Preparing To Get Out

There are no "Taliban" distinct from the Pashtun as a whole. (The Pashtun, please note, who are now recognised as a Lost Tribe of Israel for future airlifting purposes, since at least they are not Arabs.) Anyone who believes that there are, is as barking mad as anyone who believes in "al-Qaeda", or in a "global terror network", or in an Afghan link to 9/11, or in an Iraqi link to 9/11, or in Iraqi WMD, or in such weapons as a threat either to Britain or to America even if they had existed, or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, or in such as programme as a threat either to Britain or to America even if it existed. In other words, as barking mad as a 9/11 truther.

But the planned opening of that "Taliban" office in Western-friendly Qatar is nevertheless a very welcome step. It cannot be happening without certainly American, and probably also British, approval. The winners in Afghanistan were always going to be the people with all the time in the world and nowhere else to go.

The list of excuses for the war in Afghanistan is finally reaching exhaustion after all. The wearing of the burqa in that country is not a strategic interest of the United Kingdom, and in any case what else are the women in question supposed to wear? That's called Afghanistan. What did you think that the place was like? Nor, however worthy it may be in itself, is the sending of Afghan girls to school a cause in which to send British troops to their deaths. The claim to be fighting the heroin trade is a very sick joke indeed; in reality, we have form when it comes to alliance with heroin-traffickers, as can be seen by examining our record in Kosovo.

And the general, lunatic scheme to bomb Afghanistan into a version of California, but without Proposition 8, is at last ceasing to convince even however few people have not always been able to see straight through it. Not that it has been wholly without success. A certain San Francisco-isation has been achieved by our restoration of the Afghanistan that existed before the Taliban, i.e., the country in which the sexual abuse of adolescent boys was, and now is again, more endemic than anywhere else on earth. That is what we have been, and are, fighting and dying for. Doesn't it make you proud?