Afghanistan, Johnson: “Nobody recognizes the Taliban government”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson urges the international community to have a united position before the Taliban, “we do not want anyone to recognize them unilaterally”. The prime minister admitted in an interview with Sky News that “clearly regime change is taking place now, and we don’t know exactly what kind of regime it will be”. “It is correct to say that the US decision to withdraw” from Afghanistan “has accelerated” the advance of the Taliban into the country. “Nobody wants Afghanistan to be a breeding ground for terror or go back to a pre-2001 situation.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this, underlining how the “situation is increasingly difficult”. “We don’t think it’s in the interest of the Afghan people to go back to that,” the London head of government stressed. Johnson then said that “our priority is to ensure compliance with the obligations to British citizens in Afghanistan, to all those who have helped British efforts in Afghanistan over the past 20 years to get them out of there as soon as we can.” “Two thousand have already left the country – he said – we will take away as many as we can in the next few days”. The British Prime Minister has called for “a meeting as soon as possible” of the Atlantic Council and the United Nations Security Council on Afghanistan , as we read in a note from Downing Street, which gives an account of Johnson’s telephone conversations with the secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, and with the secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres. The United Nations Security Council will meet tomorrow, as diplomatic sources told Adnkronos. The premier stressed the need for “a concerted effort by the international community in the coming months to address the extremist threat and the humanitarian emergency in Afghanistan and the ‘importance of no recognition of a new Afghan government on a unilateral level “.