“Few events can be as debilitating as a great victory,” wrote the eminent liberal Israeli journalist Amos Elon in his 1971 book, The Israelis. Elon was referring to the Six-Day War of 1967, which gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories. Israelis rejoiced, unaware that they had been given a poisoned chalice. America’s victory in the Cold War in 1989 followed a similar pattern: when Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed one after another, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and its policy elite basked in triumphalism, seeing democracy as the natural order of things to come. The war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties did not shatter the smug belief in a linear direction of historical Progress entertained by the powers-that-be; both events were horrific, but they were localized. Convinced that no geopolitical threats existed anymore, America sold its military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new kind of war, whose goal was purely humanitarian. Such was the misleading effect of the victory in the 44-year-long Cold War.

The realization that the end of the Cold War had given us not peace, but an even more dangerous and far more unstable world occurred in stages. And 9/11 was the first shock, magnified by the technology of television, which repeatedly showed the twin towers in lower Manhattan collapsing into a fiery pile of dust and rubble. The event hit Americans, lulled into the complacency of the Nineties, with the psychological force of Pearl Harbor, to which it was repeatedly compared. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the world was already at war. The Nazis had already occupied France, and were at the gates of Moscow. The Japanese had already invaded China and committed the Rape of Nanjing. Thus, for Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on the Axis Powers was not only the right thing to do, but also the natural thing.

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The direction of history after the attacks of 9/11 was not so clear. The world was otherwise at peace. The Chinese were still in the early phase of building a great navy, around which their military capability would be oriented. Moreover, China was still governed by the reformer Jiang Zemin, a leader friendly to the United States. Vladimir Putin had been in power less than two years and was still consolidating control. It was unclear in what direction he would take Russia. Great power conflict was the furthest thing from people’s minds.

And so, with China and Russia out of the mental picture, the public debate went from unreflectively assuming democracy was about to overtake the world to falling in line behind the Global War on Terrorism. In this way, 9/11 was incorporated into post-Cold War triumphalism. Indeed, as 9/11 had demonstrated, and as the conventional thinking went, the Arab world was politically sick, and the cure was to bring democracy to the greater Middle East.

The administration of President George W. Bush was actually slow to come to this conclusion. Caught off guard by the devastating attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House, burdened by guilt and thus determined that no chances could be taken in protecting American security, immediately conceived of a war to topple the Afghan regime of the Taliban, the hosts of the 9/11 killers. Two months after the attacks, the US military and its Afghan allies occupied the Afghan capital of Kabul. Victory had come easy, perhaps too easy, owing to an innovative, economy-of-force strategy emphasizing special operations forces and local Afghan fighters. But again, without much reflection, rebuilding Afghanistan was turned over to the big, conventional US Army bureaucracy, whose conception of Afghanistan — despite inventive interludes under certain commanders — would turn out to be analogous to that of the Soviet occupiers in the Eighties, who themselves withdrew in defeat.

Because Afghanistan was too easy (as it was then thought), and 9/11 still reverberated in a loud, deafening manner, a bigger response was conceived: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime in Iraq. After all, from a human rights perspective there was no worse regime in the world except for North Korea’s. And Bosnia and Kosovo had set the pattern for humanitarian interventions. As I can attest from reporting on the ground in the Middle East, Iraq back then was actually far more repressive than Iran, which had an element of democracy built into its theocratic system under the reformist president Mohammed Khatami, and more repressive even than fellow-Baathist Syria. Though the proof of Saddam aiding al-Qaeda was very flimsy at best, he was certainly supporting many other Arab terrorist groups. Then there was the issue of Iraq seeking a nuclear bomb, which not only the American intelligence community but other Western intelligence agencies assumed to be the case. This is not a defense of invading Iraq — a war I initially supported — merely an argument of how it was not outright madness to consider such an action in sequence, considering that China and Russia were not yet on the radar screen as great power threats, and 9/11 still overwhelmed the public debate.

History is ironic. Had 9/11 not occurred; had Saddam not acted like a guilty man, trying to convince the world that he had a nuclear program even though he didn’t; had the Bush administration’s guilt over 9/11 not led it to a take-no-chances approach in the Middle East, there likely never would have been an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

History is also governed by odd contingencies. Had several Arab armies not threatened Israel in the spring of 1967 — specifically, had King Hussein of Jordan heeded the many warnings not to open a military front against Israel in the West Bank — Israel would not have come into possession of an Arab population totaling 1.25 million at the time. The Jewish settlers’ movement never would have been born, forever deforming Israeli politics in the process. Egypt would have stayed stuck with ruling Gaza. And later on, Iran’s clerical regime, despite its hatred of Israel and the Jews, would have had much less propaganda material to work with. The results of the 1967 War could well be interpreted as a tragedy for Israel; just as the effect of 9/11 could be interpreted as a tragedy for the United States even beyond the initial, massive loss of life, spawning as it did a long and misconceived occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous war in Iraq.

The problem is that extremism can be emotionally satisfying, especially after a great event or catastrophe. Moderation does not do well when people are literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem like after the 1967 War, or baying for blood like after 9/11, or likewise after 7 October 2023 in Israel. Calls for regime change in Iraq or flattening Gaza appeal to the emotions and not to the intellect. That is their strength. The nuanced, middle-of-the-road technocrats and area specialists are at their weakest in such moments. The last American president who after a great, foreign outrage pursued limited objectives was the moderate conservative George H. W. Bush. Following Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked aggression of Kuwait in 1990, Bush decided to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule but otherwise leave Saddam in power and not invade Iraq, where America would likely have been bogged down for years to come. By saving his successor, President Bill Clinton, from this fate, Bush allowed Clinton to inherit a largely pacified geopolitical climate that, in turn, allowed Clinton to focus on humanitarian wars-of-choice in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the relatively benign geopolitical climate bequeathed by the elder Bush was largely responsible for the naïve hubris of much of the American policy elite in the Nineties.

Remember that after the Napoleonic Wars, it was enlightened conservatives such as the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, the British statesman Viscount Castlereagh, and the French statesman Talleyrand who, by not pursuing extreme and vindictive solutions, however emotionally satisfying they would have been at the time, bought Europe almost a century of peace. Ironically, it was the assumption that peace was the natural order of things that led several great European powers to stumble naively into the First World War.

Similarly, the success of limited interventions in Panama in 1989, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 allowed significant sectors of the American elite to believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the US military could do anything in a world ordered to American goals and interests. It was this delusion that allowed the United States to stumble into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond the gargantuan loss of life and treasure that the 9/11 wars cost the United States and the affected local populations, perhaps the greatest catastrophe was America’s grand strategic distraction while Russian and Chinese power grew exponentially. The decade of 9/11 wars was the decade when the Chinese military, especially its navy, unleashed its momentum of growth which continues to this day. Meanwhile, Putin consolidated his power in the Russian military and intelligence services, permitting him to rebuild the armed forces under virtual one-man rule for the first time since Stalin.

