Boris Johnson put a brave face on the G7 meeting – but it was a discussion about how to present failure

Boris Johnson convened the G7 video meeting because the UK happens to hold the rotating presidency of the organisation this year, and he wanted to be seen to be doing something when Kabul fell to the Taliban.

But the real summit meeting had already happened in person, in Kabul, between William Burns, the CIA director, and Mullah Baradar, of the Taliban. It was presumably at that meeting that the US accepted that it would abide by the 31 August deadline to leave Afghanistan. The alternative, after all, was to go to war with the Taliban. And it may have been that the main topic on the agenda at that meeting was what it would take to guarantee that the last flights of US troops can leave in good order.

In any case, it had already become increasingly clear that the Taliban would stick to what they called their “red line”, and so the main purpose of the G7 video conference was as a media management meeting to decide how to present the west’s failure in Afghanistan.

You could tell it was a failure because Boris Johnson started his comments after the G7 meeting by saying: “You’ve got to understand quite how much has been achieved already.” He said that British forces had evacuated 9,000 people since 14 August, which involved rounding up the actual tally of 8,458, and that they would carry on with the evacuation “right up to the last moment – but you’ve heard what the president [Joe Biden] said and what the Taliban said”.

In other words, he was trying to make the best of a situation decided by others.

Thus the attempt to try to persuade the US and the Taliban to extend the withdrawal date had been abandoned and was now replaced with a plea for the continuation of “safe passage” after 31 August. This is a plea directed solely to Afghanistan’s “new power”, as Johnson described Kabul’s new rulers. With US military force removed from the picture, the leverage available to the G7 is “diplomatic, financial and political”, according to Johnson, who insisted that this leverage was “huge”.

He was torn, as he so often seems to be, between pessimism and boosterism. “I’m totally realistic about the Taliban,” he told Sam Coates of Sky News. “I am not going to pretend this is anything other than a very difficult situation.”

But then he held out the prospect of unfreezing “huge funds” for “the use of the Afghan government and the people of Afghanistan”, and set out the conditions on which these funds would be available: stopping Afghanistan becoming a “breeding ground for terrorism”, preventing it from becoming a “narco-state”, and insisting that girls must be educated up to the age of 18. He pointed out that these were the goals for which “people in this country gave their lives”, as if that were likely to influence the Taliban.

Then he seemed to remember that the G7 media management meeting had agreed that there was one overriding message that its members were supposed to be broadcasting to the world. “The number one condition we’re insisting on is safe passage beyond 31 August,” he repeated.

But this is, as the prime minister knows, a plea from a position of weakness. It relies on the Taliban regime being different from its predecessor of 20 years ago, and being a regime that cares what the west thinks of it, or at least, a regime that thinks it has an interest in minimal cooperation with the west.

Listening to Johnson launch into an aside about the history of Afghanistan being cyclical, I am very worried about what is going to happen on 31 August.