 Afganistans hujli relevanto New Zealand. Baka in 1999 when Helen Clark won the election and promptly cancelled the Skyhawk upgrade, she declared that there was, you know, that there was a benign strategic environment for New Zealand and just two years later she was committing troops to Afghanistan and 20 years later we're now faced with utter embarrassment, withdrawal of allied troops out of Afghanistan in great haste. We're seeing awful pictures coming of people fleeing to the airport, clinging onto aircraft, falling from a great height as the aircraft take off and we're seeing, you know, appalling pictures of helicopters landing on the roof of the American Embassy and just five weeks ago Joe Biden was saying that these things would never happen. Have a listen to this. Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now 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 you had an entire brigade breaking through the gates of our embassy. Six, if I'm not mistaken. The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They're not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There's 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. So five weeks ago he was talking and saying in the face of media questions about the Afghan government collapsing, the Afghan army collapsing. The media already knew that this was going to happen and Joe Biden sitting there denying that the Taliban had the capabilities to route the Afghan army. He went into great depths on their numbers and their skill sets and all of those. But it seems that as soon as the American air power and the American steel and resolve disappeared from Afghanistan, so did the fight out of the Afghan government and the Afghan army. And the Taliban in a few short weeks have marched right through the whole country and taken it over. So it is important. 10 New Zealanders died fighting in Afghanistan. Heroes. We had our latest Victoria Cross winner come from the battles in Afghanistan. So it is hugely important. And we shouldn't ignore the fact that there was a massive multimillion-dollar inquiry that the government held in an attempt to try and smear the military on the basis of a kakamemi book by John Stevenson and Nicky Harger. So you can't kiss it away saying, we shouldn't have been there, we were there. You can't say that it's not relevant. It is relevant. And it's disappointing to see what's happened in Afghanistan as a result. Well, what it should have been is a whole lot faster. Chris Farfoy is likely to have blood on his hands. Five weeks ago, on July 5th, he rejected the visa applications of 43 Afghan nationals who had assisted New Zealand forces in Afghanistan. They're in grave danger with the Taliban taking over. They're likely to be reefed out of their houses and summarily executed. And he rejected their applications. And now we've got a mercy dash underway from the New Zealand Government to try and save these people. Well, it's a dollar short and a day late. Jacinda Ardern was on holiday on Friday. She spent the weekend on holiday. She basically wasted three days and then had a cabinet meeting on Monday and then announced that they were going to send a Hercules on Wednesday. Well, it's too late. Those people are either extremely compromised or dead. And that's not even looking at the hundred or so kiwis that are still there. So, you know, it's tough. These sorts of questions that come up, these sorts of challenges that come up for a government, it's how you handle them. And I've got to say that Jacinda Ardern has handled this appallingly. Just slow, weak, vacillating. And she was even on TV yesterday imploring and begging the Taliban to basically be kind of the kiwis that were wanting to leave Afghanistan. Well, what she's forgotten is that this is the Taliban. They are a death cult. They are Islamists. And the last thing they're going to listen to is a woman. And they'll be sitting there thinking, what the hell is a woman talking? She should be hidden under a berk and saying nothing. And that's who we're dealing with. And that's what the mentality of the people that we're dealing with there. Well, I just think that they are used to, conditioned, to doing everything by committees, working groups, wanting to be briefed up the wazoo on absolutely everything. When situations like this occur, it's very fast moving. And you've got to react very, very quickly, far more quickly than Jacinda Ardern who wants to have a meeting about everything. There should have been a plane in the air months ago, or even as little as four weeks ago to get these people out. The French government evacuated all of the French nationals four weeks ago. The Canadians started a week ago. We still haven't got our plane up there. It's still parked on the tarmac at Fenuaupai. So the government's just vacillated and people's lives are at risk. And you can't have that. And it's an absolute crying shame that when we needed leadership, it was found wanting.