What’s new about the recent Israeli method, however, is that it doesn’t stop at one or two important figures. Rather, they’ve gone after leaders, planners, strategists, figureheads and key implementers, with the obvious goal of not merely slowing down the adversary but actually crippling them, ideally beyond repair, and turning the population against them by demonstrating just how damaging these leaders are to their quality of life. 

It’s too soon to say if this will become a key tactic in Israel’s arsenal, whether it will prove effective in the long run, and what responses it might draw from their enemies. Yet what we can speculate on is this: might a strategy that emphasises the enemy’s decision makers turn out to be good news for civilians? 

The goal of bombing across many previous conflicts, notably the Second World War, was to demoralise the citizenry through starvation and destruction. As late as 2003, meanwhile, the goal of the US bombing blitz in Baghdad was to cow the Iraqi population into a state of “shock and awe”. The current Israeli goal, at least in theory, is to eliminate the people and infrastructure of their sworn enemies. This is a significant difference, and is potentially epoch-making. 

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The unjust distribution of the costs of war have been one of its eternal features. Wars are declared by leaders, planned by generals, fought by often-reluctant footsoldiers — and endured in misery by the population at large. To put it differently, it’s always been ordinary people, the conscripts on the frontlines and the mass of civilians behind, who bore the brunt of any war, and this hasn’t changed. According to the Red Cross, a full 90% of war-time casualties remain civilians.

In theory, these civilian losses are “collateral” damage, unintentional and regrettable consequences of fights between armed combatants. But the evidence shows that most lethal action against civilians is either deliberate, or else represents a consequence that was known in advance and judged to be acceptable. You don’t bomb a city like Dresden without realising that you’ll be burying women, children and the elderly in the rubble, with an estimated 30,000 perishing in February 1945. 7,500 civilians died during America’s initial bombardment of Baghdad, and thousands more were traumatised and maimed. 

What if 2003 had gone differently? What if, instead of invading the country, the Americans had simply killed Saddam and his inner circles in a focused strike? There might have been no insurgency, no sectarian slaughter, no eventual Iranian triumph. Or, to return to the Second World War, what if the Allies had tasked Oppenheimer with focusing his scientific genius on developing missiles instead of atomic bombs, with the goal of destroying Hitler and his advisors in the Eagle’s Nest? What, to put it bluntly, if they’d targeted Hirohito not Hiroshima? Would that not have sacrificed one life for thousands? 

It’s hardly a new question. I grew up with it. My grandmother, cynical over a lifetime of catastrophic military ventures that saw her survive the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the loss of two world wars, and the Soviet occupation of her country, perennially greeted global conflict with the comment that “the big shots with their big ideas should fight it out directly” and leave the civilians out of it. But, to reluctantly quote Steve Bannon, this was a pipe dream, because “the aristos never fight”. 

And in fact, over more recent decades, psychopathic dictators not only sidestepped punishment, but were allowed comfortable exiles overseas. That’s what happened with Baby Doc Duvalier, the erstwhile Haitian despot, or Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who both found themselves living the high life in France. Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, protector of Josef Mengele and killer of political opponents, was hosted by Brazil. The theory behind this genteel approach was that a cornered dictator would fight to the death, thereby prolonging the bloodshed. Offer him an attractive way out, and more slaughter could be avoided. 

Over time, though, this solution became less acceptable to global public opinion, ushering in our current era of sanctions and International Criminal Court arrest warrants. The approach sounded salient on paper, but in truth the ICC lacks any real muscle and has rarely proved effective either as a deterrent or as an instrument of justice. Just ask Vladimir Putin. 

The Israeli approach, then, represents a far more impressive reframing of the question of accountability. As we’ve discovered, war always assumes collective guilt. But are civilians truly more deserving of punishment for the decisions of their leaders than those rulers themselves? “They went along with it,” we may say. And that’s true. Too often, indeed, fanatical leaders can count on the hysterical enthusiasm of the masses. “They elected them,” we point out, and that sometimes applies too. 

Yet civilian populations are usually motivated by little more than the chance to prosper. Most people, moreover, are not heroes of the resistance. American voters did not choose a president in the knowledge that he would become obsessed with non-existent WMDs in Iraq. The fateful decisions, in short, are made at the top. What does a corporation do when it’s in trouble? Does it fire the entire staff, or replace the CEO? Isn’t it then both more just, and arguably more efficient, to go after the leaders?

A stronger objection comes from political scientists. While they generally agree that “decapitating” an enemy by taking out its leader is psychologically effective, they argue that the impact only lasts until a successor emerges, and all you may have achieved in the end is having created a martyr. What’s different now is that Israel seems to be aiming well beyond mere psychology, and is instead working to disable the broader command structures of its foes. It has focused on disrupting the enemy’s communication channels, as well as preventing new leaders from taking over. Just a day after killing Hassan Nasrallah, the IDF also targeted his Hezbollah successor. 

From there, the list continues. Ali Karaki (Nasrallah’s longtime adviser); Eid Hassan Nashar (the commander of Hezbollah’s medium-range rocket force); Samir Tawfiq Dib (the commander of its southern front); Nabil Kaouk (deputy head of its central council); all these, and many more, have been killed in Israeli strikes. Nor has the IDF neglected its main ideological enemy: Iran. The assassination of top Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, while he was staying at an official military guesthouse in Tehran, is an excellent example. The suspicious death of Iran’s former president Raisi in a helicopter crash may or may not have been an accident — but anyway bears striking similarities to Israeli actions elsewhere.

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To be clear, I’m not ignoring the appalling number of civilian casualties in Gaza, nor the impact on Lebanon. Nor do we yet know how other players may respond to this emerging new style of warfare. Mossad’s recent pager attack is a remarkable piece of spycraft, untangling adversaries from their surroundings. It plucked the Hezbollah members from the crowd, albeit imperfectly. But the similar weaponisation of daily items could plausibly yet be deployed by the West’s enemies too, with obviously unpredictable consequences. 

So far, though, our assessment must be: tactical advantage Israel. Even after taking some time to think it over, Iran hasn’t been able to react innovatively to Israel’s attacks, instead launching its usual knee-jerk show of missiles into established Israeli defences. 

If, then, we want to be optimistic: there’s a chance that Israel’s focus on going after the “brains behind the operations” might make leaders think twice before sending their lackeys off to die. And if not, it may at least drive a salutary wedge between violent-minded ideologues and the population at large, as the latter recognises that they’re better off without them. In fact, this may already be happening in Lebanon, where criticism of Hezbollah is beginning to be voiced by politicians and the public at large. Netanyahu’s message that the Lebanese people aren’t the enemy will need, in light of the damage they’re suffering, to be amplified with concrete offers of cooperation and support.

During his visit this week, the Israeli prime minister could meet with Kamala Harris — but to what purpose? Even if she had the bandwidth to focus on the Middle East, she would be best advised to avoid any kind of substantive utterance. In an election that is likely to be close, “niche voters” matter greatly, particularly those who care about Israel and Gaza. And based on her time in office, we know how Harris handles difficult challenges: through evasion, inaction, and lots of beaming smiles. Indeed, she has already implemented that approach vis-à-vis Netanyahu. In a move that will be welcomed by the anti-Israel contingent, she has “declined” to attend his address to Congress; and in a nod to the pro-Israel lobby, she also stated that she will meet with him privately.

As Netanyahu negotiates Washington’s corridors and backrooms, he will no doubt be hoping for hints of how the two possible next administrations are likely to deal with him and with Israel. Trump, who last night announced his plans to meet with Netanyahu, can be expected to be blunt. But it will be more difficult for him to glean what a Harris administration would mean for him, as well as his rivals abroad. So, in honour of his visit-in-vain, let us speculate.

In her first speech as Biden’s designated successor, Harris went full-on fulsome: he has achieved more in his one term than other American presidents managed in two; his legacy is unmatched; yadda yadda. Since she has no policy profile of her own after four years of unmatched invisibility, we can only take her at her word — and project onto her the basis of Biden’s policies, plus what we know of her personality.

If we take a good long look at Biden’s presidency, one theme emerges with startling clarity: indecisiveness. This was a man who was uncomfortable with leadership and instead was constantly scanning for approbation. As a result, some initially sound policies failed, some good ideas died on the vine, and the riderless horses of ideology and emotion were given their head.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, for instance, Biden expressed strong solidarity with Israel. But then pro-Palestinian factions (and even some pro-Hamas voices) on American campuses and in portions of the Arab-American electorate erupted in protest. What was “Genocide Joe” to do? Biden’s formula was something for everyone, and nothing for all — except a big bill.

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Weapons and aid to Israel continued, accompanied by preachy admonitions to exercise restraint. The humanitarian concerns for Palestinian civilians were assuaged by his Potemkin Pier: a floating piece of expensive engineering nonsense that promptly failed and had to be expensively dismantled, as all the technical experts warned from the start. The proposed peace plan — a permanent ceasefire that any Israeli interested in survival could hardly agree to — was already floundering. The months just before a US presidential election, let alone one of such exceptional volatility, are unlikely to produce a breakthrough.

A similar picture emerges in relation to Ukraine. True, Biden has been steadfast in his support for Kyiv — steadfast, but indecisive. From the day Russia invaded, the Ukrainians and Zelensky knew exactly what weapons and support they needed to protect their population and their infrastructure. Biden gave it to them — but in staggered deliveries, dribbling it out across the terrible months, wasting the momentum of the early counteroffensive and contributing to the grinding, bloody and no longer hopeful slog this has become. A negotiated settlement that includes territorial losses for Ukraine seems inevitable. Can anyone picture Harris as a tough negotiator against Putin?

Next stop: Afghanistan. By the time Biden became president, this conflict was sucking up far too many resources. Kudos to him for recognising that and continuing with the troop withdrawal that had been initiated by Trump, instead of seeing it as a partisan issue. But a troop withdrawal of that magnitude has to be properly prepared and executed. You don’t start by shutting down your defensive capabilities while relying on a civilian airport in the middle of a city full of desperate people. Even then, a prompt reaction could have saved the day. When the Afghan public started mobbing the airport, flights should have ceased immediately and the airport shut down until a process was in place. The Taliban were cooperating at that point, happy to see us leave and willing to facilitate our departure.

But with the US media slamming Biden for “abandoning” our Afghan allies, his response was to ramp up the speed of the evacuations, which, predictably, caused a stampede. The chaos was an open invitation to Isis, who promptly attacked, killing 13 American soldiers who had been given the hopeless task of guarding Abbey Gate, plus 170 in the roiling Afghan crowd. Those were the only US casualties during the entire two years of withdrawal negotiations and implementation, and they were completely avoidable.

The list goes on. Essentially, Biden “gave” Iraq to Iran, by abandoning his own initial assessment of the situation. The result was exactly what he had feared: sectarian conflict, Shi’a dominance, and an Iranian influence verging on total control of the Baghdad government. Biden even sold out the one little piece of his plan that was working: the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. There, an enthusiastically pro-American population, plus a Christian minority that the Kurds had generously integrated, were repeatedly ignored, rebuffed and denied support by the Biden administration. By way of appreciation, Baghdad is now preparing to ignominiously evict our remaining troops.

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As our final example, we must cite his choice of VP. Even if Biden deluded himself that he was up to a second term, and that the voters would agree, he knew that at some point his vice president would become his party’s candidate for the highest office. Yet by what measure of merit could he possibly have thought that Harris is the one? When he chose her, her popularity was so low and her fundraising appeal so non-existent that she had dropped out of the 2020 election months before the Democratic caucus. Observers decried her propensity to randomly change position on key issues. She had, and still has, no foreign policy experience, and did not use her time as vice president to develop a discernible identity beyond what is now being celebrated by some: her race and gender.

Faced with negotiating with such a figure, let alone Biden himself, Netanyahu may be wishing that he, too, had Covid and could go into isolation. Angry Israeli protesters sent him on his way at Ben Gurion, and even angrier American protesters are besieging the Watergate Hotel, where he is staying. Huge demonstrations are expected outside of Congress, with the demand that he be arrested. His hope, in the considerably different circumstances of just a few weeks ago, had been for a statesmanlike reception and substantive talks about a hostage release and ceasefire with an option to continue the degradation of Hamas’s power.

Biden may want one final accomplishment, some kind of Middle East deal. But can a lame duck and an ICC-wanted leader unpopular at home pull off a win? Don’t hold your breath.

We can’t be certain how the world would be different had a different course been chosen, but we can identify turning points and their cascading tumbles of consequences. And we can hypothesise an alternative history that, absent some fateful step, might have unfolded instead. Such “Planet Ifs” are more than thought experiments; if we can uncover what these wrong turns have in common, we can try harder to avoid them in the future. To see how, let’s consider four.

The first is almost as old as America: What if the United States had never permitted slavery? Slavery, after all, was an ethical transgression, while the Civil War that followed ripped the country apart. Today, slavery’s toxic effects still impact the nation — socially, economically, culturally, politically. Nor was this outweighed by any significant benefits, as plantation-style farming was not essential to southern agriculture. A national story free of slavery would thus be indisputably preferable. Case closed.

On to our second Planet If, this time in Europe: What if the Treaty of Versailles had refrained from deliberately humiliating Germany after the First World War? The Treaty placed exceptionally harsh conditions on defeated Germany. The Bundestag was forced to cede territory and portions of its population, to accept burdens that prevented their economic recovery, and to demilitarise and to pay massive reparations. Such a vindictive stance fuelled Germany’s subsequent nationalism, with economic despair rendering its populace vulnerable to the recovery and pride promised by Hitler.

This lesson was learned by the end of the Second World War. In 1945, few would deny that a contemptuous and vindictive attitude towards Germany would have been warranted — but the decision was made to aim for rehabilitation and reintegration into the international system. They were obliged to pay reparations, and there was mandatory public education about the camps and the genocide, but there was also a roadmap for Germany’s return to being a normal and respected nation. Had such an approach been taken in 1918, it is entirely possible that we would not have had the Second World War. It seems unlikely Hitler would have seized power. And projecting forward: no expulsions of Jews, no genocide, and therefore no Israel, no Middle-East conflict, no PLO, no Hezbollah, no Hamas, and no Gaza War.

Third, let’s visit a more recent Planet If: What if Mohammad Mosaddegh, a secular reformer, had been allowed to remain as Iran’s elected Prime Minister?

As Prime Minister, Mosaddegh launched a series of policies targeting the country’s social inequalities. These included land reform, public housing, the abolition of forced and indentured labour, and sick leave for workers. Then he decided to nationalise the country’s oil. Why, he reasoned, should a country so rich in resources be so poor, with its principal source of wealth under the total control of a foreign government, the UK, through its Anglo-Iranian Oil Company?

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Mosaddegh proposed to compensate the British company for its future losses, but that did not assuage Churchill’s rage, who determined to overthrow Mosaddegh and replace him with the compliant Pahlavi dynasty. Unable to manage such an ambitious undertaking alone, the British sought to pull in the Americans. Sensibly, Secretary of State Dean Acheson rejected the plan, terming it “destructive” and criticising the British intention to “rule or ruin” Iran. But the British persisted and, when Eisenhower was elected, they finally had their patsy. Playing on his Cold War paranoia, they persuaded him that Mosaddegh, an outspoken anti-Communist, was going to ally with the Soviet Union. With that, Project Ajax was born — a bold, elaborate and expensive plan to foment unrest, spread disinformation, instigate riots and overthrow the Mosaddegh government. Hundreds of demonstrators were shot, members of the government captured, tortured and executed, and the submissive successor regime was placed on the throne, his first task being the return of the oil wealth to the foreign companies. Mosaddegh was placed in solitary confinement, where he died.

A great triumph: a Pyrrhic victory. Let’s recall where this path went.

Social and economic reforms having been nipped in the bud, the Iranian populace continued to be poor and uneducated. With the secular reformists eliminated, the disgruntled masses turned to firebrand religious scholars who concocted a volatile mix of nationalism and retrograde religion. Eventually, this erupted in an Islamic Revolution whose successors now support terrorist groups across the Middle East. The consolidation of Hezbollah, Hamas and even last year’s horrific attack on Israel can be traced back to the coup against Mosaddegh — a man who, we must recall, was on course to effect reforms, modernise his country and educate the populace. Iran could have been a regional ally, instead of where it is today: partnering with Russia and China to bring us down.

Our final Planet If was formed three decades later: What, it holds, if the US had not backed the radical Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan?

In 1979, Soviet troops were sent to Afghanistan to defend a beleaguered pro-Soviet Communist government. This being the Cold War, the US saw an opportunity. The theory was that the Soviets as a superpower would inevitably prevail, but we could make it costly for them by backing the craziest, most extreme among their opponents, the ones who would fight most brutally. Some modern-minded, pro-democracy Afghan resistance groups were also opposing the Soviet forces, but they were judged to be too tame. So, we turned to the mujahideen, “those who wage jihad”.

After the Soviets threw in the towel and withdrew, the mujahideen groups became the new Afghan government. The US had brokered a power-sharing rotation agreement among them, which instantly fell by the wayside as each group decided to seize and permanently hold on to power. A bloody civil war ensued; the mujahideen encircled Kabul and blasted away at each other, destroying entire neighbourhoods of their own capital city and killing many civilians. Disgusted by this, the Taliban, made up of Afghan graduates of fundamentalist madrassas in Pakistan, marched forth to end the civil war that was devastating their country. To the initial relief of the population, they brought pacification, but then went on to impose a regime of oppressive ultra-Islam. And they hosted their like-minded partners: al-Qaeda.

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As for what happened next, little speculation is required. To use legal terminology, “but for” our nurturing of the mujahideen, and “but for” our prolongation of the war in order to stretch to the maximum the losses we could inflict on the Soviet military (and the hapless Afghan population) through our proxies, there would have been no Taliban, no al-Qaeda safe haven and no 9/11.

We can project by analogy what would have happened instead: the Soviets would have quashed the uprising against the Communist Afghan government, the country would have endured an unappealing political system — but, alongside that, it would have enjoyed accelerated infrastructure and economic development. Of course, within one or two decades, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed, leaving Afghanistan to now look like any other Central Asian Republic. Women of all social classes would be educated and integrated into all levels of public life, and the country would now be in the process of de-Sovietising, rather than being governed by a rogue regime that is being courted by China and, oh irony, Russia.

What do these examples have in common? In each instance, those formulating the policies and the plots knew that they were violating principles of fairness and their own ethical and ideological values, in the interest of material gain and power; and they also knew that what they were doing was morally wrong and extremely risky. We can imagine them congratulating themselves for being so bold and diabolical, indeed even so brilliantly Machiavellian.

On each occasion, the illusion of success initially appeared to confirm the cleverness of the plotters. The plantation owner elite became rich and powerful. Germany not only lost the First World War; it was crushed. The compliant Reza Shah Pahlavi took his seat on the Peacock Throne, and Western corporations could once more pump Iran’s oil to their heart’s content. And in Afghanistan, our erstwhile proteges-gone-rogue were eliminated and a pro-Western democracy installed in their place — or so it briefly seemed.

But what can we say about each of these episodes? The most obvious commonality is that they all involved leaders and policymakers knowingly violating their country’s ethical code and belief system. After all, the Founding Fathers knew that slavery offended the values of their new nation. They initially planned to emancipate the slaves upon gaining independence. Earlier drafts of the Declaration of Independence blamed King George for polluting the New World with this abominable practice. But the section was deleted.

