Blind To The Dangers

As the world continues to watch events unfold in Afghanistan .....

The Afghan Government Collapsed
In A Few Days In August 2021.

 ....  as its newly created Emirate, attempts and fails to fill the structure of a 'normal' government, such as education and economic competence, we have to wonder what the future holds for this benighted state.

All its new government ministers are former Taliban fighters, and nearly all are from the non majority Pashtun ethnic group, and ALL are male in its 'inclusive' government. In fact an exact repeat of its previous failed government, the last time it ruled Afghanistan.

Some countries, such as Pakistan and Qatar are advocating that we engage with the Taliban via international aid, and allowing them to be represented at the United Nations. But many potential donor countries are going to find this hard to stomach, as girls are still denied schooling. Even those nations, such as the US and UK, that suggest that they will use all diplomatic and humanitarian methods to stop conditions getting worse in Afghanistan by trying to aid the people of Afghanistan, without aiding the Taliban. 

Helping the general population without aiding the Taliban is a feat its going to be hard to do when you think about it ... even if food and medical aid was somehow given directly to its people, this would just mean that the Taliban can use their resources elsewhere. All the Western leaders have said that any international recognition of the Taliban must be contingent on the group respecting human rights ... also a somewhat unlikely prospect given their record so far.

My own, and many other peoples view is that they are simply barbarians who will revert evermore to type over the coming years ... no matter whether we help or ignore them. It is the very nature of their beliefs that they will act in a certain manner, no matter what front they try to throw up to fool the donor aid countries and the non government organisations.

It is one of all Muslim majority countries inherent weaknesses, that they are easily bent to this hard-line form of Sharia governance, by comparatively small numbers of very hard-line young men with beards, who are prepared to use ruthless violence. The recently collapsed 'democratic' Afghani government, was little different in its weak governance, corruption, cronyism and lack of transparency, than many other similar countries across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. 

This is why its often the national army that steps in to run these countries, to prevent groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from gaining power (whether via the voting box, as they did in Egypt), or by violence, as ISIS did in Iraq/Syria ... they (the armed forces), are often the only semi secular organisation, that isn't so weak as to be able to offer no resistance. 

One only has to see what has happened in Iran (and is happening in Turkey, where one party rule seems to settling in), to understand what happens when the armed forces do not step in (or do so too late, as happened in Turkey), to understand how quickly 'Islamic' regimes become entrenched, with the subsequent loss of human rights, and the rule of law. 

African Jihadists On The Rise

So the rise again of the Afghan Emirate, is really little different from the sudden rise, of the recently defeated ISIS Caliphate that extended across parts of Syria and Iraq. 

Across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere, Islamic groups are still striving through the use of extreme violence, to establish similar regimes, and indeed without Western military support for local regimes, would have done so in Mali and elsewhere. For example, al-Shabab, the Somali Taliban jihadist equivalent, blew up the only theatre in the capital Mogadishu in 2012, after it had reopened after 21 years, as they consider live entertainment and films to be morally corrupt. Its reopened again, but for how long is anyone's guess.

You can have several generations of apparently 'democratic' governance in Muslim counties, and then a small group of men will want 'pure Islamic rule,' and the whole pack of democratic cards will collapse and they sweep into power. After all Afghanistan had 20 years free of hardline Islamic governance, and the example of the five years of previous Taliban rule between 1996 and 2001, to understand what letting them back would mean. But 70,000 Taliban fighters, defeated 300,000 government soldiers, and took over a nation of 38 million with barely any resistance.

Its this centuries curse in the West, that Islam was never reformed in the last two centuries, and that Western politicians are seemingly incapable (or more likely unwilling), of recognising the inherent dangers, that continued mass Muslim immigration/asylum is possibly bringing to our liberal democratic societies. 

Muslim countries have to find a way with dealing with the continued chaos in the Islamic world. We in the non Muslim world should not have to re-home millions (or possibly billions) of refugees, escaping from the economic and political poverty that their governments and religion seems to continuously serve up.

If not, then we will eventually reap what we continue to sow.