Girls vs The Taliban

I keep hearing noises – mainly from woolly liberal types – about how we should be getting out of Afghanistan. Personally, I’ve always been in favour of spreading good old fashioned liberal western values around the world (although, of course, there are ways and means of doing that that don’t necessarily have to involve war). But the thing with Afghanistan is that, given that we’re already there – and given the utter hideousness of the Taliban – how can we, in good conscience, leave those people to it?

The answer to that is: we can’t leave them to it; not in good conscience.

And what’s this got to do with Maggie and Alice?

I’ve now got three daughters. My eldest, Louie, is everything you’d wish for in a daughter. No, really, she is. She’s clever, she’s beautiful, she’s thoughtful and she’s very, very bright. I’m hoping that Maggie and Alice will be the same. The thing is, I keep hearing that we should be getting out of Afghanistan and I keep doing this stupid, somewhat sentimental, thing of imagining what life would be like for our girls under repressive regimes and, specifically, under the Taliban. Actually, I don’t need to imagine what their lives would be like – I just need to see the actual evidence. And I get so enraged and upset by the idea that these disgusting, murderous, misogynistic, backward, no-nothing, hateful cunts would, given half the chance, prevent our girls from enjoying life, from getting an education, from getting out there and proving how fantastic they are. And it’s a short step from there to thinking about actual parents in Afghanistan right now who daily have to face the reality of having their daughters decapitated, or having acid thrown in their faces, simply because they want to go to school. It breaks your heart just thinking about it. And let’s not forget that that’s just the extreme end of it. At its best, the girls and women in Afghanistan – and other similar countries – are treated dreadfully. And by whom? By the most degraded, stupid, worthless bastards it’s possible to imagine.

I love it that our girls live somewhere where they’re allowed to make the very best of themselves. Where, for all its faults, they’re not treated like second class citizens and told that they can’t have what their brothers and fathers have.

So I think about the Taliban and I think about what they would do to my girls and I want them destroyed. Dead. As simple as that. Really, fuck them and fuck everything they stand for.

But in order for that to happen we need to still be in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) to help get rid of the Taliban. And the problem with that is that the Taliban aren’t going anywhere without a fight. So we’ll have to stay and fight.

Or, alternatively, we could just get out and let them get on with creating a highly repressive regime that is the exact opposite of what we would wish upon ourselves and our own children.

Racist scumbag BNP leader Nick Griffin, just like many so-called liberal types, also wants us out of Afghanistan. Not because he cares about the soldiers or the people of Afghanistan. But because he believes that brown people in foreign countries don’t deserve to have the life that we do. Moreover, he believes that they’re unworthy, and undeserving, of any help from us.

Hurrah for our girls and hurrah for all girls everywhere!


By the way, I don’t want a debate about this. It’s just something I had to get off my chest....