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The result of all this has not been pretty. Terrorism has certainly not been eliminated. As Joseph Conrad showed in The Secret Agent (1907), all it takes is an angry, politically motivated individual or two, burrowing in the heart of a city, anonymous to their neighbors, to perpetrate great atrocities. And great power conflict now exists alongside terrorism. Despite the attempts by middle-level powers to navigate between the United States and China and chart a course of their own, the very survival of the global system is now in jeopardy. This is the world that has followed what was believed to have been the triumphant end to the Cold War. And 9/11 was a crucial inflection point in this tragic process: distracting us when we should have been focused on Russia and China. It was indeed a great head fake.

Alas, there is no relief from history. The rise and fall of great powers is never-ending, and policymakers’ tragic mistakes are baked into the process. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was avenged by the US victory over Japan in 1945, the United States is still searching for some sort of meaningful historical reply to 9/11 a quarter-century later. Indeed, our 9/11 wars, particularly in Iraq, only emboldened clerical Iran and enlarged its geopolitical footprint. The current war with Iran is part of the process that began with 9/11. The attacks brought us into a generational military struggle in the Middle East that shows no sign of abatement. And it isn’t only the Middle East’s inherent instability that is the problem, but our very obsession with it. Tragedy, as Shakespeare repeatedly shows, is borne of obsession.

Five years on from the Taliban’s return, and life for Afghan women like Manizha has become a kind of hell. Banned from schools, universities and even parks, they need a “male guardian” to travel more than 70 kilometers from home. And now, the mother of three fears for her children’s future too. Taught that unbelievers should be killed, and that women’s rights are mere Western propaganda, young Afghans are being groomed to become the extremists of tomorrow — with worrying implications for their country and the world.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has become infamous for its restrictions on female education, locking over two million girls from the classroom. But that still leaves millions of boys, and millions more girls under 14, in the regime’s pedagogical clutches. Certainly, it’s clear that the Taliban itself understands its power here. As far back as 2022, a 78-page leaked document outlined a raft of changes to what was dismissively called the “modern curriculum”. Instead, the document argued, schooling should be transformed in line with the Taliban’s radical interpretation of Islamic law, suggesting, among other things, that natural disasters should be explained both scientifically — and in terms of “Allah’s will and power”.

If that’s the theory, the practice is equally grim. “They asked schools not to teach some parts of certain books to the students,” explains one anonymous educator. “They’ve also removed subjects such as civic education, life skills and a subject about loving the homeland.” In its place, the teacher adds, schools now hold classes on the Quran, with textbooks reviewed by UnHerd exhorting battle against “invaders” and “apostates”. Other subjects, including English and biology, are no longer covered for lack of teachers, unsurprising when the Taliban has banned thousands of female staff.

Not that the curriculum is the only thing to change. Boys, after all, are now expected to wear a beard — or at least try to — while girls as young as six now attend class in the burka. That, in turn, reflects the spread of out-and-out madrasas, the religious schools common across the Islamic world. According to research by the Hamrah Network, a cohort of Afghan organizations, there were 23,000 such schools in Afghanistan last year, up from just 5,000 in 2023, with some 3.65 million Afghans now enrolled in madrasas or Islamic seminaries.

The Taliban has achieved this growth by operating what the Hamrah Network calls a “franchise model” — whereby private madrasas are nationalized in return for government salaries and a formal certification. With the Afghan economy in a state of near collapse, it’s little wonder that everything from broadcast facilities to guest houses have taken up the offer. One notable example is the Abdul Hai Habibi High School in the east of the country. Once among the most progressive institutions in Afghanistan, it became a madrasa in 2022, displacing 6,000 students and 130 teachers.

If anything, meanwhile, Afghanistan’s burgeoning madrasa system is even more extreme than regular schools. Framed around the hardline Deobandi movement — a revivalist form of Islam founded in India — it brings extremism to the heart of every classroom. Manizha has witnessed this firsthand, and not only in her son: her young daughter has been taught about marrying a jihadi fighter. “What place does jihad have in the 21st century?” the girl’s mother asks. “Why does a 10-year-old need to know about participating in the war or killing people? How do you expect a kid to have a bright future if all they are being taught is killing and bloodshed?”

They’re all good questions — with a depressingly plausible answer. Experts speculate that reshaping young minds is the very reason the Taliban are consolidating their control over Afghan schools. In this, the militants have history, shadowing other Islamist insurgencies in recruiting almost exclusively from religious institutions. More than that, the emirate continues to maintain a militant insurgent group, complete with suicide bombers on call, with the madrasas ensuring a steady stream of brainwashed recruits.

If this obviously has domestic implications — Dr Timor Sharan, co-founder of the Hamrah Network, suggests it deepens the subordination of women and girls across Afghan society — this matters beyond the country’s borders too. After all, the Taliban continues to support terror groups across the region. That includes the remnants of al-Qaeda, which has been blamed for a number of recent atrocities in India and Pakistan, as well as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which wages war on Islamabad from bases inside Afghanistan. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a Uyghur group battling China, also enjoys training grounds in the emirate.

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Yet whatever the geopolitical implications here, it’s hard not to return to the plight of Afghanistan’s children, with parents suggesting that the steady drumbeat of extremist content is affecting the younger generation’s mental health. “The way the teachers behave with the students, my children now dislike going to school,” Manizha says. “Especially my older son, who has experienced schooling in better days.” Other evidence supports this claim: the student dropout rate, even among boys, is rising, perhaps also a symptom of the rise in corporal punishment since 2021.

Of course, it’d be wrong to suggest that the Taliban invented these schools wholesale. Afghanistan was a deeply conservative country long before they returned. All the same, locals suggest one key difference, in that regressive ideas are now lauded by the state.

“The funny thing is I grew up in a community where we already experienced having that one family member, an uncle who was a little too conservative, who would get mad if women in the family went out or they wore clothes he considered inappropriate,” explains Pashtana Durrani, founder of Learn Afghanistan, which runs underground classes for girls banned from school. “We know that type in all South Asian communities”.

But now, Durrani suggests, these attitudes are “celebrated” in public — even as they’re seeping into formerly liberal, urban areas too. Given the already-shocking rates of gender violence in Afghanistan, this could have disastrous consequences, as whole new cohorts of boys grow up thinking that women are there to submit.

There are, to be sure, glimmers of hope, and Durrani’s Learn Afghanistan project is one. Operating covertly, it follows the pre-2021 curriculum, educating some 400 students in everything from history and geography to robotics, AI and even feminist literature. At one point, Durrani’s team held discreet lessons in person, but Taliban crackdowns forced them to go almost entirely online. It’s a move that poses problems all its own, obliging Learn Afghanistan to invest in new laptops, and the solar-powered batteries to run them during power cuts.

