PETER HITCHENS: Want to see extremists destroy a nation? Look at our liberal Taliban.
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! The liberal elite is saying it cares. Oh, how they care about Afghanistan. In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking they care more about Afghanistan than they do about Britain.
The really intense carers even have a special way of speaking to show how much they care.
Instead of saying ‘Kabool’, the way British people have pronounced the Afghan capital for generations, they say ‘Karble’ or even, in advanced cases, ‘Korble’.
The country itself is described as ‘Arfkharnistarn’, and the Taliban become the ‘Tarlabarn’.
Now, I make a complete exception here for any of these carers who actually plan to welcome Afghan refugees into their own homes, without time limit and at their own expense.
A Taliban fighter is seen beating a man on the streets of Kabul. Who precisely is going to do the endless bloody fighting necessary to keep the Taliban away from power? Why, young men from the poor parts of our cities
These all mean what they say and deserve our respect. But the others want to make themselves feel and look good, a very different thing from doing good.
As for the rest of their concerns, no doubt the Taliban’s social policies are unlovely and cruel.
But who precisely is going to do the endless bloody fighting necessary to keep the Taliban away from power? Why, young men from the poor parts of our cities.
And these young men live under our own Taliban, the fierce stone-faced Left-wing doctrinaires who in the past 50 years have created huge zones of misery in what was once a pretty happy society.
Our liberal Taliban – who claim so much to worry about the fate of Afghan girls – drove millions of women out of homes where they would happily raise their own children if they could, to drudge all day in call centres and such places for a pittance that pays for the ropey ‘childcare’ they must then use.
They destroyed lifelong marriage, depriving uncounted British boys of their fathers and dumping multitudes of children in ‘care homes’ whose very names are a mockery.
Our liberal Taliban destroyed rigorous state education, depriving the British working class of skills and of ladders upwards into real careers.
Our liberal Taliban told the British people to be ashamed of their history, their freedom and their religion and gave them nothing to believe in instead.
As for the rest of their concerns, no doubt the Taliban’s social policies are unlovely and cruel
And they gave up protecting them from crime and disorder, claiming that such things were caused by deprivation, not by a lack of punishment and deterrence.
Try, as I have done for decades, to argue against these dogmatists and you get nothing in return but contempt. How they wish I did not exist.
If they can, they will silence and cancel opposition to their views, and you should realise that they will in the end do this, so that opinions such as mine will no longer be heard.
But why is it so much better to care about how Afghan young women are deprived of proper schools, thousands of miles away, than to care about how British young men are deprived of the same thing, down the road? And there is so much hypocrisy here.
Taliban fighters are seen confiscating an Afghan flag
Let us turn to the mysterious, fascinating ex-soldier Tom Tugendhat, who was garlanded with praise for his odd, rambling speech in Parliament on Wednesday.
I may be mistaken but he seemed to be arguing that Britain should have stayed in Afghanistan to save it from the medieval repression of the Taliban.
Yet back in February 2018, the same Tom Tugendhat told the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National that he thought very highly of the Saudi regime, perhaps the closest rival to the Taliban on Earth for repression of women, lack of freedom in general, religious intolerance and savage, steel-bladed criminal justice: ‘I welcome enormously the reforms that Mohammed bin Salman has conducted recently.
‘He is rightly showing a vision for Saudi Arabia that sees her taking a place as a player in the global economy and I think that is incredibly positive, not just for Saudi Arabia, but for the world.’ Eight months later the Saudis murdered the dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
This incessant making of allowances for the Saudis, a central part of our foreign policy implicating every Cabinet and the Royal Family itself, makes a perpetual nonsense of our pose as the enemies of repression in the Islamic world.
So I personally could do with a great deal less of this noisy piety. Good deeds, if you can manage them, should be done in private and without bombast. And they begin, as they always have, at home.
Peter Hitchens. MOS.
