The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins

British MPs have turned on Boris Johnson – but what tidy end did they expect from this imperialist experiment?

Britain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselv...