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DOUGLAS MURRAY
Taliban give the word medieval a bad name… now we do a deal?
THE war in Afghanistan was one of the longest conflicts this country and our allies have been involved in.
It cost the UK billions of pounds and the US trillions of dollars. It dragged on for 20 long years.
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And it cost the lives of 457 of our finest young people.
Many other servicemen and women have returned for ever changed with life-altering physical and mental injuries.
And for what?
In recent days, it has been confirmed that all coalition forces will leave Afghanistan by the summer.
There was even talk of September 11 being the date we all had to pull out by, to add insult to injury, as it was the events of September 11, 2001, that sent us in there in the first place.
The mission to rid the country of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda was achieved fast.
But the conflict soon morphed into something much bigger. Not least an effort to push back the Taliban.
But scroll forward 20 years and we are actually handing the country over to the Taliban.
In recent weeks, as the Afghan army has begun to have to face the Taliban alone, it has failed miserably.
One whole battalion of the Afghan army fled across the border to Tajikistan last week, in its first engagement with the group.
The Taliban is without doubt one of the most backward, medieval groups on the planet. In fact, they give the term “medieval” a bad name.
The fact they can control vast swathes of Afghanistan is appalling. The fact they now look set to once again overrun the whole country is a tragedy.
But as The Sun exclusively reveals today, our own government will work with the Taliban if they become the government in Afghanistan.
Having been our sworn enemies for two decades, we have now apparently accepted that we will deal with them.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has confirmed we will treat them “like other governments around the world”.
Well, here is the thing.
They will not be like other governments around the world.
Apparently, we will treat them normally as long as the Taliban play by the rules and “adhere to international norms”.
Newsflash for Mr Wallace: The Taliban aren’t going to play by any such rules.
They are not remotely interested in what the mandarins of Whitehall demand of them.
Because they just saw them all off.
One Taliban judge promised this week that the group is looking forward to going back to all its old ways.
“Judge” Gul Rahim con-firmed this will include their old favourite of pushing walls on to homosexuals to crush them to death.
And they are going to reintroduce the practice of cutting off the hands of thieves.
The victory of the Taliban will be a tragedy for Afghan women who will, once again, be forced to live under the oppressive “sharia” regime.
Among much else, the Taliban believe educating girls over the age of eight is a crime. Everything about the group is barbarous.
Just this week, they hung the severed limbs of their opponents from the trees.
And they massacred 22 brave, young soldiers of Afghan Special Forces as they surrendered with their hands in the air — a war crime.
CAUGHT IN QUAGMIRE
The Taliban currently run a third of the country and everything suggests that they’ll soon have control of much more.
So what exactly is this talk of treating the Taliban like any other government?
Or demanding they obey the rules of the international order?
The West looks weak and pathetic rolling out such clichés in the face of this reality.
We should be under no illusions. The world’s most advanced militaries went into Afghanistan in 2001.
We got caught in a quagmire and were fought first to a draw, now to humiliating defeat.
All by an army of Stone-Age fundamentalists.
If there is a reason, it is that the Taliban were more committed to their mission than we were to ours.
The UK and our allies lost our way in Afghanistan.
Specifically, we got caught in a mission creep.
We should have gone in to tear up the earth of Afghanistan to ensure al-Qaeda could never again launch a 9/11-style operation from there.
But after that, we should have got out.
Would we have needed to keep intervening from the air?
Almost certainly. And we should have kept bombing the hell out of anything that even looked like a terrorist training camp.
But we should never have got stuck in this state-building mission to build a state that was unbuildable in a country that was ungovernable.
What has happened is a tragedy.
For the people of Afghanistan.
For the many brave men and women of our Armed Forces who gave so much.
It is also a tragedy for our reputation around the world.
We faced a group of barbarians. And the barbarians won.
Uber-woke
THIS week’s martyr to madness is Milli Hill.
The author and childbirth campaigner says she was “cancelled” recently because she opposed the use of the term “birthing people”.
It was used by someone being uber-woke.
And in response, Hill pointed out that there is a perfectly good name for “birthing people” that has done well for an awfully long time.
That term is “women”.
In normal times, that would have been an end to it. But these are far from normal times.
According to Hill, a campaign began against her online.
People pressured others to stop buying her books and she was accused of having “dangerous opinions, beliefs and views”.
Meantime, the CEO of Birthrights – a childbirth charity Hill had worked with – also contacted her to complain.
The CEO said she was concerned about the effect Hill’s comments might have on “non-binary or trans people who give birth”.
You sometimes have to marvel at how many people in this country need a very basic biology lesson.
People can call themselves whatever they like. And they can pretend to be whatever pleases them.
But really, take my word for it – only women can give birth. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t sound clever.
They just sound like they were bunking off lessons when everyone else was being taught about the birds and the bees.
Chinese smoke screen
ANOTHER week, another tale of China’s bid to pollute the world and choke us all with its smog.
Research showed that 25 of the world’s mega-cities are responsible for 52 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
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Guess where 23 of those cities are?
That’s right, the People’s Republic.
Anyone who has travelled to China will know the truth of this.
One of the worst offenders is Shanghai. When I first visited there some years ago, I thought it was the set of Blade Runner. If slightly less welcoming.
These Chinese mega-cities are a sight to behold. They are vast, packed, dirty, polluting.
And most people in the West have never heard of them.
How many people outside of China have heard of Handan, Suzhou, Salian or Qingdao?
Though admittedly, Wuhan – another top offender – got a certain amount of publicity lately.
But these cities are responsible for most of the pollutants being pumped out into our planet.
As I mentioned on this page last week, China is planning to continue building huge coal-fired power plants to fuel the mega-cities.
And all the while, the UK Government pretends that if we just toss out our old boilers and save up to afford greener alternatives, then we will solve the planet’s problems.
The reality is that none of these problems can be solved so long as China stays on the track it has chosen.
And far too little attention is paid to this. We should keep doing our part, so long as we don´t cripple our own infrastructure.
But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that our contribution is any more than a drop in an increasingly Chinese-polluted ocean.
Cheekymonkey a mad booking
STRANGE events in Redbridge, where a libraries reading challenge produced a curious mascot.
At the East London venue, one of the actors hired to get children reading was dressed in a costume from a psychedelic nightmare.
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The performer wore a rainbow-coloured monkey outfit, with a bare bottom and a prosthetic penis dangling very visibly between his legs.
It remains unclear whose bright idea this was.
There is a photo of the strange-ass monkey talking to another performer.
The other performer was dressed as a strawberry.
And I must confess that while studying this photograph I had to check my temperature to make sure I wasn’t running a fever and hallucinating.
Any child who saw this strange assortment of performers would not only have been put off reading for life, they would have had nightmares for weeks.
I expect that I will have them myself.
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After complaints from a number of parents, Redbridge Libraries has apologised for the incident.
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Specifically, it apologised for the “inappropriate” monkey costume.
But you can’t help suspecting there was more than one arse involved in this embarrassment.
Video shows 22 Afghan commandos executed by the Taliban
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