That’s better than nothing — but hardly enough to stem the extremist tide. Indeed, though Manizha says her family tried to complain about her children’s curriculum, they were dismissed out of hand. “We can’t raise our voice because we know the outcome could hurt the kids and also the family members within the community,” she says, adding that she works to counter the Taliban’s educational extremism once her children return home every evening.

That might explain Manizha’s remarkable optimism in light of everything that’s happened. “We are Muslim,” she says, “and we will be Muslim with or without the Taliban, and are capable of teaching our kids about Islam. Everything comes to an end eventually. People won’t always tolerate this form of extremism.” Perhaps — but, for the moment, the Taliban and their madrasas remain.

Whenever I see the word “Taliban” I always think of The Tempest. Caliban sings those lines after Stephano gets him drunk and persuades him that exchanging Prospero for another master amounts to liberation. The rhyme may be accidental, but rhymes are rarely innocent once they lodge themselves in the mind. Cognitive psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh have identified a “rhyme-as-reason” effect: formulations that rhyme are processed more fluently and can consequently acquire a spurious sense of truth or fitness. Sound, in other words, can tempt the mind into looking for a connection in meaning. The resemblance between the words “Caliban” and “Taliban” proves nothing logically. But it suggests a track where the echo may lead.

Shakespeare’s Caliban — savage, slave, poet and dispossessed islander — offers an unsettling way of thinking about the movement that returned to Kabul five years ago, 20 years after America invaded Afghanistan in response to 9/11. At first sight, rhyme apart, the two names belong in radically different registers. The Taliban — literally translated as “students” — emerged around Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, in 1994 from predominantly Pashtun religious students and former mujahideen, many formed in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s Afghan refugee belt. Led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, they exploited popular disgust with the predatory warlords who had divided Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, promising order, Islamic justice and disarmament. With substantial Pakistani assistance they captured Kandahar, swept northwards and took Kabul in 1996, establishing the Islamic Emirate that would shelter Osama bin Laden until its overthrow after 9/11.

Caliban, by contrast, is Shakespeare’s fish-smelling monster who claims the island as his inheritance and succumbs to alcohol in a manner later generations could readily associate with dispossessed peoples in America and Australia. He carries utterly different baggage — indeed, he has been made to carry almost every political burden imaginable. The dramatist Trevor Griffiths, surveying stage interpretations from William Charles Macready’s 1838 revival to the postcolonial productions of the Seventies, finds him successively represented as an “underdeveloped native”, revolutionary republican, Darwinian missing link, black slave and oppressed aboriginal. The retreat of the British Empire transformed the relationship again: Prospero increasingly became the colonizer and Caliban the colonized. Yet Shakespeare scholar Meredith Anne Skura, warning against doctrinaire versions of this reading, insists that the play is too slippery to be reduced to a tract about colonialism. Its very slipperiness is its strength.

Shakespeare does not allow Caliban to remain just a monster. He is certainly capable of monstrosity: his attempted rape of Miranda, with the intention of peopling the island with his own kind, cannot be wished away. Yet while the supposedly civilized characters routinely describe him in terms that diminish his humanity, Caliban himself possesses the most intimate knowledge of the island — its springs, berries, pignuts and hidden resources. A 20th-century Stratford program put the matter bluntly: the island belongs to Caliban “both by inheritance and by right”, because it is he who knows its terrain.

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His political claim is equally uncompromising: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.” By 1904 the radical journalist W. T. Stead could hear in those lines “the whole case of the aboriginal against aggressive civilization”, comparing Prospero’s blandishments to those used by Cecil Rhodes’s chartered company in southern Africa. Over the centuries, the analogy has kept on changing because Caliban himself will not settle comfortably into either category, savage or victim.

Nor does his language. Prospero and Miranda teach him words, expecting linguistic instruction to be part of civilization. Caliban discovers that language can also be an instrument of resistance: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Yet the same creature who curses Prospero as a tyrant hears music where his supposed superiors hear nothing: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” The “savage” is aesthetically receptive to his world in a way that complicates the cultivated ducal exile’s account of him.

Actors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries repeatedly discovered this complexity. One critic insisted that however debased Caliban might be, he possessed “human feelings” and could win an audience’s sympathy. A 1974 production visually divided him between monster and noble savage, while his cry of “freedom” carried more passion than anything else in the performance. Derek Jarman’s wonderfully mannered 1979 film foregrounds this ambiguity through Jack Birkett’s compelling, grotesquely vulnerable Caliban. The repertoire of performances shows how much political meaning can gather around Caliban without being settled. 

The rhyme linking “Caliban” and “Taliban” may offer only an acoustic bridge, but the ambiguity is salient. In 2001 the Taliban were expelled from Kabul with astonishing speed. Mullah Omar fled Kandahar on a motorbike. Osama bin Laden escaped into the mountains of Tora Bora. Into the space they left arrived Prospero’s government, and with it came international recognition, constitutions, elections, NGOs, consultants, development targets and, behind them all, overwhelming American military power.

Then there was Ariel. Shakespeare’s sprite is invisible, airborne and astonishingly mobile; when Prospero wishes, he becomes visible to no one but his master. The American version consisted of satellites, drones, special forces, biometric databases and the communications systems through which an immensely sophisticated external power believed it could see and control Afghanistan. Twenty years before Kabul fell, Western forces possessed virtually every technological advantage imaginable.

What they did not possess was Caliban’s intimate knowledge. The Taliban survived in villages, valleys, madrassas, clan networks and cross-border sanctuaries. They understood relationships that could not easily be entered onto spreadsheets: which district commander had quarreled with which governor, which family grievance might be mobilized, which local notable could be frightened, bought or reconciled, when to fight and when simply to wait. They could be brutally coercive, but they were also indigenous to the political ecology in which they operated.

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The contrast with America’s Prospero, Ashraf Ghani, was painful. Ghani was among Afghanistan’s most intellectually accomplished citizens: anthropologist, former World Bank official, author of a book on rebuilding failed states. When I met him briefly at a conference in New York, he struck me as one of the most quick-thinking and brilliantly articulate people I had ever encountered. For myself, and many others, he represented the dream that Afghanistan might be reconstructed through expertise, institutions and international capital. Yet the republic over which he presided depended upon foreign money, foreign military power and administrative structures whose authority weakened drastically beyond Kabul.

When the Americans finally left, Ariel vanished with them. Or, to be more precise, Ariel ceased to serve Prospero. Some of his magic changed masters. The Taliban now carry American rifles, fly American helicopters and use Western smartphones.  

Yet another Shakespearean echo resonates here. Prospero’s power is inseparable from his books. Cast out of Milan, he remembers Gonzalo furnishing him from his library with volumes “that I prize above my dukedom”. Caliban has learnt the same lesson from below. Plotting Prospero’s murder, he tells Stephano that the first thing to do is seize the books: “for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am.” Then comes the blunt instruction: “Burn but his books! He had brave utensils — so he calls them — which, when he has a house, he’ll deck withal.” Caliban sees that the “brave utensils” are only the outward trappings of power; the real instrument of Prospero’s rule is the knowledge contained in his books. Destroy its source and the magic collapses.

Afghanistan has produced an ironic reversal. The Taliban have seized much of Prospero’s utensils without burning them: rifles, helicopters, smartphones, ministries, uniforms, even some administrative habits. But they have not accepted the assumptions that were supposed to come bundled with the machinery. Prospero’s library is not ornamental: it is the source of the magic that allows an exiled duke to command the island. For the Taliban, ultimate sovereignty belongs to the Qur’an and to the Sharia drawn from it. The discarded utensils of the American imperium may be useful, even indispensable. But the Taliban remain subordinate to a holy Book whose authority the occupiers never displaced.

Washington assumed that modernization would inexorably produce Westernization: that roads, schools, internet connections and elections would carry liberal values. Instead, the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. Caliban has learned to operate Prospero’s machinery while declining Prospero’s metaphysics.

The image should not be pushed too far. The Qur’an is not a magic manual, and Sharia is not reducible to a single book. The Taliban’s jurisprudence also draws on hadith, Hanafi law, Deobandi scholarship, clerical authority and Afghan custom. But as a Shakespearean echo, the contrast matters. Prospero knows that books make rule possible; the Taliban know that technologies can be borrowed without surrendering the textual authority by which rule is justified.

After the American withdrawal five years ago, the Afghan security forces, expensively trained and equipped, dissolved with extraordinary speed. Provincial capitals fell almost without resistance. Ghani fled Kabul for exile in Dubai. Twenty years after being driven into the wilderness, the supposedly defeated barbarian returned to Prospero’s island.

Yet the moral of The Tempest cannot simply be that Caliban was right all along. The play is more conflicted, and Afghanistan more tragic. The Taliban’s claim to indigenous legitimacy does not absolve them of what they have done with victory. Since 2021, they have progressively excluded Afghan women and girls from secondary and university education. They have sought to erase women from large areas of public life, restricted their employment and curtailed their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, Hazaras and other minorities remain exposed to discrimination and violence. Caliban, once restored to his island, may himself become Prospero.

Nor has restoration resulted in prosperity. A recent Afghanistan Analysts Network report describes an economy that contracted calamitously after the Islamic Emirate returned, followed by a recovery so fragile that GDP per head continues to fall. Behind those figures lie families exhausting one survival mechanism after another: savings disappear, possessions are sold, boys leave school, sons are dispatched on dangerous journeys to Iran. Women and children undertake poorly paid work at home or on the streets; the Taliban restrictions on women’s education and employment have denied them escape routes they might otherwise have used.

The result is a grim inversion of development. Families survive today by consuming tomorrow: schooling, assets and earning capacity are sacrificed to the immediate necessity of food and shelter. Yet the report reveals something that is easily missed from Kabul, Washington or London. Afghans do not simply wait upon the state. The social contract of reciprocal help — relatives lending money, neighbors supporting neighbors, families taking responsibility for one another — still operates, though poverty is placing it under severe strain.

Another recent AAN account catches this side of Afghanistan almost microscopically. A 40-year-old Kabul office worker with a slipped disc cannot afford the operation his surgeon recommends. He moves through several worlds simultaneously. He consults modern doctors and has MRI scans; visits hakims who bleed him and prescribe herbal powders; travels to a shrine in Paktia where a mullah ties a tawiz, an amulet containing sacred writing, to his arm; and finally returns to surgery when the pain becomes intolerable.

The story could be treated as an illustration of medical backwardness, but it is more revealing than that. It shows a society whose institutions overlap rather than replace one another: MRI scanner and shrine, surgeon and hakim, religious belief and modern medicine. Most strikingly, when the operation finally becomes unavoidable, formal provision does not rescue him. A friend unexpectedly repays a debt of 200,000 afghanis, enabling him to meet the hospital costs. After surgery he cannot afford physiotherapy, so another friend abroad sends him exercises to perform at home. Afghanistan is full of noises: some of them cacophonous, some of them sweet. This is what Caliban’s knowledge of the island may mean in less romantic language: knowing not merely mountains and pathways but the dense networks through which people actually survive.

Meanwhile the Emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, governs in Kandahar from something like Prospero’s cell: rarely seen, surrounded by clerical advisers, issuing commands whose authority rests ultimately on sacred texts rather than social or political consent. His Afghanistan is a landlocked “island”. His staff may not be magical, but has the weight of religious legitimacy. The symbolism is not invented by outsiders. At Kandahar’s Khirka Sharif, lines of Qur’anic calligraphy run through the decoration around the shrine that houses the Prophet’s cloak. In April 1996, Mullah Omar carried that cloak onto the roof of the main mosque before thousands of ulema and fighters. The assembled scholars acclaimed him Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. Sacred text, sacred relic and political sovereignty were made to reinforce one another. A few months later, the Taliban captured Kabul.

Yet while decrees issued from Kandahar have religious authority, they are far from absolute. In reality they encounter the messy density of Afghan society. Families improvise around them; religious practice intersects with custom; money circulates through networks of debt and obligation; people move between official and unofficial institutions according to necessity. The Afghan state may prohibit, prescribe and punish, but it does not exercise a totalitarian type of control. That is another lesson the West was slow to learn: power in Afghanistan has rarely been identical with government. The state may issue decrees, but villages, families, ulema, businessmen, elders and local authorities determine the extent to which they become reality.

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Those networks now extend far beyond Afghanistan. For some young men, the escape route leads westwards through a clandestine economy that has become increasingly sophisticated. An Afghanistan Analysts Network investigation found young Afghans traveling through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and onwards towards Italy, France, Germany, Ireland — and Britain. Journeys are arranged through professionalized smuggling networks using GPS, encrypted messaging, TikTok advertising and hawala, the informal money-transfer system built around personal knowledge and trust, that functions here as a kind of escrow account. A passage from Turkey to Italy can cost €6,000 to €8,000; some networks have graduated from facilitation to extortion, kidnapping and violence.

For British readers accustomed to encountering Afghans at the other end of this journey — in debates over small boats and “illegal migration” — the connection is worth making. Europe’s harder borders have not abolished the traffic. In parts of the Balkans they have helped turn what was once a loose diasporic network of guides and fixers into a profitable criminal industry. The young man crossing the Channel may be the final visible link in a chain beginning with the economic and political constriction of Taliban Afghanistan.

