Laden and the other al-Qaeda membership. There were indications then that even at that time the Taliban constituted something of a coalition of different views and that some elements may well have been willing to give bin Laden up. We're still unsure about the detail of that and there are indications that in fact the Americans would not want to go for it because they wanted to go to war anyway, but that's controversial in both senses. But what it does mean is even at that time there were differences within the movement. So I have no doubt at all you're absolutely right. There are many differences now. What does seem to change though, and I think might possibly tip the balance, and I'm really cautious here, is the relationship with the outside world. Particularly, I would suspect the interest of several regional countries and we're looking sort of, if I can put it crudely, in clockwise order from Iran and the West through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, through to that very important common border with China, at the Waksang Corridor, and then of course Pakistan right around the Eastern to the South. Now of those countries, obviously Iran is extremely cautious but has influence in the West. Its experience with the Taliban particularly at the end of the 1990s was not good. There was the case in which a number of Iranian diplomats were murdered by the Taliban. But they will be cautious, but they will want to deal with the Taliban, not least because they need desperately to control the drug trade going from Afghanistan into Iran and also they want economic relations. Turkmenistan does not count for very much here, Uzbekistan to Tajikistan to an extent. So it's really left to China and Pakistan. Now within Pakistan obviously you have quite a big split which doesn't really appear in public. The civilian politicians including most elements of the government want to see a peaceful Afghanistan. They're really of very mixed thoughts as to whether the Taliban is good for that, but basically they discount it. The military is a very different matter. The senior Pakistani military are far more cherry of India and they see it as important to have as good a relationship with Afghanistan and they see the Taliban as a pretty good option because of all the long-term relationships with the ISI. That leaves China and I may be exaggerating so I don't think I am. The Taliban really will want to do a deal with China. If the Waxan corridor is open, if they can all weather road which is feasible if difficulty, then you actually have a new corridor, a direct connection with China. And that could happen. The Chinese will basically see this as advantages themselves in two senses. One they will get access to Afghanistan, another route down to Guadal in Pakistan, opening up to Western Asia in a way which adds to the routes they already have. And they will also be in a very good position to exploit Afghanistan's incredible mineral reserves. The quid pro quo from the Taliban side will be they will insist that the Taliban control the Huigha paramilitaries who form part of the Taliban fighting force, a small part but the Chinese an extremely dangerous part. As far as the Taliban is concerned they would benefit from the economic development that would flow from Chinese involvement. And that I think is a situation which would not have existed if you could imagine this 20 years ago. And this is why I think in some ways Taliban is having to open up to the outside world to an extent they did not feel in any sense essential in the 1990s. Maybe I'm being over optimistic here but all I am saying is the situation has changed. What has also changed of course has been an extraordinary decay in the status of the United States and Britain and NATO, particularly because of what's happened very recently. I mean we've seen in the past two weeks an extraordinary failure of intelligence. I'm going to show a clip of Biden in a moment sort of about the failure of intelligence. So I just want to hold that thought for one moment and just pick you up on this point about what international pressure can achieve. Because when people say have the Taliban changed one of the things they're meaning is will they let girls get education? Will women have to wear the burqa? Will they have really horrific punishments in public? And if what we're relying on is that they want to have good relationships with Uzbekistan and Pakistan and China and Iran, there might be many people who think well those don't necessarily sound like relationships that are going to secure women's rights in the country for example. I mean obviously alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom also doesn't guarantee these rights as we see with Saudi Arabia. But to what extent can any international alliance protect, well women aren't a minority but protect people's individual rights in any country? I don't know and I would agree with you entirely that the situation as it exemplified in many other parts of the world does not offer you much more hope that it will be different in Afghanistan. All I'm saying is that as far as we can tell it is reasonable to say the Taliban as they exist now are different from the Taliban of 20, 25 years ago. And so it is a question of trying to work in ways which to ensure that. It won't be easy and I wouldn't pretend this and in some ways if one argues as some of us did 20 years ago that we should never go into war in the first place. People rightly turn around and say but look at all the progress that has been made in