If Taliban isn’t the bad guy, then no one is

A British MP’s praise for Afghanistan under its repressive and violent leaders made Christine Lamb choke on her tea.

Men stand outside a beauty salon in Kabul last week after all beauty parlours were ordered to shut. Picture: AFP

Early last week, I was drinking tea and doing the online equivalent of flicking through the day’s papers when a headline caught my eye. “Is it time we did business with the Taliban?” it asked.

“Hold your breath,” urged its writer, Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood. “I’ve just come back from an Afghanistan that is totally transformed … security has vastly improved, people are free to travel … The congested streets are bustling with life … The Taliban authorities are no more visible than our own police are in London.”

Corruption “has all but disappeared”, he gushed, the opium trade “seemingly gone”.

Hold my breath? I almost choked on my tea. As usual that morning my WhatsApp feed was mostly desperate messages from Afghan women, including owners of beauty salons, the last remaining refuge for women, which must shut down. A new UN report graphically detailed the “ever-worsening situation for girls and women in Afghanistan”.

Yet here was Ellwood posting a video accompanied by upbeat music in which he enthused, “Pylons distribute electricity to the cities and solar panels are now everywhere.” Women and girls merited just one reference.

As his fellow Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg commented, “It could have been issued by the Taliban tourist board.” Indeed it was retweeted enthusiastically by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

I have been to Afghanistan three times since the Taliban took over and agree the country is “totally transformed”: the Taliban is everywhere and women and girls are locked at home.

In 36 years as a foreign correspondent, it’s the most heartbreaking story I have covered. For the Taliban to seize power after 20 years of Western intervention, replacing the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with that for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, undoing hard-won rights and bringing back public lashings is tricky to get one’s head round.

Afghan women stage a protest for their rights at a beauty salon in Kabul last week after the Taliban ordered beauty parlours across the country to shut. Picture: AFP

Yes, Afghanistan is more secure. The war has ended and people such as Ellwood (who, unlike women, do not need a male escort) can go to places that have long been too dangerous.

But it’s not so secure for Matiullah Wesa, the education activist trying to bring schooling to rural girls, who has been jailed since March.

Or the woman, cited in the UN report, beaten with sticks by Virtue and Vice police for simply being in a park.

Or those who worked with foreign forces who are being hunted and killed.

Or the beauticians who protested in Kabul on Wednesday only for the Taliban to spray them with firehoses and start shooting.

Nor are the solar panels much consolation to those forced to sell their babies and kidneys to feed their families.

The criticism of Ellwood was swift, not just from Afghan women but also from his parliamentary colleagues, some of whom tabled a motion to have him removed as chairman of the defence select committee.

What was Ellwood thinking? As he wrote, his brother was killed in the 2002 Bali bombing. He also helped to try to save the life of Keith Palmer, the policeman killed in the Westminster attack in 2017.

We are friends so I messaged him, expressing my disappointment, adding: “I always thought you were one of the good guys.”

He responded angrily: “I am one of the good guys – there’s been more discussion about Afghanistan in the UK media over this than for any time in months.”

After some back and forth, he conceded he was sorry. “If it’s any consolation right now I feel very lonely,” he typed.

Eventually he apologised publicly and deleted the video, though it is still on the Taliban feed.

Even in his apology, there was only the briefest of mentions of the “increasing restrictions on women and girls”.

Afghan girls learn the holy Koran at a madrassa on the outskirts of Kabul. Picture: AFP

It’s a shame as the point all this was intended to raise was important: how do you deal with rogue regimes that don’t care what anyone thinks? As Ellwood says, the strategy of “shouting from afar” is not working.

Hopes that the Taliban had changed or the West would have leverage because of the country’s need for humanitarian aid have long faded. Instead it has simply issued more and more restrictions.

Does Ellwood really think reopening our embassy would change the Taliban’s mind? Wouldn’t it just be seen as a sign of legitimisation?

Next month it will be two years since the takeover and we should be deeply ashamed that in 2023 there is a country where girls are banned from secondary school and university – particularly as the Taliban is in power because NATO walked away humiliated.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine six months later conveniently enabled Western leaders to move on and for NATO to reinvent itself. Much as I think what’s happening in Ukraine is horrendous and have spent months reporting there, I worry it is sucking attention away from other conflicts.

We have to engage with the Taliban as it is running the country and even flying in aid requires its say-so. But we do not have to accept it. After all if denying rights to half the population is not a red line, what is?

Yet as the world gets ever more authoritarian, if bad guys stick around long enough, we end up working with them.

In November 2016 I interviewed President Bashar -al-Assad of Syria while his bombers (helped by Vladimir Putin and the Wagner mercenaries) were obliterating the old city of Aleppo. “The West will have to learn to live with me,” he told me.

Some 500,000 Syrians have been killed in the brutal crackdown that followed the 2011 uprising. Yet he is being welcomed back into the Arab League. The United Arab Emirates invited him to attend the Cop28 global summit later this year.

I suspect I’m not alone in saying I know little about British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s world view. In his only key foreign policy speech, last November, he talked of “robust pragmatism”.

Iran has arrested 20,000 people in the past 10 months and executed dozens in a crackdown on women-led protests following the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Yet talks restarted last month between the EU, UK and Iran to try and revive the nuclear deal.

Then there’s Rwanda, which is backing M23 militias terrorising the population of eastern Congo with killings and gang rapes. Doctor Denis Mukwege, whose remarkable Panzi hospital has treated 55,000 rape victims, tells me the situation is so bad he is treating the granddaughters of previous victims. Not a peep from our government, which still hopes to put our migrants on flights to Kigali.

Did we learn nothing from our dealings with President Putin, to whom we turned a blind eye for years as his forces flattened Chechnya, invaded Georgia and annexed Crimea?

Commenting last week on Western companies’ spurious excuses to continue business in Russia, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki warned: “Think about where you want to stand when the history books are written.”

What’s happening in Afghanistan today is gender apartheid. If we just give in to the bad guys and their solar panels, what a sad signal we are sending.

The Times