And this takes us back to the Bard. The deep ambiguities in The Tempest lie not in deciding whether Prospero or Caliban are good or bad guys. They involve the much more difficult questions about who possesses the right to rule the island, who possesses the knowledge required to rule it, and what happens when supposedly superior outsiders mistake magical or technological mastery for political legitimacy.

Skura’s caution is helpful. She argues that the colonial interpretation can itself become reductive when every difference between Shakespeare’s island and colonial history is treated as irrelevant and every contradiction as further evidence of domination. Caliban lacks many of the stereotypical attributes Europeans assigned to New World peoples, and Shakespeare repeatedly complicates any straightforward identification. Skura’s larger point is that the personal and political cannot finally be separated. Prospero comes to the island as the victim of Antonio’s usurpation, but responds by becoming master over Caliban: the exile who has lost his dukedom recreates hierarchy in miniature. Caliban becomes a screen onto which Prospero projects the appetite and disorder he disowns; mastering him allows Prospero to rehearse the recovery of authority.

The Afghan story reflects a similar pattern of replication. To explain why the Taliban defeated the republic is not to endorse their theocracy. Their rootedness may confer a kind of authenticity without conferring virtue. Conversely, the ideals proclaimed by the international intervention — education, women’s rights, constitutional government — do not become worthless because the political structure erected to protect them proved catastrophically fragile. Nor should “indigenous” be confused with humane. The restored Caliban may now be the ruler, but his regime has deliberately deprived half the island’s population of opportunities that might make their lives less desperate.

The rhyme, then, can still trigger meaningful perspectives. Shakespeare refuses the comforting choice between enlightened Prospero and the uncouth monster. The native claimant may indeed be brutal, lustful and dangerous; he may also know his island better than the civilizer who has taken possession of it. The civilizer may bring books, knowledge and extraordinary powers; he may also mistake possession for legitimacy. And books themselves can serve more than one sovereignty.

At the end of The Tempest, Prospero says something Western policy rarely admitted in Afghanistan. Looking at the creature he has repeatedly called slave, monster and devil, he declares: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Even that line refuses a simple interpretation. Does Prospero mean that Caliban belongs to him — the last assertion of colonial possession? Or is he recognizing something of himself in the figure he has spent the play defining as Other? Skura points out that critics have argued both ways: the acknowledgment can be dismissed as another act of appropriation, yet its poetry reaches beyond Prospero’s behavior and momentarily destabilizes the distinction between civilization and darkness.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Afghanistan leaves us with much the same discomfort. The Taliban are not simply medieval intruders who somehow captured a modern state. They arose from Afghan history, from war, religion and social structures — but also from the violence, alliances and unintended consequences of outside intervention. And the Afghanistan they now rule is not simply “Taliban Afghanistan”. Beneath the Emir’s decrees lies a deeper and denser reality: women sewing for pennies, boys abandoning school for work, migrants sending money home, relatives lending to relatives, doctors scanning spines, hakims mixing mountain herbs and mullahs tying amulets beside ancient shrines. Some of its young men are also moving through Balkan forests, climbing fences or waiting for boats across the Channel. It is battered, improvisatory and profoundly local — yet connected to us in ways British politics notices only when those connections wash up on a Kentish beach.

Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban. Ban, ban, Taliban.

The rhyme itself proves nothing. But perhaps that is why it lingers. It connects two figures whom powerful outsiders prefer to define as barbarous, and asks the disturbing question Shakespeare leaves hanging over his enchanted island: whose island was it in the first place — and what does its owner do with it once he gets it back?

Almost exactly five years earlier, on 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized this airport. Chaos ensued. The Americans carried out an 18-day operation in which more than 123,000 people were airlifted to safety — the largest non-combatant evacuation in U.S. military history. On 30 August, at 11:59pm local time, the final US military plane departed Kabul, one minute before President Joe Biden’s deadline for withdrawal.

The airlift marked the end of the American-Afghan state that was born in 2001, when the US, aiming to hunt down Osama bin Laden and overthrow his Taliban allies, invaded the country and installed a Western-style government. For 20 years, this US-backed state persisted, but its unraveling took mere weeks. Everything Washington had built in the country, notably a national army, proved to be a mirage that vanished in the face of a resurgent Taliban. The regime now celebrates 31 August as the day of liberation from US occupation. Each year, parades weave through Kabul’s central squares. Celebratory gunfire sounds across the city.

Today, the capital is a mix of urban squalor and state repression. Armed Talibs patrol the streets while beggar children work the traffic, tapping insistently at windows and thrusting out supplicant hands. On Chicken Street in the city center, homeless girls play beneath brightly colored shopfronts selling trinkets and carpets to a small but growing trickle of tourists. “Things are much safer now the Taliban are in control, and there is no war,” says a local who doesn’t wish to be named. “But we have lost a lot of freedoms. That is the bargain we now live under.”

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He’s right. The streets are calm. Taliban are polite – friendly even. But I am aware that this is a state beholden only to itself. People can, and are, regularly disappeared into its prisons and torture chambers without warning or due process.

Still, to understand the Taliban, you must understand where they come from. Kabul may be Afghanistan’s capital, but Kandahar, a city in the country’s south, is the Islamic Emirate’s spiritual and political center. Here its Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and his circle of advisers rule, largely hidden from public view. I make my way there down the  300-mile Kabul-Kandahar highway, which cuts through vast stretches of arid plateau and dust-blown steppe. I pass goat-hair tents belonging to Afghanistan’s semi-nomadic Kuchi people and flocks of threadbare sheep. Mud-brick villages whizz past, their flat roofs and earth-colored walls almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

As I approach the city’s outskirts, three small girls swing incense burners, sending coils of smoke billowing skyward. The ritual is said to keep away evil spirits. In the city center, the heat is intense. Taliban flags fly everywhere. Men swathed in black keffiyehs emerge through clouds of dust kicked up by their motorbikes. Women are begging in full burqas. The poverty of Kandahar, to say nothing of the theocratic intensity, makes Kabul look like San Francisco. I am told that photography is banned.

My first stop is the Ministry of Information and Culture, where I’m seeking permission to report in Kandahar. It’s roasting hot in the carpeted waiting room. In the corner, two men are carving up a huge melon. I am offered a glass jar of pear drops – the Taliban’s love of 1950s British sweets is one of the more surprising discoveries of my trip – and told that I’m in luck. A senior local official, Inamullah Samangani, has decided to grant me a spontaneous interview.

After a few minutes, I am summoned to an air-conditioned office next door. Four Talibs, one of whom is cradling an M16 rifle, are sitting barefoot on sofas. Cold melon and water are served to everyone. Samangani is an ethnic Tajik from the country’s north. He has a smooth, youthful face with a manicured mustache and tufty beard. He beams at me.

I ask him how he feels as the fifth anniversary approaches. “All our people are happy,” he replies. “This is what we wanted. After 20 years of war, this anniversary is very meaningful for us.”