Afghanistan. But you know you have to turn around and measure that against the cost of what four failed wars over the last 20 years. And havoc in so many parts of the Middle East are now increasing the Sahel. So there are no clear answers to that but all I'm saying is that we are not in the same position we were before. There is a much wider need for just a higher priority on human rights, particularly women's rights, not just in Afghanistan and many other parts of the world. But Britain has some fault in that I say at the present time. Let's talk about what the events of the past week tell us about US and UK foreign policy and strategy. And particularly Joe Biden of course many people did predict and the Taliban would come to power once America withdrew. But Joe Biden had very very recently denied that would be the case. This is the US President on July the 8th. This was his answer when asked if the Taliban takeover at that point was inevitable. No, it is not. Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 well equipped as well as equipped as any army in the world and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. Mr. President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse. That is not true. Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not? That is not true. They did not reach that conclusion. So what is the level of confidence that they have that it will not collapse? The Afghan government and leadership has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place. And do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam with some people feeling? None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is yet an entire brigade breaking through the gates of our embassy. Six of them are not mistaken. The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They are not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There is going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable. So the question now is where do they go from here? That the jury is still out. But the likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. Now that is not an answer that will go down particularly well in the history books. Obviously Joe Biden was 100% wrong about the Taliban, 100% taking over the country. Perhaps most embarrassingly for Joe Biden. He said there would be no circumstances where helicopters evacuated people from the U.S. Embassy as happened in South Vietnam. These were the scenes streamed across the world on news channels yesterday. So this is coming in from, it's just done some loops around the territory at a higher altitude. And now it's coming into land at the U.S. Embassy. Earlier we had two, and there's another one taking off to my left if we just pan over here Saludin. So Charlotte one assumes that that is the evacuation process on going that what we're looking at in terms of helicopters. Is that right? Yeah what you're looking at we've just had two more helicopters take off from the U.S. Embassy. And this is how they're ferrying people back and forward. And then we have, I can see four in total. These ones heading directly for the airport now. So helicopters were needed to evacuate people from the U.S. Embassy. What's your take on this? Was this a failure of intelligence on the part of the Americans or did they kind of know what would happen or have a suspicion it would happen but didn't want to admit it? I suspect it was the latter. Overall I mean the comments that Biden made to what only five weeks ago about the Afghan army. Anybody who knew anything about the military situation Afghanistan would have known that was nonsense. Yes, technically there were 300,000 people in the army and the armed police force. The levels of ability were really very low but more than that morale was appalling. The Afghan army has suffered many thousands of deaths over the last five years in fighting the Taliban. The equipment has not been readily available at the right time in the right place and there have been many other problems for the army itself. Now whether you can blame the longer term training they've had from the Americans and from the British, the British were running the major staff college, whether you can blame corruption within Afghanistan who can say. But certainly it may well have been more the latter but the army was not in a fit state to maintain control of the country for a long time. Now I must admit you know when I was doing talks about this interviews four or five weeks ago I thought it was possible that Kabul might stay in government hands through the winter. I thought it was also possible probably more likely that Kabul would fall before the winter came on. The pace at which the change has happened has been in a sense what could have been an intelligence failure. I mean how was it that for Britain with all his experience of Afghanistan training the army and the rest, GCHQ, the massive defence intelligence system in the MUD and MI6 all failed to warn even two weeks ago what was happening. Or maybe they did and the government didn't take any notice but there are certainly very big questions to answer there which might at least have made this changer from the terrible events of the last 48 hours less likely. But going back to Biden obviously the state of opinion in the United States as one understands it two or three months ago was an overwhelming theme of let's get out of there. Biden obviously been determined for what ten years or more that Afghanistan was the bad war. Going back to Obama's time when he came in in 2008 he had decided in that campaign