The myth of the “moderate” Taliban
Miliband Minor, Wee Dougie Alexander, and even the Prime Mentalist himself have all intimated over the weekend that Britain is ready to talk to moderates within the Taliban, to seek some political solution to the Afghan war. Setting aside for a moment the fact that the simplest solution is just to get our troops the hell out of a conflict that is fuck-all to do with us, and let the Afghans deal with Afghanistan, let’s look at what the dullards can possibly mean.
The spectre of Northern Ireland is being used – the echo of Sinn Fein joining the “peace process” – with SF being, supposedly, thought to be the “moderates” there. But in Northern Ireland, the moderates didn’t want different things to the hardliners – they simply had different views on how to get them. The distinction between moderates and hardliners was largely a product of Downing St spin – only their chosen schedules set Adams and McGuiness apart from the “hardline” republicans. What they *wanted* was identical – and still is. The “peace process” is, far from a compromise, simply a slow “surrender process”.
As it will be in Afghanistan. There are no Taliban who support schooling for girls. There are no Taliban who support a multi-religion Afghanistan. There are no Taliban who reject the death penalty for apostasy. Their “moderation” is simply that they’re willing to set aside open warfare if jawjaw gets them what they want instead.
The deeply unimpressive Miliband might think a feller who is prepared to sit down and talk amounts to a moderate – the hordes of NuLab-supprting NGOs and other hangers-on who bought into this charade of liberal intervention won’t. Not when they realise that the UK government, and the Yanks naturally, are straining to find some way of getting away from that quagmire with, if not honour, a plausible yarn that might be spun into honour. To do this, they’ll happily sup with the devil. They’ll happily hand over a couple of provinces to Taliban control. They’ll happily see the same policies they swore were unacceptable reintroduced, but this time by “moderates”. A moderate Taliban is one who bulldozes walls onto homosexuals, but in the context of being the legally appointed governor of Shithole Province, I reckon.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting a better policy would be to fight on. I’m suggesting a better policy would be to never have fought in the first place. What I’m also suggesting is that when we leave – as we will – let’s not think for one second that those British lives have been anything other than wasted. Do not let the wretched Brown or anyone else say any differently. Hundreds of our dead, thousands of theirs, and we will have gained precisely nothing. Other than tens of thousands of new enemies of course.
Yup, the only “moderate” Taliban will be those yet unborn, but don’t sweat – they’ll learn to hate us soon enough.
Tags: afghanistan, geopolitik, jaw jaw, kabul, moderate, obama, prime mentalist, sinn fein, taliban
28. July 2009 at 9:44 am :
Yeh false analogies all around. I heard some military expert this morning gabbing on Radio 5 about how previous Afghan ‘bandits’ in the 1890s or whenever became the Khyber Rifles blah blah.
It’s true that most warlords and clan leaders are for sale but the bottom line is they want us out and we – most of us – want out also. As one British soldier recently said, it’s hard to died for a bunch of child rapists and heroin dealers.
Steven Pressfield’s novel on Alexander’s campaign says all there needs to be said about Afghan warfare.
As for the warlords and clan leaders in NI – hmm Frank, as I’m sure you know there are more revelations to come. The Guardian’s NI correspondent has been very good on the peace process, which has basically been a process of penetration into the IRA by British intelligence, to the extent – shades of The Man Who Was Thursday – that our spooks and their placemen seem to have been running the show.