What the Taliban want, he tells me, is peace and prosperity for the nation. “Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. Afghanistan needs a great deal of rebuilding and construction, and we are working on this.”

What are the biggest challenges facing this new Islamic Emirate? “The situation is not normal because of the war and because of Western policies towards Afghanistan. The military war has ended, but an economic war continues. We want peace not only for Afghanistan but for our neighboring countries, the region and the world.”

I ask what he attributes the Taliban’s success to. “Our belief in Allah,” he replies without hesitation. “And our belief from the first day that we were on the right path. After September 11, when America and its allies occupied Afghanistan, we knew that freedom was our first and last choice. After 20 years, we achieved it.”

The interview ends; it’s clear that Samangani is more concerned with painting the Islamic Emirate as a reasonable partner with whom the international community can do business than getting into the realities of life here — and in this, he is like politicians everywhere. I make my way out of the office, passing a small room where a Talib is sitting on the floor, clipping his toenails.

Outside, armed men saunter in groups. Printed on a billboard overlooking a roundabout is a message from the Supreme Leader. “When you return from Hajj, don’t be wasteful by spending money on dinners and celebrations,” it warns.

The following morning, I set off from my guest house to meet Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for the Taliban government since 25 October 2021. He became a Taliban spokesman, and a senior government official, in January 2007, during the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan government. Even as he claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for attacks on coalition forces, he remained faceless and pseudonymous. But on 17 August 2021, two days after Kabul fell, he revealed himself publicly. Now he is the regime’s international face.

For security reasons, I am not initially told Mujahid’s location. Instead, I am instructed to wait for a call. As I sit in a nearby cafe, my eyes scan the room until they settle on a pair of decorative screens. One depicts two camels, the other a peacock, the faces of all three creatures covered with stickers. I’m confused until I realize why: the defacing accords with the hadith-based injunction against complete representations of dhawāt al-arwāḥ (“beings possessing souls”). If you obscure the head, you render the figure incomplete and therefore permissible. I saw nothing like this in Kabul.

The call comes; the venue is a gated residence just across the road. I walk into a spacious garden, where a flunky is watering a comparatively lush lawn. Inside, I am shown into a large room and asked to wait.

After a few minutes, Mujahid enters and sits down. He is immaculate in a white shalwar kameez with dark blue waistcoat and brown, patterned turban. Five years on, he tells me, the Taliban’s victory has brought what Afghans wanted most. “No war, no fighting, and a unified government in place.”

But victory has also forced the Taliban to govern, not just fight. Its foot soldiers and clerics, formed in the madrassas and mountains, must also now serve as policemen, civil servants and diplomats. They must manage budgets and rebuild infrastructure. For this they need international recognition, and aid money from international organizations and Western countries — above all, the US. “We definitely want good relations with the USA,” Mujahid tells me. “We have tried, but they have to try as well.”

Recognition has not been forthcoming. I ask Mujahid about the first government press conference he gave in 2021, when he promised that women would be able to work and study within the bounds of Islamic law. Girls have since been excluded from secondary schools and women from universities.

“I said that everything would be according to Sharia,” he replies, maintaining a serious demeanor and a quiet, even tone of voice throughout. “I still say that. Human rights, education — everything.”

Women still work in hospitals, schools, banks and government, he says, before adding that the exclusion of girls from secondary education, now approaching its fifth year, is “only a slight disruption in the education system”. The Emirate is working to find a way for women to study “with the necessary segregation, transport and safeguards”.

The matter of women’s rights is a serious problem for the government — even among its supporters.  Mainstream Islamic law does not ban the education of women; even hardline theocracies such as Saudi Arabia have eased the restrictions on women in recent years. Afghans are furious. In Kabul, on my second day in the country, I met a man out walking with his three daughters. “We have seen a lot of improvements in different sectors and in the rebuilding of our country,” he told me. “But there are big limitations for girls. They should be able to go to school. This is a big ambition of every Afghan. We hope the government will listen to the voice of our citizens.”

But the Taliban will not budge. I suspect Mujahid will be giving the same answers to the same questions five years from now.

I ask him about another contentious issue. In Kandahar, fiber-optic internet has been cut off to private homes. Mujahid insists this is not an internet ban, but a means of ensuring internet use stays within Sharia guidelines. “With mobile internet we can [control it] to a degree,” he explains, “but with fiber-optic Wi-Fi it is harder.”

Every Talib I meet echoes what Samangani told me: they defeated the most powerful and technologically advanced army in history because of “Allah” and their faith. But the more time I spend in Afghanistan, especially in Kandahar, the clearer it is to me that the Taliban are not to be regarded simply as quasi-medieval fanatics. To Westerners, they might seem like barbarians — particularly in their treatment of women — but they do not reject technology or modernity. Except where they cannot control them, they have absorbed both.

As a result, I’m witnessing a kind of Taliban “March of Progress”. Talibs still patrol the streets with long hair, matted beards, black turbans and the imprint of the village. But what’s also emerging is a discernibly post-American Talib. At the many checkpoints between Kabul and Kandahar, these men now stand guard in matching uniforms, patches identifying them as Afghan National Police. Some wear black balaclavas like Western special forces. They cradle their weapons with conspicuous discipline: fingers straight along the receiver rather than curled around the trigger. They carry M16s and Kalashnikovs, the most famous weapons of the two superpowers defeated in Afghanistan.

One morning, I awake to the sound of a helicopter flying low overhead. “Taliban air force,” explains a friend — who proceeds to tell me a story. When the Taliban swept to power five years ago, the US-trained Afghan pilots were told to fly the helicopters to the safety of Tajikistan. One of them, already in the air, called his father to ask what he should do. The father hurried to the Taliban in their village and laid out his son’s dilemma. “He’s a son of Afghanistan,” they said. “He must come back. He will be safe.” The father relayed the message; his son switched off his transponder, turned the helicopter around mid-air, and flew home. The Taliban kept their word. Now he works as an instructor, teaching Taliban pilots to fly the helicopters the Americans left behind.

The Taliban have embraced many of the technologies and institutions of the Western order they defeated, all the while rejecting its overarching values. They carry American rifles and use Western smartphones, yet remain unyieldingly beholden to Sharia. To them there is no contradiction. Washington assumed that modernization meant, inexorably, Westernization. But the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. And in so doing they exposed the category error on which America’s war was based.

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The US-led coalition claimed to be in the state-building business, but in truth it extended a narrow Western template of statehood to Afghanistan. The West offered Afghans the liberal franchise, confident they would accept it. Why wouldn’t they? This was 2001. Liberal democracy had won the Cold War, helped bring peace to Yugoslavia and presided over a decade of extraordinary capitalist prosperity. Washington went in, convinced that economic development, education, connectivity and institutions would bring democracy in their wake — and turn Kabul into Copenhagen.