that Iraq was the bad war the Americans withdrew. In fact Afghanistan was one related directly to 9-11 and in a sense the Americans would stay there. But Biden even when he was vice president was Jewish about that and that's been basically a thing which to be fair to him he's held for a long time. But the events of the last few months I think have been absolutely disastrous to the Biden administration even though it was Trump who decided to get out and agreed to a completion date. The way that Biden has kept to that either he was very badly advised or else it was a terrible error on his part but I'm afraid the consequences are going to be serious for him personally and for the Democrat administration for some time to come. And what does the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government tell us about I suppose the decision to withdraw because there are a couple of ways of interpreting it. One is to say Joe Biden by going along with this deal that Donald Trump made with the Taliban and leaving in the summer when it's still fighting season put the government in as weaker position as they could be. And that's why they don't have much leverage in any or zero leverage basically any sort of peace negotiations that come and the Taliban will have to make fewer concessions than if the government had fought harder. The other interpretation is that the weakness of the government shows that whenever the Americans withdrew it would have been very unlikely that they could shift the balance of power in such a way that the Taliban were defeated. And it would just be a slower defeat of the government and that could have led to many more deaths. Actually, this is a protracted civil war instead of a basic instant surrender. Which one of those do you see as being a more plausible account of the implications of the speed of this dramatic takeover by the Taliban? Again, Michael, it's a very difficult question to answer now. When more information comes out from all the military circles and there are quality circles of every in the United States, we'll have a clearer idea in analytical terms. I could just hazard a guess at the moment that what you said at the end is one thing we should remember. The longer this went on in its current circumstances, the more people would have been killed. And it is not just Afghan army people by the thousand. The UN was reporting and the special inspector general for reconstruction, the one independent person advising Congress. He and the UN were reporting on the very high-rated civilian casualties month by month over the last few months. And in a sense, if it had gone on very much longer, it might have got even worse. So it sounds terrible as though to say in some ways, Americans cut their losses and it might have increased the chances of a peace. But we don't know what sort of peace. And we don't know what sort of peace will come through the Taliban. So it's a question which has to be answered. But what that answer will be, I don't know. All one can say is that Afghanistan has been through a real nightmare for 20, well, for 40 years overall. And it has not got better in the last year or so. And that, I'm afraid, is a reflection on this war. And when you take in what has happened in Iraq against ISIS and also, of course, in Libya and what is now happening across the Sahel, then we are not in any way out of the woods. And there has to be some incredibly serious rethinking of what we even mean by security. We haven't even begun to talk how this interact with a world where you're moving into an era of climate breakdown. These are international issues in which Afghanistan has seemed to be small, but it's actually part of a much wider issue, I'm afraid. I've just got one audience question I want to ask you finally. This is from Taddo Cantwell with 10 Euros. Thank you very much. How does the presence of Shia in Western Afghanistan impact on how Iran deals with the Taliban? The Iranians will be watching this very carefully. In fact, if you go towards the western part of Afghanistan, particularly Herat and the area around that, there is a substantial Shia minority. There is also, of course, somewhere in a session overlapping with that, the Hazara minority, which are essentially of a Shia outlock. There are about two million of them, including quite a lot in Afghanistan. They are hugely concerned about any serious impact that ISIS may have. You remember there was that terrible bombing of a girl's school, which was essentially a Hazara school just a few months ago, which has probably laid at the door of ISIS factions, probably rightly. And that killed, I think, 60 or more young girls. What the Hazara have done, in fact, is formed their own kinds of militias, probably in Kabul, but in the areas in which they live more towards the west of Afghanistan. And they, in a sense, can offer a kind of resistance if the Taliban are prepared to go for the Shia. So in other words, it is not just the Iranians across the border with whom the Afghans do have to deal. The Taliban have to deal. It is also minorities within Afghanistan. So you hope, and I'm afraid I can't say more than that, that Taliban leaders will see the sense in avoiding this kind of inter-confessional conflict. Because if that adds to all the problems they already have with the many factions, then essentially Afghanistan is going to stay a very unstable country. Paul Rogers, thank you so much for your time and insight this evening. If you do want to read more from Paul Rogers, the fourth edition of his book, Losing Control, Global