Why did they override their better knowledge? The simple answer is greed. The Founding Fathers, otherwise endowed with admirable foresight, had to know that this would not end well, that it would undermine the moral integrity of their society, harm the middle and lower classes, and create a minority that inevitably would become free one day and have cause for deep resentment. But for individual — and influential — members of the Southern elite, to be “gentleman farmers” with large landholdings was a matter of prestige and wealth.

As for the experienced statesmen who drafted the Treaty of Versailles, they could have focused on bringing stability and reconciliation to Europe. Instead, they were determined to not just punish Germany, but to prevent it from getting back on its feet for decades to come and perhaps ever. As Keynes observed, the Treaty was “one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible”.

In Afghanistan, however, ignorance was no excuse. The US knew full well that the terrorist groups and warlord bands they were arming, funding, training and supporting did not remotely resemble “freedom fighters”. Their goal was to conduct a holy war, a jihad, with the purpose of imposing Islamist rule over the country.

So, what can we glean here? Well, international affairs can seem highly convoluted, but as these examples suggest, one simple maxim can make things easier. First, don’t violate your own beliefs and core values in the interest of being clever — because it won’t end well. Or, in other words, to thine own self be true — because karma’s a bitch.

To many in the West, an Afghanistan that flourishes under the Taliban, or even one that survives, cannot possibly be true. Under their rule, the country can only be a place of unremitting failure and misery. The decision of Tobias Ellwood, then, as chair of the UK’s defence select committee, to post a video praising the Taliban for improving safety in Afghanistan was never going to find a warm reception.

In 2021, the UN issued a desperate warning about an impending disastrous famine in Afghanistan. The Taliban takeover and the exodus of international NGOs, they said, had caused a collapse in food supplies. They projected one million children were likely to die in the coming winter. And yet, winter came and passed without a famine and without mass deaths. Did the UN’s experts take that as a prompt to review their metrics? Not at all. Instead, they repeated the prediction for the next winter, and were wrong again. Afghanistan is an agricultural country with centuries-long experience in handling scarcity; accustomed to harsh winters and isolation, they knew what to do.

From the moment the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021, analysts have been confidently predicting the imminent collapse of the Afghan economy. It’s not an unreasonable expectation. The nation’s financial reserves remain frozen. Sanctions have closed the door on foreign investment and business. The Central Bank is unable to access its funds, which are stuck in American and European banks. Not one country has recognised the Taliban government, and several of its key officials are on terrorist no-fly lists.

Nor do the Taliban have any of the requisite skills for governance. Their leadership consists of eccentric elderly religious figures and regional paramilitary commanders. The bulk of the Taliban are young, uneducated men who have never done anything but fight and have never lived anywhere but in remote rural areas. Anyone with education and professional skills decamped to the West. It could only be a matter of months before the ramshackle edifice collapsed. But to everyone’s incredulous amazement, including my own, Taliban Afghanistan lives on.

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Ellwood was obviously naïve in his presentation — it’s never a good look for a Government official to be retweeted by the Taliban — but the crux of his message is largely accurate. Afghanistan’s drug trade has been almost eradicated, as confirmed by international watchdog agencies and satellite surveillance. The borders are mostly secure, and the Taliban have built good cooperation with neighbouring border police such as that of Uzbekistan. Even the International Crisis Group, no fan of the Taliban, has acknowledged that security across the country has improved, with the exception of pockets of anti-Taliban extremists.

Elsewhere, the economy is better than it was under the Western-installed and Western-funded governments, the latter having required near total international subsidy while the Taliban are managing not just on their own, but under sanctions. Improved security also means improved trade routes and revitalised agriculture. As the US Institute of Peace, another critic of the Taliban, notes: “the Taliban have taken some positive steps toward financial stability by publishing a fiscally responsible three-month budget and raising considerable amounts of domestic revenue — especially through customs duties, which have risen with a crackdown on corruption”.

When did any of the previous governments have fiscally responsible budgets? Never. According to Sigar, the US government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, more than 80% of Afghan government spending on our watch was paid for by the US and its allies. As for corruption, Transparency International, the Europe-based watchdog agency, elevated Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by 24 places from where it had been under Western governments, from 174th to 150th, which the government-funded Voice of America termed “a remarkable status upgrade”.

Today, the biggest problem for the Taliban is Isis, which, despite some progress, remains a menace in the country. Given this is a concern we share, surely some cooperation would be wise — not least because there is no obvious alternative to Taliban rule on the horizon. If security is a priority, we can’t treat them as a pariah forever.

And yet, there is what we might call The Big Obstacle: what the Taliban are doing to half their population, the girls and women. Despite earlier promises to the contrary, they are back to their former ways, with girls banned from education after Grade 6 (below the age of 12), women’s employment strictly limited, female students excluded from universities, and strict rules on women’s dress and presence in public. As the UN made clear earlier this year, “20 years of progress for women and girls’ rights has been erased since Taliban takeover”. Although, for accuracy’s sake, this statement would have to read “for women and girls in middle and upper-class urban neighbourhoods”. The grim truth is that, in two decades, barely a dent has been made on female literacy, maternal and infant mortality, or the eradication of forced marriages and child brides in the poor neighbourhoods and rural areas where the overwhelming majority of Afghan women live.

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All of which is a tragedy, and certainly does not make the even more restrictive policies of the Taliban any more palatable to us in the West, as the Taliban know well. So, given that they are seeking recognition and foreign investment, why won’t they budge on this matter?

While on other issues, the Taliban have been capable of change or compromise, on the issue of women they are completely intransigent. In his recent speech to mark Eid, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, Afghanistan’s supreme leader, gave no ground, instead announcing that “necessary steps have been taken for the betterment of women as half of society in order to provide them with a comfortable and prosperous life according to the Islamic Shariah”. This was either an exercise in supreme cynicism or something he and his circle truly believe. In either case, we are dealing with a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in values.

So, can anything be done? Well, what we should be learning from the Afghan case is what not to do. As I have written before, we did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. What we did, and what did not work, was to focus on a small group of middle and upper-class urban women, giving them a Western education, and then training in a series of “workshops” in skills that are helpful to activists only in the West. We wrote them a Constitution that guaranteed them seats in Parliament and funded them extensively. And this did produce a cadre of assertive, confident women, capable of aggressively demanding various rights and benefits — but only in a Western setting benignly overseen by us. Once the Taliban took over, they fled and Afghan women found themselves without an obvious grass-roots protest movement.

In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, without our instigation, women fought for their political and social rights, for the right to be in public, to get identity papers without the permission of a male guardian, to make decisions on matters affecting their children, to drive cars. Activists lost their jobs, some were jailed, but they persisted. And, over time, they succeeded in having all of those initially unthinkable demands met. Saudi Arabia today is a different universe from Saudi Arabia 20 years ago, and much of the credit goes to its courageous women. Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia — they all have indigenous, and influential, women’s movements who have made legal and social gains.

And there are courageous activist women holding their ground at this moment in Afghanistan. Typically, they stem from less privileged personal backgrounds than those who departed, and work through local NGOs with the support of friendships earlier established with women on the outside. They are continuing to offer basic social services to widows, orphans and indigent women. They are using modern technologies for underground education.

Equally encouraging are the deep divisions within Taliban ranks over the issue  of women’s rights and female education. Quite a few Talibs send their own daughters to Pakistan or Qatar for access to education and continue to raise the matter internally. Other Islamic countries send regular delegations of Islamic clerics and scholars to Kandahar in an attempt to convince the hardliners that their stance is un-Islamic and is giving Islam a bad name.

There are many pressure points, then, and these would become more effective with the country’s opening. Ellwood’s suggestion that Western embassies should return was not as ill-judged as some insist. The problem is that the Taliban is the government. There is no alternative in the offing; our sanctions are not working, and we are not going to do what the Diaspora would like, and send our militaries back in. So, again, what should we do?

“Showing up is half the battle,” as Stephen Hawking said. Western presence means Western influence, dialogue, and the demonstration of alternative possibilities. Afghan women activists still in the country, and their civil society groups, are asking for this and we should listen to them; they are on the ground and they know best what will help them.

After Ellwood posted his video, he was tarred, feathered and threatened with expulsion, causing him to ignominiously cave in and agree that, like Mr Morgenstern’s academic, he must have “imagined the whole thing”. This dream, however, has cost us, and them, incalculable harm. This time, let’s focus on the facts rather than wishes.

What constitutes a successful application, however, is not so clear. In a court of law, to claim compensation, you must show that you have suffered harm and associate it with a certain amount of money. Is this criteria met? The slaves who were transported to America obviously suffered harm. But they are not the plaintiffs here. Rather, their descendants — along with people who are not their descendants but who belong to the same racial group — are the complainants. Is there a case that they have suffered harm as a result of historic enslavement?

The American legal system has a useful “but for” concept for the determination of harm. Under this framework, you are culpable for damage suffered by someone else if “but for” your action, they would have been fine. For example, “but for” you allowing your dog off his leash, he would not have chased a squirrel and run into traffic, causing a car to swerve and hit a lamp post. What happens if we apply this methodology to the descendants of slaves? “But for” the transportation of their ancestors to the Americas, what would their circumstances be? Well, perhaps most obviously, they would still be living in sub-Saharan Africa. Would that be preferable to living in modern America? Have they suffered harm because they now live instead as citizens in the US?

These are speculative questions, obviously. Still, we must note that today, vast numbers of people from all corners of the world embark on dangerous and desperate journeys in hopes of reaching the United States for the chance to live and work. We need only look to the southern border, where families cross swirling rivers and scale barbed-wire fences with babies in their arms because America offers them a better life. Or at the shocking images of young Afghans clinging to American planes lifting off from Kabul airport in a suicidally hopeless effort to escape their country.

None of this justifies past slavery, and in these examples, the dangerous travel is undertaken voluntarily. What it does illustrate, however, is that the descendants of the trafficked individuals find themselves in a country that millions around the world would give anything to reach. Even citizens of prosperous Western Europe sign up for the Green Card Lottery. To be here, equipped with full citizenship, is not a bad circumstance.

To complete our thought experiment: what would life be like for today’s African Americans if their ancestors had not been taken to the Americas? Today, the blunt truth is that Africa is a mess, politically, socially and economically. Bloody wars and coups, as well as tribal and ethnic genocides, recur with regularity. Hunger remains prevalent, with malnutrition serving as an underlying factor in almost half of deaths among children. An estimated 98 million in Sub-Saharan Africa are not in school, instead scrounging a living on the margins of the economy. Every fifth child is engaged in forced labour, often in exhausting and dangerous conditions in factories or mines.

Meanwhile, 25.6 million Africans have Aids, and a half-million die of malaria every year. Almost 600 million of the continent’s residents have no access to electricity, with South Africa only the latest country to declare a state emergency following a series of blackouts. Women face particular miseries: 19 of the 20 countries in the world with the highest maternal mortality rates are in Africa. According to the World Health Organization: “Gender inequity, poverty among women, weak economic capacity, sexual and gender-based violence including female genital mutilation (FGM) are major impediments to the amelioration of women’s health in Africa.”

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And yet, according to those calculating the value of African-American losses traceable to slavery, the “ultimate goal of reparations should be to restore the black community to the economic position it would have had if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination”. The problem with that is, had it not been for slavery, that community would not be here at all, and their economic position on their continent of origin would likely be inferior. This is to assume that the removal of 338,000 of its inhabitants made little difference to Africa’s future. But even so, would life there be better than modern America?

Unable to address this question, one wing of the reparations lobby is proposing a “right-to-return-to-Africa” programme. This idea pre-dates the end of the Civil War, when it was championed both by abolitionists who thought it was the best way to undo the damage of the slave trade and, ironically, by die-hard Southerners who felt that a population of resentful emancipated slaves would be a social burden and should be encouraged to leave. Several state legislatures set aside funding for reverse colonies to be established in various African nations, but there were few takers. Such reluctance was wise, as almost half of the initial returnees soon perished from tropical diseases, principally malaria.

Moreover, the indigenous inhabitants and neighbours were less than welcoming of their returning brothers and sisters; indeed, they were distinctly hostile. Perhaps the most lasting of these experiments was Liberia, whose name derived from the Latin word liber, meaning free. There, the return-migrants managed to achieve dominance for a time, but in 1980, they were toppled. Since then, chaos has reigned, and at least a quarter of a million people have been killed in the bloody process.

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Here, it is noteworthy that contemporary anti-racist activists, including Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, vehemently opposed the concept of repatriation. “We live here — have lived here — have a right to live here, and mean to live here,” Douglass stated categorically. Perhaps he could have added: and we mean to leave trauma behind us and live well. For let’s not forget: many African Americans have done just that. The African-American middle class is almost exactly the same size proportionally as their white counterpart. It’s a huge disservice to them, and to the country, to portray this part of our population as failed social and mental wrecks requiring therapeutic cash.

This is not to say that the situation is hopeless or that the descendants of slaves just need to get a grip. Although some have attained wealth and many have entered the middle class, there clearly is a large segment that has suffered from little upward mobility. But apologies and one-time windfalls won’t help; this requires frank and serious analysis, actual plans and study of other models.

A good place to start would be a review of the strategies of other minorities, such as Asian Americans, and their uncomfortable decision to live in cramped multi-generation units that allowed them to afford housing in middle-class neighbourhoods with better schools and a safer environment. Or one could study models such as that of Singapore, where a multi-ethnic population of hostile communities mired in unemployment, poverty and mutual dislike was forged into a prosperous nation within just a few decades. It means looking at the military, where young men from minority backgrounds thrive and rise in the ranks — America’s most senior two leaders are currently African-American generals.

Calls for reparations may attract headlines, but that doesn’t mean they will succeed. Though dangling the chance of a lottery win may be a clever vote-winning trick for unscrupulous politicians, that doesn’t make it good politics.

If you said Pakistan, you would be correct. If you said America, you would also be correct.

For the US, this is a departure. Not because of the scandals, of course. From the country’s inception, many of its highest-ranking political figures have engaged in outrageous behaviour — political, financial, sexual, or combinations of the three. There were love triangles, duels, extra-marital offspring, flings with interns. Accusations of corruption date back to Alexander Hamilton, and of illicit campaign finance to Ulysses S. Grant and 1872, when his supporters diverted a tax on whiskey into the election coffers.

At the presidential level, though, the maximum consequence has been impeachment (Johnson in 1868, Clinton in 1998 and Trump in 2019 and 2021), or the pre-emptive resignation of the offender (Nixon in 1974). To jail a president was, until recently, unthinkable, no matter what one might feel regarding the individual officeholder. And this was a valuable safety measure, keeping antagonism and partisan rivalries within bounds.

If Trump’s warnings are correct and he is arrested today, it will represent a new low in a chain of unprecedented prior boundary violations, including an unannounced FBI raid on a former president’s home with guns drawn. This time, the consequences will not be pretty — for once a red line is erased, it is gone for good, no matter which party you belong to. Who will be next? The Democrats hated and investigated Ivanka and Donald Jr.; already the Republicans are zeroing in on Hunter Biden. Step by step, tit for tat, America is heading into the banana republic zone.

To find out what this entails, we need only look to Pakistan. Here, we have a political system that regularly cannibalises its leaders, jailing, executing or assassinating them with such appalling regularity that one wonders why anyone would ever seek high office. The explanation is most likely a combination of factors: idealism bordering on a saviour complex; the addictive adulation of supporters who, at rallies, can easily number in the semi-hysterical millions; the push of relatives and hangers-on all hoping to benefit; and the lure of all sorts of personal licit and illicit benefits.

Take Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who served first as Pakistan’s President and then Prime Minister in the Seventies. After being educated in the US and UK, he founded the Pakistan People’s Party and oversaw the drafting of the country’s constitution. Ultimately, however, he was deposed in a military coup, arrested, put on trial for alleged involvement in the murder of a political rival, found not guilty, re-arrested under martial law on the same charge, tortured, sentenced to death, and hanged. The man responsible for his demise was Zia ul-Haq, who became President via military coup in 1977. His turn in power ended in a mysterious plane crash in 1988, believed to have been caused by a bomb concealed in a box of mangoes.

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Later, in 1999, Pervez Musharraf became President through a military takeover, cementing his position by jailing and initiating criminal proceedings against the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. Musharraf was the target of multiple assassination attempts but survived them. When his excesses against political opponents became too extreme, and he was about to be impeached, he fled into exile. Upon trying to make a comeback in 2013, he was indicted by the country’s high court for involvement in political murders, including that of Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfiqar and twice Pakistan’s prime minister, causing him to flee to Dubai to avoid arrest.

This pattern of politics can only be described as dysfunctional. It operates on the basis of disregard for the rule of law, direct violent attacks on political rivals, manipulation of elections, intimidation of opponents, misuse of the judicial system, and frequent attempts to kill political figures. Its current protagonist, Imran Khan, is certainly eccentric, with marriages to a British socialite, a journalist who later wrote a tell-all about his supposedly degenerate personal life, and now to an ultra-Islamic Sufi alleged to engage in witchcraft on his behalf.

He is currently limping along with his legs in casts and bandages from a recent assassination attempt, while efforts are underway to arrest him for allegedly failing to mention an illegitimate daughter in his pre-election paperwork, selling gifts he received from foreign dignitaries, and dozens of lesser misdeeds. Khan’s supporters, meanwhile, are encamped around his home to defend him, engaging in battles with the police.

There are a number of obvious analogies to Trump: similarly a populist, an eccentric, a person swirling with allegations about his sex life, financial dealings and his family. If he is arrested today, it seems likely it will be because of hush money paid to a porn star. In response, the Democrats have spent the past months attempting to take him out of play through harassment in the courts over comparatively trivial matters. He is accused, for instance, of failing to properly register all the gifts he received during state visits.

During their time in office, politicians and diplomats constantly receive gifts of varying value and tastefulness, and it’s not the task of the recipient to register them — that’s a job for staffers. In the case of Trump, the two most significant gifts he is accused of keeping are a set of golf clubs and a life-size portrait of him, which I doubt the nation is desperate to keep.

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Back in the real world, both Trump and Khan’s cases reek of a double standard, with the target personality being scrutinised for behaviour that, for better or worse, is widespread within a political elite. As for their sexual peccadilloes, in both instances these relate to incidents that are well in the past and not all that sordid. The Democrats have been scouring the nooks and crannies of Trump’s life in a determined effort to prosecute and jail him. That’s not “equal treatment under the law” — it’s a political gambit. Perhaps their campaign slogan should be: Make America Pakistan.

Meanwhile, as the Republican Party heads for the 2024 election, its most energetic slogan, inspiring hats and bumper stickers and T-shirts, is: Make America Florida. Under Ron DeSantis, Florida has charted its own course in recent years — and done very well. Its unemployment rate is at a record low, while its budget surplus is at a record high, despite zero income tax. Elsewhere, Washington DC is a mess, as is California, New York and Chicago. These major cities all sport a collapsing infrastructure, potholed roads, pop-up homeless encampments and rampant lawlessness.

Amid this urban blight, Florida appears as a beacon of hope. Its infrastructure is well-maintained; the streets are clean; affordable public transportation is state of the art; crime rates are low. Unsurprisingly, corporations as well as private persons have been abandoning ship, fleeing their foundering cities and moving to the well-run Sunshine State. The DeSantis formula — no-nonsense, frontier-America law and order fused with individualism — not only won him his recent landslide re-election, but turned the Florida Formula into the Republican vision of America’s future. Efficiently managed, pragmatic, minimally interventionist, focused on middle-ground conservative attitudes and values but strong on personal liberties, it’s sounding pretty good to a lot of people.

Whether or not Trump is locked up today, next year’s elections look to be a watershed moment. What path to follow? Will America become Florida or Pakistan?

Consider Afghanistan’s recent history. The Soviet Union occupied the country, was defeated and forced to withdraw in 1989. The resistance groups formed a coalition government, but instead of reconstruction, they turned on each other in a civil war that flattened Kabul and plunged the country into chaos. That chaos allowed the Taliban — in its first iteration — to take power.

Relieved that the fighting was finally over, the population initially welcomed a group whose name translated as “the scholars”. But instead of bringing scholarly calm and smart economic recovery, the Taliban focused on inventing eccentric rules of dress and conduct, closing girls’ schools, blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas, and partnering with an Arab terrorist group, al-Qaeda — leading to 9/11, US retaliation and the downfall of the Taliban regime.

Then followed 20 years of massive financial infusions, development and education programmes, and an enormous US military effort to train and equip the Afghan military. Such levels of investment and effort could have turned Afghanistan into Central Asia’s Switzerland or Dubai. Instead, the country’s politicians perfected the arts of theft and corruption. The Army let the Americans do the heavy-lifting while they focused on creating ghost soldiers (imaginary recruits whose pay cheques the officers could collect). The new government, uninterested in nation-building, engaged in villa-building, creating fantastically tasteless Hollywood mansions, while the majority of their fellow citizens languished in rural mud huts. These rural areas were perfect terrain and recruitment for the Taliban, who not only persisted but grew. Eventually, the US faced the facts and, last year, pulled out, bringing about the Taliban’s second iteration.

The Taliban, in the conversations that accompanied last year’s Doha Peace Talks, vigorously emphasised that they had learned from their past mistakes. This time, they were going to be benevolent guardians of the state, and show the West and the world what an Afghan Islamic republic could accomplish. They would focus on development and on the welfare of the population.

At first, things went relatively smoothly. The Taliban entered Kabul without incident; they could not be blamed for taking unilateral control of the capital, Ashraf Ghani had fled in the night in a cash-stuffed helicopter, instead of fulfilling the agreement to meet and form a shared transitional government. Life continued much as before, with some improvements. NGOs, for instance, reported that they could now visit and serve previously inaccessible areas. It wasn’t great that the Taliban cabinet didn’t include even one woman, and that members of other ethnic and political groups were not represented — but, given that the alternative was a return to civil war or outright war, the world was willing to be patient.

This was, after all, a fighting force that had yet to acquire skills of governance and administration. Even as the re-opening of girls’ middle and high schools kept being postponed on one pretext or another, even after a prominent al-Qaeda leader was found comfortably ensconced in the middle of Kabul (and less comfortably removed by drone), the world’s patience held. No one wanted a renewal of conflict, especially since, in the absence of any credible contender, it would just mean a grinding bloody and protracted fight. There were even plans to set up a special UN commission to negotiate a “normalisation” of diplomatic relations with the Taliban, potentially culminating in the recognition of their government. What an opportunity! The former pariahs were poised to take a place on the world stage, and all they had to do was let girls go to high school, include a few non-Taliban in their various councils, and stick to the things they had already agreed to in Doha, such as not supporting terrorism.

It seemed all too easy — until it wasn’t. Just before Christmas, it was announced that women were now also banned from universities. And hardly had the world had time to condemn it before the next insanity followed: women were now banned from working for NGOs, domestic or foreign.

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Both moves are, obviously, unacceptable on grounds of innate values and human rights. They have no foundation anywhere except in the pathology of the nutcases who came up with them; certainly not in Islam, as the chorus of dismay from scholars and leaders across the Islamic world immediately expressed. But they are also inexplicable on grounds of simple pragmatism. Without external aid, Afghanistan is in very deep trouble. It lacks, for a period of some years at least, the resources to feed itself or to provide power, basic tools for transport or farming, or pharmaceuticals and medical care. To be self-sustaining, the country needs to wisely and energetically build up infrastructure and human capital. And just consider basic demographics. Given the total segregation in place, which does not permit women to be treated by male doctors, how do the Taliban propose to cultivate a viable next generation? Without female nurses and doctors, the already high maternal and infant mortality rates will only increase.

Many within the higher and middle echelons of the Taliban acknowledge all of this. Privately, they express dismay over the rulings in hardline Kandahar province, which they claim represent a very small yet very prominent minority around Haibatullah, the Taliban’s Supreme Leader who was born there. And this time, unlike during the Taliban’s first iteration, there is public pushback. There have been demonstrations by women, and also by men. A group of male students in Herat walked out of university final exams in a show of solidarity with their banned female colleagues. According to credible reports, some Taliban foot soldiers have left their posts in protest. Some of this opposition reflects principles, some reflects pragmatism, and probably much of it is a mix. The Taliban hardliners are going to run the country into the ground, which is clear to most, including officials and even cabinet members of the Taliban.

So, what is the Taliban actually doing about the hijacking of the movement’s historic second chance? Not much and certainly not enough. There are internal discussions during Taliban meetings. Delegations have travelled to Kandahar to appeal to the Inner Circle, but have been rebuffed on the grounds of magical thinking. The country will starve without external aid? No — food comes from God, who will provide if everyone demonstrates sufficient piety. Women and infants die during childbirth without proper medical care? It is God’s will.

It’s not hard to see what this quality of leadership will bring about: renewed civil war. Already, gatherings of opposition groups are taking place in Vienna and Dushanbe, among other locales, hosted by Western and regional governments who are contemplating backing an uprising. This may be tempting, but it’s not a good scenario. There is no contender strong enough for a clear or speedy victory, and a return to violence is the last thing one would wish on the Afghan people. To avoid either the collapse of the country’s economy and its return to the role of pariah state, or a return to war and bloodshed, the Taliban must disempower the small clique of eccentric autocrats in Kandahar.

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This, of course, will not be easy. While Islamic orthodoxy may agree that the rulings on women’s work and education are un- and even anti-Islamic, harming the community of Believers, Islam has no equivalent to excommunication and Sunni Islam in particular tends to emphasise obedience to the ruler, even if he is flawed. Further, during the decades of their struggle, the Taliban needed to remain unified and indivisible. To show division and disagreement publicly is a big step.

On the other hand, if the reasonable Taliban elements find some courage, they will find conditions to be favourable. Highly respected Islamic authorities inside the country, such as the renowned Professor Abdul Samad Qazizadah, or Maulawi Jalilullah Mawlawizadeh, the head of a madrassa in Herat, have publicly denounced the rulings as having no basis in Islam and as having the potential to destroy the country and ruin the good name of Islam before a world audience. Their words carry weight. And while it is short of excommunication, last week’s declaration by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation — which represents 57 member states — disavowing the Taliban rulings on female education and employment should give dissidents within the group the theological and political backing to openly oppose these policies. It would qualify them for significant intra-Islamic aid and support if they managed to take the rudder.

Outside Afghanistan, the international community had been cautiously inclined towards accepting the Taliban government. That’s out of the question now, as long as the Kandahar Krazies are in charge. But if they were to be removed, and the moderate wing prevailed, they could expect significant help and support. This last part isn’t a heavy lift. If they were then to rescind the female employment ban, open girls’ schools, readmit women to the universities, and take steps to a more inclusive government, it would change everything. Add to that, if the Kandahar Hardliners — several of whom are on global terrorism lists — were no longer part of the government, sanctions could be lifted and the country’s frozen assets released.

Many of these moderate Taliban members took on the United States and Nato. Will they have the guts to take on the small circle of hardliners who are upending the peace dividend and leading the country into ruin? With civil war on the horizon, they may not have much choice.

Even within the iconoclastic organisation, there are some for whom this forced backward march does not make sense. It’s one thing to be highly pious and ultra-conservative. It’s quite another to blast out eccentric, made-up rules with no foundation in mainstream Islamic doctrine or Afghan history and custom. Today, it’s all too easy to imagine a bunch of bearded old men sitting around in Kandahar dreaming up the next ridiculous way to annoy girls and women: girls above the age of 12 turned away on the first day of school; female university students ordered by guards not to wear scarves that are too cheerful in colour; female news anchors told they must cover their entire faces except for the eyes. So much for the hopes that this time around, the Taliban would be different.

The conclusion from all this seems obvious: after seeming to have learned from the failure of their previous time in power, the Taliban are now back to oppression as usual. Yet a more granular look reveals a peculiar vacillation in the Taliban’s edicts on women.

Under the current regime, an order is announced — then, right away, it is partially taken back or softened. Attempts are made to enforce it, but these are also erratic and uneven. Flurries of contradictory explanations and announcements follow. We’re told that girls in Grade 6 and above will not return to school. Wrong — they will, just not yet. We’re told this is because additional female teachers need to be recruited. Wrong again — it’s because a more concealing Islamic school uniform needs to be designed and manufactured. As for adult women, we’re told they must wear a hijab, but then that a headscarf is sufficient. Actually, no it isn’t: they must wear the burqa and be covered up completely. Well, no, it doesn’t have to be an actual burqa, a hijab is fine after all. But wait, they must also cover their necks and faces except for the eyes. But that’s just a recommendation, not a requirement. But it will be enforced.

What is going on here? Are the Taliban collectively maniacal, changing their minds as their mood shifts? It’s unlikely — you don’t fight and win a 20-year insurgency by being indecisive. Rather, these sequences of contradictory statements reflect their internal divisions on how to govern, and where they want the country to go. A tug of war is taking place and the cracks are starting to show.

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Already there have been a number of eruptions. In a recent speech, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, a high-ranking Talib, went so far as to accuse those calling for the exclusion of girls from middle and high-school education of disrespecting shariah. Because how could girls and women claim their Prophet-given rights if they can’t get enough education to learn what those are? More astonishing still are the credible reports of shouting matches between the Supreme Leader in Kandahar, Haibatullah Akhunzada, and his own bodyguards, in which the latter accused him of wasting the sacrifices made by their comrades and turning the country into an impoverished backwater shunned by all.

These rumblings in the ranks are partly down to the fact that today’s Taliban is more like a multi-party system. In one corner we have the Doha Group, which consists of those Taliban who were involved in the peace negotiations. For years they lived in Qatar, which, while unimpeachably Islamic, is not neurotic on the subject of women. Education is universal and excellent. There are high-profile women in corporate and political life. Both men and women wear traditional dress that includes a head covering, but women are not expected to conceal their faces or to stay at home. Public life is very family-oriented, with malls and parks populated by happy, relaxed parents and their children enjoying their leisure time together. All of this was not lost on the Afghans. Indeed, many of them left their families there when they returned to Afghanistan to join the government.

Then there is the Haqqani Group, which was based in Pakistan. While the country is conservative, it is also home to strong, publicly engaged women: politicians including heads of state, entrepreneurs, cultural icons, scientists. Their Taliban guests took note. There are also regional Taliban power centres which, due to the decentralised nature of an effective insurgency, are accustomed to exercising considerable autonomy. The Taliban is not a hierarchical organisation, nor does Akhunzada have the theological position or weight of, say, Ayatollah Khomeini. So to have him issue consequential pronouncements on his own, without consultation, rankles.

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There may also be ideological and theological reasons why some of the factions are distinctly more forward-leaning about women’s rights. A significant part of this more progressive interpretation of Islam seems to be rooted in their vision for the country, and its most likely path from abject poverty to modest prosperity. That path has as its absolute requirement the acceptance of the international community. Nothing good will happen unless the government is recognised, sanctions are eased, frozen assets are returned, and investment occurs.

There is a bit of healthy defiance in this vision. The insurgency was driven by the narrative that the country was bent under the yoke of foreign occupation and the corrupt elite it had introduced. But whatever its contradictions, the impulse is present and may prove impossible for the Kandahar Grandfathers to suppress.

In August and September of last year, as the Taliban took control of Kabul, videos and photos surfaced on social media showing young Taliban soldiers encountering modernity. These were amusing vignettes, the classic stereotype of hillbillies in the big city for the first time. One group had entered the abandoned Presidential Palace, gone exploring, and found the gym. Tentatively at first, they investigated the bizarre contraptions, testing to see if they were weapons, then quickly discovering their functions and filming each other laughing as they tried them out. Others went to the zoo and stared in dumbstruck fascination as they came face-to-face, for the first time, with the residents of an aquarium. Kalashnikovs slung across their torsos, one group traversed the lake in Bandiamir on swan-shaped pedal boats. The videos were faintly comical, but they were also enlightening. These were young people out in the world for the first time, and they were curious, open to new things, open to joy. These young Talibs don’t want to live in Jurassic Park. They want to be part of the larger world. And that world includes women.

This isn’t the only change worthy of note. The last time around, repressive edicts by the leadership were met with disdain by the outside world and sad despair by the Afghan public. What we see this time is quite different. Now, men are part of the protest against the backward slide of women’s rights. In reaction to the forced veiling of female news anchors, for instance, male colleagues made a high visibility statement by also reading the news with their faces covered.

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Is there anything we can do to support these dissenters? Well, if the past 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that our efforts at overt social engineering are not likely to meet with much success. These kinds of changes, of foundational social norms and gender relations, must happen from within. And what are the prospects of that? On the downside, this is a deeply patriarchal society, in which everyone submits to the dominion of the alpha male. Such habits are hard, but are certainly not impossible to break.

On the other hand, we mustn’t forget that, demographically, this is an extremely young society, where the power de facto rests with the young soldiers, the young farmers and the small group of remaining young educated doctors, managers and technocrats. Also, there is no credible opposition. No one really believes that any of the has-beens can muster a plausible fighting force and take back the country, and everyone has had enough of war. There is Isis, but if the government became reasonable, they would have ample outside help against that threat.

There is little we can do, except follow the mantra of “do no harm”. Keep the sanctions in place enough to keep the hardliners in a stall and on the brink of failure, but not so much as to starve the population. Let the protest and the messages come from within, so there is no argument that once again the West is imposing its alien decadent values. Above all, keep the prospect of connection with the outside world alive.

Though most foreign embassies in Kabul have been shut down since the Taliban takeover, a significant Western presence remains. Various UN agencies, representatives of NGOs and of donor countries maintain offices, send delegations or conduct regular visits. Talking points always include the latest eccentric moves by Kandahar on the issue of women. This must be incredibly tiresome and exasperating for the emissaries involved, but it’s important. The younger Taliban hear this, see this and realise where the obstacles to progress lie. They now know that the world remains ready to welcome them, and that they have a choice between shaping their own future, or letting their Grandfathers shut them away in a dark corner.

When an interview with Antonov containing these laments  appeared in Politico this month it became the talk of the diplomatic circuit. At social gatherings, several ambassadors shared that his office had contacted their office, and on their instructions, been rebuffed. And seriously, they wondered, how could he expect anyone to agree to meet him for lunch? To be seen dining with the city’s principal pariah was out of the question. As for taking his calls, who wanted to hear him spout Moscow’s party line at a time like this?

Having spent a decade as a ‘diplomatic spouse’, I find myself strangely fascinated by Antonov’s situation. The average Russian citizen may be inundated with propaganda, but Antonov has access to international news and commentary. He knows exactly what his country is doing and is personally experiencing the revulsion this has engendered. Demonstrators regularly gather in front of his embassy. They beam the Ukrainian flag onto the walls. In a way, having people refuse to see him or take his calls is a kindness and reflection of their good manners, given what most of us would like to say to him.

I can’t claim intimate knowledge of his state of mind or moral compass, but Antonov always struck me as a decent man. I remember him telling me that one of his personal projects when he first came to the US had been the rehabilitation of the historic cemetery in Ft. Ross, a settlement of Russian immigrants in Northern California. It was a moral obligation, he explained, to ensure that the dead could rest with dignity. A few months after that conversation, his army would be torturing and murdering civilians, then shovelling them into mass graves, or just leaving the bodies on the roadside to rot. What do his morals say about that?

Overnight Russia, which was working to regain its position as the serious and sober world power that in so many ways it seemed qualified to be, revealed a different face. Instead of playing a role on the world stage, it has been excluded from multiple economic, diplomatic and institutional affiliations. Even once this ends — as eventually it must — no one will forget that Russia wrecked its neighbour without anything even distantly approaching a proportionate provocation. The consequences of this act of aggression — Sweden and Finland preparing to join Nato, Germany rearming — are far-reaching and will last.

Antonov’s main assignment was to improve relations with the United States. And I believe this was a mission he embraced with sincerity. During a small lunch in December in his elegant residence, he expanded persuasively on that goal. Our two countries had important interests and global concerns in common, he said. But there was mutual distrust to overcome. Perhaps one could organize some youth programs, he suggested. These could bring Russian young people together with their American counterparts, to start building mutual understanding and forge relationships. What he had in mind was organic, gradual and positive.

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And I think he was making headway. Serious voices in the Washington policy world were beginning to conclude that diminishing Russia was counterproductive, that Moscow’s feeling of being boxed in by Nato and treated like a second-rate power should be given consideration, that a Russia possessed of heft and respect could be a partner against an aggressive China, a volatile Central Asia and the resurgence of Islamist terrorism. Wasn’t it time to bury the hatchet, and besides, did Washington really want to shoulder the world’s burdens all by ourselves?

Over time, this view might have prevailed. But instead of playing the judicious long-game envisioned by Antonov, Putin decided to speed things along with tanks, missiles, and genocide, and now his envoy is left holding the fort as representative of a Mongol-era scorched earth barbarian, a country whose neighbour no one wants to be, a leader President Biden has termed a war criminal, and a state that has been ignominiously kicked off the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Ambassadors tend to be well educated, well-traveled and self-possessed. There is an esprit de corps among them, even when they represent hostile states. Everyone shares a lifestyle of transience and understands the obligation that comes with the job: to defend positions whether or not one agrees with them. You see each other constantly in social settings where everything is light and civil and wine is served, and then you clash in a debate or security council vote; it engenders a sense of irony.

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They are comparable to soldiers in that they don’t make policy; they obey directives. A sensible government will consult them, listening to their estimations of the chances for success, heeding their warnings about unanticipated fallout. In the end though, ambassadors must represent whatever decision is made, and with conviction.

But what if they simply can’t? Here is where diplomats, as a rule, are in a better place than soldiers. A soldier or officer who walks away in protest can be prosecuted or, depending on the circumstances, even executed for desertion or treason. For most ambassadors, the stakes are not quite that high.

As with military officers, they are patriots, so it’s unlikely to be an easy decision, especially at the hard-won career level of ambassadorship. But what if they come to feel that they can no longer, in good conscience, defend the actions of their government? They have options: retire, resign, or jump ship altogether and seek asylum. The first two can either be accomplished quietly or be accompanied by statements of dissent. And what happens then? That very much depends on what country they are from.

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Some ambassadors, by resigning, improve their personal circumstances. Diplomats from Afghanistan were famous for abandoning their posts, even before the recent Taliban takeover. Currently — though now at least with some justification — 55 Afghan ambassadors and staff have requested asylum in the U.S. In general, it’s more common for diplomats from volatile, poor, or conflict-ridden countries to resign postings in more prosperous, Western countries. Without doubting the sincerity of their motives, the move has at least as many benefits as costs. They and their families receive asylum, gain residency, and typically receive a comfortable sinecure.

The Trump era was studded with ambassadorial resignations. In 2018 James Melville resigned as U.S. ambassador to Estonia in protest over President Trump’s stance towards the European Union. He moved on to become Associate Dean at the College of Charleston. In the same year, U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley went public about his resignation in an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President.” Therein he wrote that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what to him were “the traditional core values of the United States.” He moved to Miami and joined a media company. Everyone remained alive, well, and able to earn a respectable living.

But then there are countries that take a far dimmer view of absconding diplomats. During Communist era Poland, for example, their ambassador to Japan Zdzislaw Rurarz defected to the U.S. to protest his government’s imposition of martial law. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. He was stripped of his citizenship, and his property in Poland was confiscated. Information about North Korean diplomats who defect to the South is murky, with rumours of their children being abducted and forcibly repatriated, and their family members back at home being punished or possibly even killed.

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There is one last, less dramatic way ambassadors can exit their posts — they can have their accreditation yanked and be expelled, not for anything they did wrong but as stand-ins for their government. The State Department is not quite ready yet to do this to Antonov; so far they have only expressed their displeasure by withholding visas for his embassy staff’s spouses and family members, and as he laments in the Politico article, sending home his cook. Our U.S. diplomats in Russia have seen worse; they’ve had family pets killed and their young children waylaid and intimidated on the way to school, all to signal Russia’s anger with the administration they represent.

American ambassadors to Russia have resigned in years gone by, but I couldn’t find evidence of the reverse. Given the treatment of dissidents and even of private citizens who are seen to be disobedient, I suspect it’s not extremely advisable for Russian officials or diplomats to express public disagreement, let alone defect. Yet to their immense credit, in light of the horrific actions of their government in Ukraine, some courageous individuals in public roles have done just that.

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Russian climate envoy Anatoly Chubais resigned his position and departed Russia, citing his opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine as the reason. Ironically, it was Chubais who gave Putin his first Kremlin job in the mid-1990s, remained his strong supporter and held several important posts in various state companies. Arkady Dvorkovich, was the senior economic adviser to Dmitry Medvedev during his presidency, and was deputy Prime Minister until 2018. He stepped down as head of the state-backed Skolkovo technology fund after condemning the invasion.

Andrei Kozyrev, who was Russia’s Foreign Minister and later a Duma member under President Boris Yeltsin, told Newsweek that Russian envoys have the responsibility to oppose the actions of Putin by resigning in protest. But his career ended some years ago and he lives in balmy Florida, so that’s easy advice to give.

What should Antonov the Abandoned do? His choices are not great. Unless the US expels him he can remain in place, but his goal of bridge-building has been blown to smithereens right along with the buildings of Mariupol. Perhaps there will be a thaw again at some future point, but not until Putin is well and truly out of the picture. And any new and different leader will appoint his own people as diplomats. Is walking away a possibility, or does he have family members who would pay a price? Or does he, perhaps, out of loyalty or conviction actually support the unfolding barbarism?

Whether we like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Taliban now preside over a country devastated by decades of conflict: its new government cannot rely on the structures in place, which have been crippled by the abrupt departure of so many educated and trained managers and professionals.

Public safety, always hazardous in the tumultuous days after a major transition, needs intense policing and patrolling. Isis remains a huge threat, while the new regime’s young Taliban foot soldiers — born in remote villages, raised on nothing but combat and now amazed to find themselves in the shining metropolis of Kabul — have to be closely monitored.

Meanwhile, the disruption to trade is causing massive inflation and price increases for basic goods. A long drought has led to a poor harvest. Covid is still rampant. Winter is coming and the poor — 72% of the population, according to the UN — will look to the Government to provide them with firewood and food.

But good news: Afghanistan has money! The country has $9 billion in financial assets, of which $7 billion are in US banks and $2 billion are deposited in Europe. This is because Afghan banks traditionally keep the bulk of their funds in foreign financial institutions, drawing on them monthly for ongoing liquidity. Then there is the aid money already set aside for Afghanistan. The World Bank administers a Trust Fund for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which was supposed to pay $800 million this year, while the IMF has around $400 million designated for Afghanistan.

There’s just one problem: on the orders of the US government, all this cash has been frozen.

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And that’s not all. So much money has been ferried out of the country in recent years by corrupt officials that there is now a cash shortage. People can only withdraw a small portion of their savings. The country can’t print new bills to replace what was stolen, because the country’s currency is printed by a European company that also falls under US sanctions. It’s economic strangulation.

America likes to give names to its overseas efforts. The Afghan venture was called Operation Enduring Freedom until 2015, and Freedom’s Sentinel thereafter. What shall we call this new phase? Operation Enduring Anger, perhaps. That, after all, is what US military officers, and many in the policy community, are: very angry. It’s a blow for a superpower to have to acknowledge that it could not gain mastery over 90,000 unshaved, minimally equipped fighters, and wasted $2 trillion dollars in the process. It’s embarrassing.

But we should save our empathy for the Afghan people. Their country has been in unrelenting continuous war for more than 40 years. With 70% of its population under the age of 25, most people alive in Afghanistan have never experienced peace. We may not like their new government. But their last leaders were awful in a different way: more educated, yes, and savvier — but they used those attributes to pad their bank accounts in the UAE.

The Taliban government prior to that made women wear burqas and beat men if their beard was too short and executed adulterers in the sports stadium. Before that was a civil war and before that a proxy superpower conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. If the Taliban refrain from their previous behaviour – which so far they have largely been careful to do – and if they honour their promises to reopen girls schools, clamp down on terrorism and not persecute their former enemies, they could turn out to be Best in Show.

Granted, the return of the Taliban is not the solution the US had hoped for: to create a beautiful, free and democratic Afghanistan that would be rich on the basis of its mineral wealth. Yet that project stalled. The Taliban reappeared, won recruits, took territory, inch by inch, year by year. Until 2021, when, at long last, the US faced the facts. They pulled out their military and their diplomats and their contractors, closed the embassy and departed, taking with them nearly 200,000 local staff and supporters and accidental stowaways in a sloppy and casualty-riddled evacuation.

For punctuation, they launched one last faulty drone strike that killed three completely uninvolved non-combatant adults and seven children. The US Inspector General investigated the “incident” and described it as an “honest mistake”. The Costs of War Project estimates a total of 71,000 civilian casualties from direct military action during our little interlude. That’s a lot of mistakes.

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But now that we’re out, and winter has arrived, Afghanistan is braced for things to get worse. Last week, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told the BBC’s John Simpson that the situation “is as bad as you possibly can imagine: 95% of the people don’t have enough food, and now we’re looking at 23m people marching towards starvation. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.”

For his part, Simpson, a veteran reporter who has reported from 120 countries and 30 war zones, broke down on BBC Radio 4’s Today program as he described the plight of an Afghan mother-of-seven facing famine. “I came across a woman whose name is Fatima and she’s a widow. She’s got seven kids – five girls and two boys – and they’re grindingly poor already,” he said. “She used to make money by weeding the area for a local farmer. He can’t pay her now because he’s not able to grow the crop that he was growing. She’s got no money – she’s having to beg for fuel to make a fire and beg for flour which used to be delivered under the old government before the Taliban came in.”

Widows. Little girls. Hell on earth. Afghanistan is clearly in trouble. But let’s step back for just one moment. This woman used to work for a farmer, who used to farm, but now she doesn’t because he can’t — and it’s not because the Taliban “ascended” to power. It’s because we are sitting on their country’s money and won’t let go. It’s because we, in our determination to starve the Taliban, are starving this widow and her seven children. And 40 million others like them. Operation Mind-blowing Hypocrisy.

Now we think we have the solution: sure, we just left, but now we’re going right back in. To prevent the looming humanitarian crisis. That we made.

So money can now go into Afghanistan — as long as it is administered and dispensed by international organisations, companies and agencies. That means international staff with their Western salaries and entourage of drivers and guards and fixers and translators. That means rented houses and offices surrounded by hired security, and fleets of armoured cars and international conferences that add up to an overhead that consumes 60% or more of the total funds.

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And this will never end, because humanitarian aid does not relate to economic development. Afghanistan, in effect, is being positioned as a permanent welfare state. Perhaps, then, this is not about hungry Afghan children after all. Perhaps this about us — our contractors and the huge aid and development machinery that thrived in the country and now sees a way back in.

But we have to let go. We left. That was our decision. Now let’s leave them in peace. Give them their money. It’s all very well to tell them we won’t trade with them, and their government won’t be recognised, if they violate international law and prevailing international standards of human and women’s rights. And yes, it is regrettable that there are no women in their cabinet. But the same is true in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yemen. No one is freezing their assets, and they are all comfortably seated in the UN.

For Afghanistan to prosper, we need to stop telling them what to do and how to do it. They are not on our continent or in our cultural sphere. They have not gone through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Revolutions, or any of the other transformative steps that made the modern West. But they shouldn’t be punished for that. As we did, they too must find their path. And, in the meantime, we shouldn’t put boulders in their way.

We did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. We wanted to develop that country and rescue Afghan women. Their lives were hellish, girls banned from school, women forbidden to leave their homes except in the company of a male guardian, vigilantes beating them with sticks if their burqa was too short. We wanted them to enjoy the pleasures of modernity and live full, happy lives.

Along with the rest of that failed nation-building venture, we got this part wrong too. And now, instead of recalibrating, we are full speed ahead compounding the harm.

Our mantra now is: “We can’t abandon the Afghan women.” And what we mean by that is visas and evacuations. But obviously, we can’t fly out all Afghan women. As for the others, we’re handing them off to confront a medieval regime all on their own, having skimmed away anyone who is educated, affluent, articulate, connected and savvy. We’re leaving them in poverty and on the brink of famine, after whisking away those who staffed the food programmes and the clinics. The US embassy is shuttered. That, folks, is what abandonment looks like.

The sad secret underlying our Great Afghan Liberation Project is this: when we set out to rescue Afghan women, we had no idea of who, how or why. We worked with those we could readily find and interact with, the urban and urbane, the ones who figured us out and gratified our need for photogenic success. We never got to the ones in the slums and the villages.

Even now, we seem unaware that there is no such entity as “Afghan women”. Yet the circumstances of their lives, their mindsets and the forces to which they are subject, make them as distinct from each other as different species.

So I propose: A Field Guide To Afghan Women.