I think about this during my visit to the Khirka Sharif: a compound of buildings smothered in stars and polygons, plants and flowers. Lines of Qur’anic calligraphy thread through the patterns. Turquoise, blue and green mingle with ochre, gold and pink. Kandahar’s streets are sludge and concrete, but here, smooth white stone encircles an explosion of geometry, brilliant in the summer sun.

According to local tradition, Khirka Sharif houses the cloak bestowed upon the Prophet Muhammad during his ascension to heaven (the Mi’raj). The cloak played an important role in the early mythology of the Taliban — literally “students” in Pashto — which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s. On 4 April 1996, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, took the cloak out of its cloth-covered box and carried it onto the roof of Kandahar’s main mosque. There, he held it aloft before thousands of religious scholars, fighters and supporters. The crowd erupted: men threw their turbans into the air in the hope that they might touch the sacred garment, while some reportedly fainted. The assembled ulema (Islamic scholars) acclaimed Omar Amir al-Mu’minin — “Commander of the Faithful” — and pledged allegiance to him. By associating himself publicly with both the Prophet and Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of the Afghan state who had brought the cloak to Kandahar, Omar sanctified his leadership and transformed a sacred relic into a source of political authority.

A few months later, on 27 September, Taliban forces captured Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It lasted until 2001, when the Americans arrived with historically unprecedented military power and the apparatus of state-building: NGOs and aid agencies, elections and constitutions, Excel spreadsheets, risk assessments and results frameworks. These were the iconography of a different faith, one that rooted its legitimacy in the post-World War II liberal order.

The Taliban’s victory laid bare the error and the arrogance of that project. Modernization and Westernization are not the same thing. A fiber-optic cable is neither autocratic nor liberal. A regime can want modern roads and Western investment while oppressing women and killing homosexuals. After two weeks of reporting in Afghanistan, observing how that what is left of the American occupation has been almost completely appropriated by the Taliban; the attempt to force regime change through military means was always doomed. Today, the West pays lip service to this lesson — but the instinct, judging by Donald Trump’s attempts to topple the Islamist regime in Tehran, remains.

Just before I leave the city, I stop for lunch. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet, eating meat and rice, when a Talib in his early twenties comes in and sits down next to me, fascinated by the presence of foreigners. We talk. He joined the Taliban at 12 and fought the Americans and British for years. He likes my Western sunglasses and, ignoring the prohibition on photography, eagerly poses for pictures wearing a pair borrowed from my photographer. Photos and transatlantic fashion clearly delight him. What, I ask him, are his hopes for the future of Afghanistan?

“Taliban,” he says without hesitation, and smiles beatifically.

I journey back, and just under 100 miles south of Kabul, I pass through the city of Ghazni, its entrance dominated by three light-blue domes. Its open-air military museum displays rows of burned-out Soviet tanks, monuments to the Afghan mujahideen’s victory in the 1979–1989 Soviet–Afghan War. A thousand years earlier, Ghazni was the imperial capital of Mahmud of Ghazni, later celebrated as the “idol-breaker” (but-shikan) after his destruction of the Hindu temple at Somnath. When Mullah Omar destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, he invoked Mahmud, casting himself as a modern-day but-shikan.

The occupying Westerners lacked this sense of history. Shortly after the disastrous 2021 withdrawal, I asked a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan how, after twenty years of war, we had understood the country so poorly. “The thing is,” he told me, “we served one-year tours and left. We weren’t there for twenty years but twenty lots of one.” Western soldiers, diplomats and officials rotated through the war, but the Taliban lived it year after year. And their sense of time and place stretched back centuries — to the cloak of the Prophet and the legend of Mahmud. There was only ever going to be one winner.

Now in his 30s, Rasmus is a high-functioning opioid addict. He has a steady income, dresses well, and speaks with authority. There is little about him that suggests he has been using hard drugs for more than half his life. But even as a preteen, Rasmus was never like the other kids his age. Fascinated by the physiological effects and molecular structures of various psychoactive compounds, he soon started experimenting with everything from marijuana to MDMA and amphetamines. By age 16, his exploration had driven him to severe anxiety and depression that left him feeling like a shell of his former self.

To cope, he turned to opioids — first to painkillers like tramadol, but eventually to fentanyl. “Before it’s like you’re naked, you’re in the middle of snow, you’re freezing,” Rasmus tells me in a commercial parking lot a stone’s throw from the deep blue waters of the Baltic Sea, recounting his first experience with the drug when he was around 19. “Then some mysterious stranger appears from the woods and invites you with him, and in about 50 meters a bright wooden cottage appears, you go inside, and he offers you a warm cup of tea. I felt like a human again.”

But those days are now little more than a distant memory. Fentanyl and its analogs have been largely absent from the Estonian market for years, after the country’s police cracked down on the Russia-connected organized criminal networks distributing them in 2017. Since then, the drug has been replaced by something even more sinister. In 2019, traces of a new class of synthetic opioids started showing up in Estonia’s drug supply. These can be tens of times more potent than fentanyl — and much more deadly. But it wasn’t until 2022 that these new designer drugs, called nitazenes, began to truly wreak havoc on Estonian society.

“Fentanyl is bad but nowhere near ’zenes in how addictive it is and how hard it grabs your opioid receptors,” Rasmus tells me, his eyes concealed behind dark glasses despite the shade. “It’s basically the crack of opioids.”

Nitazenes have wreaked havoc elsewhere. Deaths have been reported across the US, the EU, and the UK. In Britain alone, the drugs have been linked to the deaths of over 400 people between June 2023 and January this year, even as thousands more opioid deaths may have been been missed from official figures. Already, nitazenes are being hailed as the harbingers of the next European opioid crisis. In the midst of this gathering storm, Estonia stands out as its unexpected epicenter. Since they arrived on Europe’s doorstep, 96% of nitazene seizures have taken place in the Baltic states, and between 2022 and 2024, Estonia likely had the highest nitazene use rate on the continent. And while the rest of Europe was only just starting to take nitazenes seriously, by 2023, the drugs had already been implicated in 56 drug deaths in Estonia, comprising nearly half of all overdose deaths in the country, pushing it into the EU’s top spot for drug-induced mortalities per million people.

Estonia’s experience offers many lessons for the rest of Europe. But the story of nitazenes and opioids more broadly in Estonia is about far more than just law enforcement crackdowns, and underscores that the epidemic is ultimately not a problem created by the mere existence of a steady drug supply, but rather one borne out of a persistent socially-driven demand for the drugs. Woven into Estonia’s decades-long struggle with opioids, and hidden behind its reputation as a technologically advanced, highly developed Baltic economy, lies a history of unequal post-Soviet economic growth, the impact of social marginalization, and the difficulties that state authorities and harm reduction workers alike have faced in combating a crisis that often dwarfs the resources their small country has at its disposal. Most worryingly, though, Estonia illustrates how once a robust base of addicts establishes itself within a society, not even rapid economic growth can uproot it — and that even if nitazenes can be eliminated, something worse will emerge soon enough to replace them.