Security in the 21st Century, has just been released by Pluto Press. He also recently did a great podcast with Politics Theory, other friends of Navarra media. So you can go check that out. I do recommend it. We do have a couple of donations. Thank you from MacMaine and Dan Smith. And Paul Taylor says the events in Afghanistan are the ultimate failure of regime change. I think that's a fairly astute analysis, quite difficult to argue with. Ash, we are going to talk about one topic in particular in a moment, which is Britain's responsibility to give asylum, give refuge to people fleeing the Taliban. First of all, though, I just wanted to bring you in, I suppose, for some general commentary on what we've been talking about. And I suppose especially how the events of the weekend has played out in British political discourse. You've got one group of people saying, this means, Biden shouldn't have withdrawn. They're saying, this is what you get when stop the war, coalition say that you should get the troops out. It means Taliban rule. And then on the other side, you've got people mainly from the left saying this shows that the regime change was always going to be a failure. As Paul Taylor says in the comments, what's your interpretation of that debate that's going on?  It is true that the withdrawal could probably have been managed in a better way in a way which secured some kind of political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban first and also secured safe passage in the ability for Afghans who need to flee to evacuate safely. Those things were possible. It didn't happen. But the seeds of that crisis were really planted by Joe Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, who boasted that he was bringing all of the troops out. The deal struck with the Taliban had a hard date for American withdrawal. And what that meant was you had the morale start to crumble. So you have this tremendously ill-prepared Afghan army. And there are reports that there were nowhere near as many soldiers as were reported, that there were as many as 200,000 ghost soldiers, the soldiers who were on the books but didn't actually exist in reality. So there are far fewer of them than the Americans would have liked to believe. They were struggling without proper food supplies or adequate air support. And you also had all kinds of regional and local deals being struck by governors with the Taliban in order to make governance possible. Over the last couple of years, you've had an increase in numbers of contested districts with the Taliban. So you had the government control of Afghanistan fall from about 75% to now what we're seeing, which is basically nothing. And so this is something which I think has a longer jure than Joe Biden's presidency. Obviously, the manner of the withdrawal was so poorly managed that it has endangered thousands, if not more, of Afghan lives and thrown them upon the mercy of the Taliban in the hope that a degree of normalised diplomatic relations after the Taliban presence in Doha might stay their hands somewhat. So there are complicated reasons for why this has been so bad. It's not simply due to Joe Biden. But I do think that there is something I think as the previous guest has mentioned about Joe Biden's attitude, which for a long time now he has perhaps entertained the notion of just get out.  It's not going to become a domestic issue for me. So I think that there is something longer term about his thinking, which has led us to the place where we are. There's one thing which I find really, really distasteful. This blame on the failure of liberal interventionism on the people who opposed it in the first place. The people who were against the war in Afghanistan. Some of them were motivated by a commitment to pacifism, which is a legitimate political opinion, but also lots of people had studied their history and said, well, hang on, foreign occupations of Afghanistan don't tend to go well. This is also a country which has been ravaged by that point by decades of warfare, which has killed millions of Afghans and also decimated the kinds of civil society institutions that you need to be able to rely on when it comes to the project of nation building, of state building, all that the billions and billions of American dollars poured into reconstruction had achieved was a mirage of a state. It didn't have particularly deep roots and certainly not outside the cities. That's also why I think it was so quick to crumble. You add to that problems of corruption, problems of poor training, problems of lack of food and air support, and that's partly how we've arrived at the Taliban being able to sweep to power inside nine days and actually control more territory than they did before the American invasion. I think that's a very reasonable take on events. I am open to people who say it was these strategic that Biden made tactical or strategic mistakes. In particular for me, I think it's quite distasteful that the exit date was set as the 11th of September, because that was so clearly not about Afghanistan. That was about the United States. That was about the symbolism to the American public, and it could not be clearer that when this decision was made, it had nothing to do with the position that they would leave the Afghan people in. They could have chosen, many people have said, yeah, if they'd left just before the winter, that would have been before fighting season begins. It's too cold in the winter for this kind of onslaught by militias. So that would have given the government more time to assemble. At the same time, potentially the government had more time to assemble forces. That would have led to a longer civil war, as we've discussed. It's all very complicated. The argument I think against this being about strategic and tactical errors is there are virtually no examples of global powers trying to invade, overturn a government and build something completely anew, build something completely anew, not on the basis of the society that already existed there.  