The political infighting has started over Afghanistan – but cheap point-scoring will get us nowhere

Questions over what can be done are not simple – but we can do better than letting the debate descend into tit-for-tat

“President [Joe] Biden’s decisions have us hurtling toward an even worse sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975... [He] is finding that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”

Those are the words of the Republican leader in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, about the current situation in Afghanistan, ramping up the political infighting as officials in America and the UK watch the swift spread of the Taliban back across swathes of the country.

In raising the spectre of Vietnam, McConnell is using a reference for military failure that will have instant resonance with the public – but he has seemingly put aside the idea that Donald Trump would have likely used a similar timetable for the withdrawal of US troops having pushed the issue of ending the so-called “forever war” hard during his presidency.

US public support has been there for the withdrawal but the speed at which the Taliban has been able to move in recent weeks, seizing new territories almost daily has brought inevitable comparisons to the way Isis moved across Iraq in 2014 – another crisis that took hold in the public consciousness.

There is obviously broad support for sending in US and UK troops to help evacuate diplomats, soldiers, citizens and thousands of Afghans who have worked with both nations as Taliban forces move closer to Kabul – but then will come the back-and-forth over what comes next.

In the UK, the political rhetoric has yet to reach the theatrical heights of McConnell, but there is disquiet about what is unfolding. The Conservative chairman of the Commons Foreign Select Committee Tom Tugendhat tweeted that the withdrawal of international troops was “like a rug pulled from under the feet of our partners”.

Tugendhat, who served in Afghanistan, added: “That's why I’m angry. It’s wasteful and unnecessary. And why it’s personal? Because I’ve seen what it costs and what sacrifices are being thrown away.” He wrote that, “we could decide to act differently”.

Tobias Ellwood, another Conservative who served in the Army, and who chairs the Defence Select Committee, told LBC that the way Afghanistan has been handled is the West’s “biggest own goal this century so far” and that we have now “handed back [the country] to the very insurgency that we went in to defeat in the first place”. He said that the UK “should step forward, even as other nations hesitate”.

We have been down this road before. The conversations around Afghanistan have been happening for 20 years and we have had the same “boots on the ground” discussions around Iraq, Syria and Isis. Ellwood raised the prospect of the terror threat in telling the BBC that that the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan would allow terrorism to “raise its ugly head again”. With the current peace talks in Doha looking increasing irrelevant as the Taliban advances, how other nations decide to act becomes ever more important.

These questions are not simple. There will be consequences for any decision that is made, But if we let the discourse descend to the level of cheap political point-scoring displayed by McConnell then we are doing a disservice to a nation that needs help.