We shouldn’t be cynical about the Taliban. They claim they’ve modernised and become more inclusive, so we should believe them.
They will still ban music, alcohol and dancing. But the one little thing they will allow so you can relax and let your hair down is to produce industrial quantities of heroin. Because we all need a little bit of “me” time.
They have released footage of their fighters looking modern , lifting weights in the gym and riding bumper cars. Next they’ll be making adverts for Mullah Fruit Corners, with one of their soldiers licking his lips and purring “hmm it’s infidelicious” with a rocket launcher over his shoulder.
Even so, they’re not the people we hoped would take over when we left the country.
Many people are criticising Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, for being on holiday and not even making a phone call as thousands tried desperately to flee Kabul. He replied: “No one saw this coming.”
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And no one did – apart from the intelligence and the military and most foreign politicians and reporter and anyone who watches the news.
In a way it’s quite sweet to have a Foreign Secretary who knows nothing about anything that’s foreign apart from his holiday.
When someone told him “Kabul has fallen”, he probably thought they meant the prices for a weekend break and said: “That’s handy. I could nip over in September to refresh my tan.”
So now we have to puzzle over why no one was prepared to defend the regime the West put in place.
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Maybe it didn’t help that, to start with, they allied themselves to a warlord called General Dostum, who set up slave labour camps.
You have to commend the Americans for this. It must have been hard to locate someone more appalling than the Taliban, but with determination they managed to find him.
In 2010, the regime was declared the second most corrupt government in the world, after Somalia. And I expect Somalia only came first because they bribed the judges.
The US invasion was part of a plan called The Project for the American Century. Air strikes regularly bombed civilians, including at weddings. Who’d have thought this would upset the locals?
If George W Bush and all the others had all gone on holiday and not made any phone calls, instead of invading the place with no clue what they were doing, this fiasco might have been avoided.
Somehow none of the people responsible for this 20-year failure “saw it coming”. And yet Dominic Raab is responsible, but he’s the only one in trouble. So I call on you all, Defend Dominic now.