I think whatever decisions were made over the next year, two years, decade, I can't see a vastly different result emerging. Let's go to our final segment of the show. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is likely to cause a refugee crisis in the region. We've already witnessed chaotic and tragic scenes at Kabul airport, as many people who fear Taliban rule have attempted to flee. You can see here people desperately trying to board one of the few commercial airlines that is obviously going to be just one small subsection of the people who are terrified of Taliban rule because of, I suppose, they may have supported politically in the past their gender identity, whether or not they want to live in a regime where education and rights for women is at best incredibly vulnerable. These images will, of course, I mean, shock everyone for a long time to come. People trying to board a U.S. Air Force plane evacuating military and diplomatic personnel. People fell off the plane and tragically died. Really, really, really horrific stuff. For those who do manage to leave the country, the next challenge is getting accepted. So we're getting accepted in a safe country and getting refugee status. As in most refugee crises, the majority of those fleeing will move to neighboring countries, something which is not often spoken about in Europe when we say, why are they all coming here? They're not, by the way. However, clearly the West should play a role. It should be offering to take in lots of refugees from Afghanistan, especially as it is incredibly implicated on so many levels in what's going on there at the moment. Canada is the one Western country that I think has been the only one to commit to numbers. They're going to grant 20,000 Afghans asylum. For their part, the UK has committed to accept those Afghans which have worked for the British armed forces, particularly things like translators or local fixes. UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace spoke emotionally about that group today. Secretary of State, when do you imagine the time will be that will be the last man or woman standing? When do you hope to have full evacuation? Our time scales plan on August the 31st for the evacuation of all the people that we would have said was in the hotbed, those people that are passing our security checks, those people that are effectively on a ticket to ride and indeed get out the three cohorts that I think I told you about last week which were entitled personnel, British passport holders, British officials and indeed then obviously all those Afghans. And I think to be clear to your listeners, we are only now in Afghanistan and have been for the last two weeks to process those people. We're not in it for, you know, we're not doing other diplomatic functions. We are simply there to process all those British passport holders and all those people we have obligation to. And, you know, our men and women of our armed forces are risking their lives in doing that, but that is the right thing to do. They've risked their lives the last 20 years and, you know, the very least our obligation has to be is many of these people through the pipeline as possible. But I think I also said, and it's a really deep part of regret for me, some people won't get back. Some people won't get back and we will have to do our best in third countries to process those people. Why do you feel it so personally, Mr Wallace? Because I'm sold. Because it's sad and the West has done what it's done. And we have to do our very best to get people out and stand by our obligations.  And that clip was obviously widely shared because Ben Wallace became so emotional in it. It is novel to see Tories have genuine emotion. It's also obvious why Britain has a particular obligation to those who worked for the British armed forces. They will be in harm's way precisely because they worked for the British. There's also a practical question here. It's going to be very difficult for the British to get people to work for them in other war zones. Hopefully we won't do any expeditionary wars in a while, but if there were to be, won't it be very difficult to get people to work for the British army if the last lot who were employed by them then got slaughtered by whoever replaced them when they left? The commitment from the UK, though, does not deserve our praise. Last week the government said about 2,000 Afghan people we have an obligation to would also be transported to the UK. That's joining around 3,000 who have already been taken out of the country. For some perspective, there are 38 million people that live in Afghanistan committing to rehoming. 