Let us start with the group that no one ever starts with: the ordinary, average, downtrodden, ignored and unloved women who make up the great majority of their country’s female population. They are Afghanistan’s nightingales, peering out shyly from behind the mud walls of their compounds, shapeless silhouettes in drab clothing, accustomed to being ignored and secluded. And possessed, I believe, of a uniquely beautiful voice, if circumstance would ever allow.

Type One: The Invisible Real Women of Afghanistan

The largest segment of Afghan women are the urban poor, the rural population and the internally displaced living in camps. Their lives have barely changed over the past two centuries — never mind the past twenty years. The Communists tried, launching the only true effort to reform an entrenched system of deeply patriarchal, tribal, feudal oppression. The stakeholders of that system resisted, and in our zeal to beat the Soviets on this proxy battleground, we made sure they prevailed.

The lives of these women are sad and difficult. Their birth is regretted, their mothers scorned or even punished for having failed to produce a son. Their childhood consists of training for servitude, starting with their brothers, who are encouraged to order them about. Too soon, it is time for marriage, often to a relative or to a much older man the family wishes to please. Love is not present to soften the lot of these women, and given the segregated lives that reduce contact between husband and wife to a crude minimum, it has little chance to develop over time. A woman’s standing does not improve until she has adult sons; that gains her the right to lord it over her daughters-in-law, who instead of female solidarity, can expect one more tyrant.

What did America’s two trillion-dollar investment buy for this group of Afghan women, in terms of an improved standard of living? Spoiler alert: not much.

According to UNICEF, half of all deaths of Afghan women between the ages of 15 and 49 were attributable to untreated complications of pregnancy and childbirth — statistics straight out of the Middle Ages. In 2017, Doctors Without Borders declared Afghanistan “one of the most dangerous places on earth to have a baby.” This is the result of 15-plus years of Western projects and funding.

What about everyone’s pet project, education? No public speech about Afghanistan failed to tout this as the great triumph: “3.5 million girls back in school, four-fifths of primary school girls enrolled in class.” Wonderful. Applause. The only problem? It’s not true.

Human Rights Watch in 2017 reported that: “Sixteen years after the US-led military intervention that ousted the Taliban government, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school.”

These are the things we failed to do. Here is what we did instead:

1. We created and coddled a tiny, entitled urban elite of professional feminists who were great on the Western lecture circuit but were disconnected from — and I venture to say, uninterested in — the actual lives of Afghan women, and who rarely used their privileges to benefit their poorer sisters.
2. We loved to build girls’ schools. It was fashionable, and we ignored early signs that the mantra “build it and they will come” wasn’t true for Afghanistan. There weren’t enough teachers, and the unending violence made it unsafe to undertake anything but a very short journey. It surely would have been better to build clinics instead, and trained traveling nurses and midwives, and focused on nutrition projects and water projects and basic public education on hygiene and first aid.
3. Then came 2021 and suddenly the Taliban were in Kabul, and we reacted with hysteria. A Plan B would have been judicious, a ready visa process in the event of imminent danger to educated people or high-profile activists. Instead, we preemptively grabbed as many male and female professionals as we could possibly shove onto airplanes — all the people with useful talents: doctors and nurses, journalists, women with artisanal skills, teachers, IT experts. Anyone who could have kept civil society, economic relations, social services and moderate values alive was hustled onto a plane and flown as far away as possible. Not an evacuation, more like a reverse cultural revolution that erased in the space of days what we had nourished over two decades.

How did we go so far off the rails? We had a goal: liberation and empowerment. And we had a theory. We had to educate Afghan women, make them economically independent and get them involved in politics.

I first glimpsed the missing piece of that formula in 2002. I was in my office at the RAND Corporation with a pile of reports and statistics about Afghanistan. What jumped out at me was a problem no one seemed to be seriously considering: the basic physical condition of the average Afghan woman.

Almost everywhere in the world, women slightly outnumber men and have a longer life expectancy. This is particularly the case in countries at war, because while the entire population suffers, the fighting is primarily done by men. But in Afghanistan, there was a clear overhang of males.

The reasons were no mystery. Good food and medical care were given first to boys and men. This made girls far more prone to illness and malnourishment, which led to stunted growth and immature bodies. Couple this with child marriage, and you have 12 and 13-year-old girls being impregnated, losing the baby, being berated for their failure and made to try again. Girls and women were dying disproportionately, of neglect, rough treatment, deprivation, withholding of care and physical abuse.

I also remember when I first began to question my deeply hostile attitude towards the Taliban. It was 2018. Russia had hosted a meeting about the peace process, and the Taliban had issued a “Moscow Declaration” explaining their platform. One section addressed the issue of women. As expected, I found the usual prevarication: women would have “all the rights guaranteed to them in Islam”, whatever that would mean in the interpretation of Taliban men.

But then came this:

“Women are faced with a lot of disasters. The so-called women rights activists stayed in Afghanistan for 17 years; in this period billions of dollars came to Afghanistan, but still Afghanistan is at the top of the countries where many women die during delivery due to lack of health facilities. Afghanistan is still among the top countries of the world where the average life expectancy rate of women is only 45. It is among the top countries of the world where there are more than one million widows. Due to corruption, the expenses brought and spent under the title of women rights have gone to the pockets of those who raise slogans of women rights…”

This was surprisingly empathetic. Nor could I disagree. Afghan feminists and their international supporters had not seemed to care about the bulk of the country’s women, had made no real attempt to address their most pressing “disasters”: lack of food, lack of health care and basic physical safety.

Personally, I had long since lost respect for the self-promoting feminists of Kabul, who knew exactly which Western buttons to push but deployed that skill almost exclusively for their own benefit. They loved attending conferences abroad, were expert at obtaining lucrative contracts to “train” each other in such skills as public speaking, leadership and “advocacy,” and enjoyed being celebrated for their “courage” in foreign news media. You wouldn’t find them in the provinces, trying to uplift rural women. And when leadership and their much-vaunted courage were urgently required, they decamped for the West. Like their country’s national army, they were a colossal disappointment.

Afghan Woman Type Two: The Living Success story

Afghan girls playing soccer. An Afghan woman street artist. An Afghan girls’ robotics team.

What else but extreme condescension explains the delighted surprise with which we received such stories? Why is it so amazing that Afghan girls can learn how to play a musical instrument or kick a ball? Why shouldn’t they be like any other girl in any other country, if given the chance? Given the dire situation of the average Afghan girl, were these really the activities that deserved our attention?

The American University of Afghanistan has an annual budget of 28 million dollars, with which it educates 1700 students, almost all on full scholarships, around half of them girls. The campus is beautiful, the infrastructure state of the art. Surely these students comprehended their great good fortune and were determined to give back to their countrymen and women.

But when the moment of truth arrived, they performed as spokespersons only for themselves. They wanted to be flown to the US — and who can blame them? These are the spoiled children of our bad parenting, the products of an education that taught entitlement over idealism. In the past, groups of them used to be brought to Washington DC and trotted out at gala fundraisers in five-star hotels. At the end of the evening, they’d be brought back on stage to press for additional donations.

To support some programme for the underserved, literacy tutoring for village girls, perhaps? No, they were prompted to ask for money for new sports jerseys, and everyone applauded and got out their check books. Wonderful! Afghan girls shooting hoops.

The adult members of the Living Success Story typically hail from affluent families or clans. Many have dual nationality or family overseas. They are well-travelled and have passports and visas. Most of them were well away even before the airlift.

Afghan Woman Type Three: The Bold Activist

But, you say, some educated women obviously stayed; we can see pictures of them demonstrating and joining in marches.

Let’s take a closer look. The activists’ debut took place in front of the Presidential Palace, eight women holding up signs demanding their rights, followed by slightly larger groups on subsequent days representing the same message before various public buildings. The photos show them angrily yelling and raising determined fists.

Will their demands be met? Am I confident that the Taliban intend to create an atmosphere of respect and safety for women? Not at all.

But let’s not fool ourselves. For most of that country’s women, an Islamic system would represent a step up, because the worst problems they confront come not from religion but from tribal traditions. Islam does not allow forced marriage and does not require women to cover anything more than what modesty demands; it does not ban them from public spaces, and it energetically prohibits Afghan customs such as settling disputes by giving a girl to the enemy clan as a slave.

The real worry is that the Taliban, not exactly a group of sophisticated theologians, will interpret their religion in the same eccentric way as last time. Last time they forbade the keeping of songbirds, which I promise you is a rule found nowhere in the Quran. Any outside help now can best come from other, more advanced Muslim societies and their religious scholars, and from educated women across the Islamic world who have dealt with, and surmounted, comparable challenges. Even last time around, though, they seemed to have some scraps of pity for women. It was a well-known embarrassment during the years of the Western-backed government that a Taliban court in one of the areas under their control would affirm a widow’s ownership of her land, while a government court was likely to accept a bribe from her greedy neighbour.

Afghan Woman Type Four: Madrassa Teacher’s Pet

The Taliban, goaded, had a response to “our” women’s demonstrations. They bused in hundreds of Taliban-supporting, slogan-shouting women in the most extreme form of all-black full-cover dress — the kind that Iranian feminist poets used to say made women look like crows — to march through the streets of Kabul and other cities in support of strict Islamic rule.

These women didn’t suddenly materialise out of the ether. They were educated in madrassas right under our noses, and in significant numbers, during the supposed years of enlightenment and freedom during the secular era we were so proud of. Yet we had no idea they were there.

This pitting of one set of women against another is a very unfortunate development, and it’s entirely our fault. “We don’t need women who left Afghanistan telling us what to do,” their banners read. A fair point.

I’m truly not sure where we go from here. Our twenty-year liberation experiment failed, to the tune of dizzying amounts of dollars. We invested in exotic frivolities and threw money at those who needed it least, and who have since proved all too ready to bite the hand that wrote the cheques. And so — as heartless as it sounds — it is probably best if we resist the “last temptation” and stay well away. And hope that one fine day, in her own time, in her own ecosystem, the nightingale will sing.