Negotiate with the Taliban. Are We Mad?!

Last month the Foreign Secretary, so the media reported, suggested that the way forward was to negotiate with the more moderate elements of the Taliban. At the time I found that hard to swallow, especially given the rise in fatalities of those killed in action.

The deaths continue and today's newspapers report a growing desire by the people of Britain to withdraw from Afghanistan, or as the tabloids prefer to report so as to pull on the heart strings and thereby harness popular opinion, "bring our troops home".

I fully understand the desire to do so, and part of me wants to shout from the highest rooftops that we must do this immediately.

But we cannot and should not.

Consider the following extract from Asne Seierstrad's excellent work, 'The Bookseller of Kabul':

I also wore the burka to discover for myself what it is like to be an Afghan woman; what it feels like to squash into the chock-a-block back rows reserved for women, when the rest of the bus is half empty, what it feels like to squeeze into the boot of a taxi because a man is occupying the back seat, what it feels like to be stared at as a tall and attractive burka and receive your first burka-compliment from a man in the street.
How in time I started to hate it. How it pinches the head and causes headaches, how difficult it is to see anything through the grille. How enclosed it is, how little air gets in, how quickly you start to perspire, how all the time you have to be aware of where you are walking because you cannot see your feet, what a lot of dirt it picks up, how dirty it is, how much in the way. How liberated you feel when you get home and take it off.

And consider further:

Any books portraying living things, be they human or animal, were torn from the shelves and tossed on the fire. Yellow pages, innocent postcards, and dried-out covers from old reference books were sacrificed to the flames. Amidst the children round the bonfire stood the foot soldiers of the religious police, carrying whips, long sticks and Khalashnikovs. These men considered anyone who loved pictures or books, sculptures or music, dance, film or free thought enemies of society...The Taliban regarded debate as heresy and doubt as sin. Anything other than Koran-swotting was unnecessary, even dangerous. When the Taliban came to power in Kabul in the autumn of 1996 the ministries were emptied of professionals and replaced by mullahs. From the central bank to the universities - the mullahs controlled everything. Their goal was to re-create a society like the one the Prophet Muhammad had lived in on the Arab peninsula in the seventh century. Even when the Taliban negotiated with foreign oil companies, ignorant mullahs sat around the negotiating table, lacking any technical expertise...They shunned scientific debate, whether conducted in the West or in the Muslim world. Their manifesto was above all a few pathetic arguments about how people should dress or cover themselves, how men should respect the hour of prayer, and women be separated from the rest of society. They were not conversant with the history of Islam or of Afghanistan, and had no interest in either.

In this first decade of the 21st Century, it is frightening to find that religion still brings untold misery to millions of people; death and destruction.

I am proud, immensely proud, of my many Muslim friends, my friends from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India respectively. We have great debates and some of the more strident advocates of strict religious codes seem to overlook the fact that such debate is forbidden in some Islamic regimes, whereas here in the UK, we have a freedom of speech that, as I have said many times before, is an unachievable dream for millions.

We should not take this for granted though.

I am angry and distressed that our troops are losing their lives; but we cannot withdraw. Neither can we negotiate with these benighted people. We have to, and will, defeat them as surely as day follows night.

We at home MUST do all we can to back our troops, and the BBC reports this week are at last concentrating on prime time television in alerting and educating the public.

Seventy years ago we were forced to declare war on an equally evil regime and the price was the loss of 56 million lives over the following six years. But we had to stand and fight and refuse to surrender. Just because the front line is thousands of miles away does not mean that it is less important, vital or crucial to this Nation's survival. The world is a small place. And we must do all we can to safeguard our liberty and thereby give hope to those who can only dream of such liberty.

Kenneth T Webb
Editor
Liverpool CityLife

LIVERPOOL
12 September 2009