5,000 of them is a complete joke. The government do say that more information will be coming with regards to Afghans who don't work for the British. But here recent history shouldn't give us much cause for hope. The Syrian civil war was the biggest refugee crisis of the last decade. This map shows some of the top recipient countries. These numbers are as of 2017. You can see by then Canada had rehomed 54,000 Syrian refugees. The United States 33,000 actually that's a very pathetic figure. Germany 530,000. Sweden 110,000. And then those countries who accept the most, as I say, they are the ones which are in the region, the neighbors of Syria in this case. So it was Turkey with 3.4 million people. Lebanon with a million people as with a population of 7 million people. So you can see how much they contributed in that sense. Britain is not on that map. There's no arrow pointing to it. And that's because the figure is so pathetic. The UK rehomed 23,000 people from the Syrian refugee crisis. Now compared to our population, that's just completely pathetic. Some of the numbers have actually increased from the ones shown on this map. So Sweden, there are now 173,000 Syrians living there. In Germany it's 788,000. I will remind you the corresponding figure for the UK is 23,000. Ash, do you hold out any hope that Britain will take its international responsibility more seriously this time than it did the last major refugee crisis which was in Eurasia? Look, there are some really straightforward policy solutions to dealing with the backlog of applications to come to the UK and come to a place of safety. One would be rather than saying, well, we've got to process and make your applications while you are still either in Kabul or in a third country, a neighboring country, you say, come here, we deal with the paperwork later. And so that's why, yes, Ben Wallace was very emotional. But unless you're going to back that up with policy and you are a member of this government and unless you're going to put the pressure on Preeti Patel and Boris Johnson directly to expedite the evacuation of these Afghan nationals, then who were your tears serving? Nobody but yourself, right? It's very, very indulgent, very indulgent to cry like that when a very simple policy solution isn't being pursued. There was also something which I found really troubling about some of the discourse around those terrible images which were at Kabul Airport of desperate people clinging to the sides of a departing military aircraft only to fall tragically to their deaths. And unfortunately, this is something which I saw not just from random troll accounts on Twitter but also a fairly well-regarded journalist including someone who worked from the BBC saying, well, why are they all men? Why are all the men fleeing? Shouldn't they stay and fight? They're cowards. They're leaving behind the women and the children. Now, what this fails to recognise is one, there have been women and children caught up in the melee at Kabul Airport, but two, it is most likely to be men who either worked assisting NATO or foreign organisations or who may be perceived to have done so. So, of course, there are conflicting reports emerging from Afghanistan at the moment. The Taliban are saying that there will be, you know, safety and no reprisals for those who worked either with the government or foreign organisations in Kabul. But there are also reports from other cities of Taliban going door to door with lists. So, I imagine that there might not be a consistent edict which is being adhered to across the country. So, men do have something to fear that either they will be killed or they will forced to kill. It is also very difficult for women to travel alone, to abandon their caring obligations if they have them. And that kind of accounts for this disparity. And what I can't bear is that when we've been greeted with these images of a human crisis and it's a human crisis of our own creation, we could have mitigated against this almost every step of the way, that you have all these armchair hard men going, well, you know what I do?  It's beyond a joke. And so I think that you've got these twin failures.  And I think that is quite a common view amongst people in this country. We also have the systematic policy failures of the UK government when it comes to fulfilling its obligations towards the Afghan people. And one thing that I would like to just finish on is that you have had two Afghan resettlement schemes under this government. The new one only came in in April and it was better as a bit more generous than the one that came in before, but still it assessed whether or not people could make an application to come to the UK based on individual circumstances. And still up to that point, you had with Afghan asylum seekers in this country, people being deported to Kabul because the Home Office policy was that it is a safe city to be deported to. And those deportations have been taking place when it has been clear to anyone with eyes and ears that the situation in Afghanistan was destabilizing. It was highly likely that the Taliban would either be represented in some kind of power sharing agreement with the Afghan government or take it over entirely. So the Home Office has pursued and prioritized the hostile environment every step of the way when it could have and it should have had a much more compassionate and humane policy. As I say, in terms of what the UK policy will be, it is uncertain. They say they will be releasing more documentation. I don't think we have much hope that it's going to be particularly generous. At the moment, though, if you are an Afghan and you want to find out how you might claim asylum in the UK, you're probably going to go to the government website. This is the relevant page. It says Afghanistan, country policy and information notes from UK visas and immigration, guidance issued by UK visas and immigration to make decision in asylum and human rights applications. This