Shared hardship

If Sean Langan isn’t the bravest, best and most likeable foreign correspondent on TV, I don’t know who is. And what a bumper week this has been for his admirers. On Monday, a Dispatches documentary (Fighting the Taleban, Channel 4) about the six-day battle he witnessed in Garmser, Helmand, when a half-platoon of British infantrymen and a couple of hundred Afghanis held out against several thousand Taleban. Then, on Thursday, another one (Meeting the Taleban, Channel 4) in which he gingerly approached a Taleban/al-Q’aeda mountain stronghold and amazingly came away with testicles intact and a halfway cogent interview.

The temptation for a lot of reporters, I think, would have been to let their gratitude at having been allowed to survive such an experience spill over into their editorial position. ‘See, they’re not just evil fanatics in black turbans,’ the tacit conclusion might have been. ‘They’re jolly brave young men. Pious. Dedicated. And they have every right to expel the wicked foreign invaders as their forefathers have done for generations.’

Langan doesn’t seem to go in for that fashionable ‘any enemy of Uncle Sam’s is a friend of mine’ line. Maybe I’m wrong. It might possibly be that Sean, too, was among the million pillocks who went on the 2003 march in favour of preserving Saddam Hussein’s let’s-feed-more-Kurds-into-the-mincing-machine fascist dictatorship; that his favourite phrases include ‘Not in my name’, ‘It’s all about oil’ and ‘Maybe we ought to start asking ourselves why it is we’re so hated’. But the impression I get is that Langan is grown-up enough to understand that the wars he has covered in Afghanistan and the Middle East, however badly mismanaged, are rather more than just imperialist adventures in far-off countries about which we’d be better off knowing much less; that, in fact, they’re a moral crusade on whose outcome our freedom and security depends.

This may be why, for example, in the hills near the Pakistani border he encouraged one Taleban leader to admit that, yes, as a sound, right-thinking Jihadist he most heartily endorsed the plot to blow ten passenger jets out of the sky at Heathrow last August.