Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Lily Cole, the burka and why we were right to leave Afghanistan

I have the feeling that Joe Biden will have to wait a while before he receives his Nobel Peace Prize, the traditional gift bestowed upon an American president if he’s a Democrat and before he’s actually done anything. The civilised world — by which I mean the mass of deluded lefties and liberals who understand nothing but firmly believe that they are the civilised world — is aghast at the man right now. There is no doubt in my mind that the pullout of US troops from Afghanistan was atrociously handled by a doddering halfwit and based upon magnificently flawed intelligence. But there is even less doubt in my mind that, one way or another, the West was right to extricate itself from that dusty, arid, stone-age hellhole and should never have become involved in the first place.

A few bombing strikes to obliterate Tora Bora and annoy al Qaeda is all very well. Attempting to cajole the country, at the point of a gun, into becoming an award-winning liberal democracy is another issue: it never works. Not least because the overwhelming majority of Afghan citizens don’t seem to have very much regard for western liberalism. But once again it is fascinating to see the worldview of the liberals shattered by the unwanted intrusion of reality — on so many levels. Why do these people still have hegemony when they are demonstrably wrong about almost everything?

The allegation against the US government is not that the Americans and the West indulged in 20 years of neo-colonialism, attempting to coerce a hideously backward third-world country into abiding by the mores of, say, Sweden. No: the anger is that we have now left Afghanistan to it. And in particular, anger at the ‘betrayal’ of Afghan women, who may soon be forced back into their homes and only allowed out when dressed as Darth Vader and accompanied by a sexually repressed male.

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