is what you might look on, will I be qualified for or will I qualify for asylum? Now, there's not much on this page. And when you look at the updates, you can see why on the 16th of August. So today the update to this page was the removal of all Afghanistan, country policy and information notes apart from medical and health care provision December 2020. So if you look at that, you've got absolutely no idea whatsoever. And as I say, we await a policy from the government. What about the opposition? This was Keir Starmer speaking today. I don't think comparisons are necessarily helpful, but the situation in Afghanistan is shocking and it's tragic. We're seeing before our very eyes the unraveling of 20 years of progress and of huge sacrifice. And I appreciate that the decision to withdraw was not the government's decision alone. But I want the Prime Minister to step up to the plate, show some leadership and some urgency. We've got a United Nations Security Council meeting this afternoon. It's absolutely clear what the priorities have to be. That's the evacuation of UK nationals and eligible Afghans. It's ensuring a process for the safety of all of those that are remaining there and an assertion of the human rights of everybody in Afghanistan, including women and girls, particularly women and girls. And an agreement about safe and legal roots for refugees because it is inevitable there's going to be a refugee crisis coming out of this. Ash, was that statement up to scratch for you? We talked about putting in place legal means for people to come to the UK. Was he hitting the right notes there? Look, it is obviously really important to expand safe and legal means for people to come to this country, but it's also really important to note that you don't have to come here through legal means in order to claim asylum. So yes, expand those means, but also be realistic. There will be flows of irregular migrants to Europe, as many as there will be in neighboring countries and what the UK should do and what the opposition leaders should do is go, actually, the priority is give people a place of safety. No ifs, no buts, that's that. One of the things that I think I found perhaps most lacking in what he had to say was talking about protection of human rights, particularly the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. The key question there is, well, how are you going to do that? Because maybe you can't play it both ways. Maybe you can't have sanctions. Maybe you can't say we're going to have no aid going to Afghanistan. We're not going to have any kinds of diplomatic relations at all because then where is your leverage? Ultimately, both the US and the UK abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. That is what happened. And now this stage of play to go, oh, well, we really want you to protect human rights. Okay, how? What's your leverage? What are you offering here? And I think that that is a conversation that people, our politicians aren't brave enough to have because it would mean admitting their own deep failures of leadership and strategy but also saying you cannot then maintain this illusion of implacable enmity whilst also saying we want to put pressure to protect human rights, particularly the rights of women and girls.  I'd like him to say commit to some numbers, for example. But I'd like him to say that we're noting and being I suppose, alert to the fact that these resettlement schemes which say we'll offer safe passage to discourage people travelling on these dangerous routes, which is obviously, you know, it's rational on the face of it, that's a reasonable policy. But it has been used systematically by this government to basically say we have no obligation to accept refugees who arrive here of their own accord. And when it came to Syrian refugee crisis, the British government saying no, we're not going to do what Germany has done and let Syrian refugees in because that encourages them to travel on these dangerous trips and so they take this moral high ground over Germany. Then you look at the numbers, Germany accepted 700,000 Syrians, Britain accepted 20,000 and yet we're on the moral high ground saying, oh no, because we resettled them close to the source of the conflict. Yes, and you only resettled 20,000. So these sort of, these policies, they can make them sound nice and reasonable, but it's actually tends to be just them covering up their own application of responsibility essentially. One big problem, something we're going to see more of is our disgustingly xenophobic media trying to sort of stoke up fear of Afghans coming to this country. This was GB News this morning. I don't want to show you a clip of it. I'm just going to show you a screenshot of the tweet. How do we know that the Taliban or other extremist groups aren't using this route to get operatives into this country? Nigel Farage gives his take on rising numbers of migrants crossing the channel. Now, as we've spoken about before, this was going out basically at exactly the same time that much of the world was looking at images of people falling from planes in the sky because they've been trying to cling on to military planes because they were so desperately in the country. At that moment, you've got Nigel Farage saying, oh, they're probably all the Taliban, right? This is completely un-designed to stoke fear. It's also ridiculously uninformed. The Taliban aren't really about that. They did harbor terrorists when it was al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda weren't part of the Taliban, and most people say the Taliban kind of thought that was a mistake because that was the thing that ended up getting them over-froined. It's not like ISIS. This idea that the Taliban are like ISIS, ISIS did want to prompt terrorist attacks across the globe. That was a big part of their founding ideology. The Taliban aren't, right? They seem to be interested in putting in place what looks like it might be a pretty horrible regime in Afghanistan, but it doesn't look like they're going to plan any terrorist attacks. So this idea that they're going to be sneaking in terrorists across the channel or whatever, it's just nonsense. It's ill-informed. It shouldn't be published on any off-com regulated TV channel, and especially not on a day like today. I mean, Ash, I'm sure you're not surprised that this was broadcast on GB News, but it's pretty, I mean really disgusting, isn't it?  It is. It is disgusting, but this is exactly what Nigel Farage does. Don't you remember in the run-up to the 2016 referendum that image of desperate asylum seekers, mostly male or brown-skinned, and it was blazoned with the title Breaking Point? This is the classic Farage racism, which is take images of people who are in really abject desperate situations and say these are people to be afraid of because, look, they're men, they're brown, they're Muslim, which means obviously they want to come here to tear down everything you hold dear. Now the bigger conversation about why are there so many people fleeing conflicts that the UK, the US, and NATO have had a role in soaking silence. Nothing to say there. You know, saying, well, hang on, aren't there easier ways to expand safe and legal routes where you can then process paperwork when people are there and here in this country can get out of checks then? Pshh! Silence. Nothing. All he's interested in is quite frankly soaking a very xenophobic and a very racist narrative to try and make sure that we don't act on our most human and compassionate instincts, which is see people to whom we have obligations because we have been part of an occupying force in their country for 20 years. We invaded, we promised a project of nation building, we've left them worse than when we turned up that we have responsibilities to those people. That is the common sense thing and in order to distract people and deflect them away from that common sense conclusion Nigel Farage is taking the big red racism button. I imagine he won't be alone in this. This is going to be something that you start to hear more of in the mail in the sun perhaps even in the spectator as well a more legitimate face of racism and xenophobic nationalism and this is going to be I think a rising drum beat as we start to see the human cost the cost of displaced peoples start to reach Europe. I think that's very well put. This will be a huge issue I'm sure in the coming weeks and months needs to be fought against. I think you put that very well Ash. Ash it has been a pleasure speaking to you this Monday evening. Thank you so much for having me. I wish that the news was better but it's not. It's not, we can't control that. Thank you everyone for your super chats tonight we'll be back on Wednesday at 7pm so make sure to hit subscribe. We've been watching Tisgy Sour on Navarra Media. Good night.


Yeah, we expect to see a reaction And I'm not so much the result just a little bit disappointed that you know, we work so hard to Get back in the game and get in front away from home at Brisbane, which is not easy and we felt that We let our swords a little bit down in that last 10 minutes. We're usually we've shown we've been very strong so You know, we've just got a tidy up a few things training has been very good and You know, it's it's a time of the year where you know every game is important I mean, they're all important through the year, but you know five to go They're crucial every match is crucial in terms of points, but we're at the The side of the table where you want to be where you're challenging and so we're happy to be where we are Yeah, I think he there was a chance he could have played certainly could have played against Brisbane. That was a Yeah, a decision by us not by him You know, he would have loved to have played as he always puts his hand up But we you know as a management we made a decision to leave him out You know, and he has a missed a beat since then he's done every session every minute of the session so far this week He looks fit and strong and sharp In the end we believe was a very good decision. We made the same with Daria. You know first and foremost what's Best for Daria, you know, and if he's fitting available, well, he'll be available for selection If he's not well, then we'll wait another week. He will join in fully today with the team You know, he's been doing parts of the session. He did 60 to 70 percent of the session on Wednesday Today we expect him to do the whole session and if he does then medical staff will assess him tomorrow morning and see whether He's available for the trip. Yeah, if you have a look at it in that context, you know, everyone's playing each other There'll be a lot of twists and turns. I'm sure to the end which is exciting I'm sure for all the neutrals out there But you know for us, it's it's very simple, you know, we if we win Which is what we aim to do we remain at worst you know a point behind Adelaide and That's all we can do is control what we can do and and if we Continue to do that throughout the year. Then, you know, we believe we'll finish where we want to be Which is at the top