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“Somehow despite the fact that we had 17 years of experience with fentanyls, we still struggled with nitazenes,” says Katri Abel-Ollo, a researcher at the Estonian National Institute for Health Development who studies nitazene use patterns and overdose deaths. “So I can imagine that countries that don’t have experience with fentanyls, it could be quite shocking to them if nitazenes appear out of the blue.”

In 2002, Estonia became one of the first European countries to face a fentanyl crisis, after heroin smuggling routes were disrupted following the American invasion of Afghanistan. To compensate, local dealers, in cahoots with Russian gangsters, sourced fentanyls from nearby St Petersburg, exploiting connections between the Estonian criminal underground and the country’s former imperial rulers that had endured after the fall of the USSR. Soon enough, Tallinn became the “fentanyl capital” of Europe, leading to a 15-year battle that finally ended when Estonian police put the main players driving the drug trade behind bars, effectively shutting off the country’s fentanyl spigot.

“For five years we had a very good spell for a while,” Rait Pikaro, the head of the crime bureau of the Estonian Police North Prefecture tells me. “We were a bit naïve thinking that for five years… the market was, so to say, dead, but in that sense we were mistaken.”

Though fentanyl itself became much harder to find, Rasmus explains, fentanyl analogs continued to float around in the Estonian drug world, while harm reduction specialists I speak to suggest that users and dealers also turned to home-brewed opioid varieties to get by. When nitazenes emerged to fill the void, they arrived not from Russia, but from China, entering Estonia through Latvia. And in a sign of the changing drug landscape, this time there was no centralized dealer network, forcing police to play a game of cat-and-mouse with users and dealers across a fragmented market, both in Tallinn and across the eastern Estonian hinterland where opioids are most prevalent.

A far cry from fentanyl they may be, but nitazenes are ruthlessly effective, providing a powerful remedy for the withdrawal symptoms that are many addicts’ worst fear. “Potency does not equate to euphoria,” Rasmus tells me, recounting how nitazenes don’t even give him 1% of the same high he once got from fentanyl, despite how strong they can be. “Metonitazene [one of the earlier nitazenes to hit the Estonian market] for example was really good and pleasurable,” he says, “but some are just like you’re shooting up water.”

According to Abel-Ollo, nitazenes have a sharper come-up, but often a shorter duration — something that can be frustrating for users like Rasmus. “You inject it, it lasts maybe a minute, some last a few seconds, some last an hour, at best,” he says, describing some of the more recent nitazenes on the market. That was clear enough just looking at him: he was visibly more anxious during the latter part of our conversation as he felt his withdrawal symptoms set in, glancing around, breathing more shallowly, and becoming less focused in his answers.

To make matters worse for addicts, nitazenes are often so potent that they don’t respond like other opioids to naloxone, a medication that counteracts an opioid overdose, requiring several doses to work — something that contributes greatly to nitazenes’ lethality. For these and other reasons, Artur Kamnerov, a former investigator who heads the drug and organized crime bureau of the North Prefecture police department, predicts that if nitazenes become as prevalent elsewhere as they have in Estonia, countries can expect horrifyingly similar consequences. “If nitazene starts taking over the market,” he says with a resigned look in his eye and a heaviness in his voice, “there’s no stopping the overdose death rates.”

To explain what he means, on an unseasonably dreary and rainy summer morning, Kamnerov takes out his phone and opens up a Russian-language group on Telegram. Boasting 4,000 members, users can order Xanax, tramadol, and other painkillers. Another group has user-friendly menus where people could buy MDMA or amphetamines using cryptocurrencies. “This is the reason why no one really needs to go to the dark web anymore,” Kamnerov says. “It’s a hassle.”

Such ease of access is hardly limited to Estonia, of course. Narcotics, including nitazene class opioids, are sold this way to users and dealers alike in the UK and beyond. But what this means is that, at least in Estonia, easily accessible nitazenes shipped directly from overseas have bifurcated the opioid user base in the country, with two distinct cultures emerging. The older, more conservative community continues to rely on the more traditional street-based distribution networks, where a more hardcore culture of injection composed mainly of Russian-speakers reigns supreme. For their part, younger users source their drugs from online vendors and are predisposed to the less intimidating, more accessible pill forms of the drug.

For the moment, it is the former, Russian-speaking group that still dominates Estonia’s opioid landscape, and which has long formed the backbone of the country’s sky-high demand for these drugs. This community has its roots in the country’s decades-long occupation by the USSR, when Russian immigrants to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic moved to Tallinn, Narva, and towns in Estonia’s northeast. These new settlers initially came to work in reconstruction after the Second World War, but additional waves later arrived when new housing projects like the Lasnamäe district were erected by Soviet authorities in Tallinn in the Seventies and Eighties. Russians were often given preferential treatment in housing allocation, crowding Estonians out of these much-coveted new apartments: once seen as beacons of Estonia’s bright socialist future.

Today, Russian speakers make up about 21% of Estonia’s population, but in stark contrast to their place at the top of the social hierarchy during the Soviet years, they emerged from the USSR’s collapse as an economically disadvantaged underclass. Great strides have been made to integrate Russian speakers into mainstream Estonian society, and Russian speakers now have access to the same social benefits as ethnic Estonians — but the baggage of years of socioeconomic hardship weighs the community down, and in many respects, their marginalization persists. Russian speakers continue to make up 60% of prison inmates in the country, as well as nearly two thirds of homeless people in Tallinn. And with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has pummelled Russian speakers in Estonia with political disinformation: resonating with many, but further widening the gap with the Estonian majority.

That’s clear enough in Lasnamäe today. A world away from that long-dead communist ideal — let alone the charming and cosmopolitan center of Tallinn — these suburbs are filled with monotone housing blocks, stretching out toward the horizon. The wide, sparse, avenues that separate them from each other give the area a liminal feel, a place that is neither in the past nor fully in the present. Their walls are adorned with Cyrillic graffiti: while many parts of Estonia have bilingual Estonian and Russian signs, here Russian predominates.

Fundamentally, Lasnamäe’s plight can be understood as a function of the end of communism. The collapse of the Soviet system brought with it major economic shocks, leading to a sharp decrease in Estonia’s GDP that affected everyone. In 1994, the country’s life expectancy dipped below that of Ukraine and Moldova.

By the following year, however, the economy started growing again, albeit unevenly, leaving many Russian speakers, most of whom voted against Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, stuck in the post-collapse era, reeling from their loss of status — not forever, but long enough for patterns of social stratification and self-sabotaging nihilism to burrow deep.

“That time, in the Nineties, was a time of gangsterism, very anxious times,” says Nikolai, a former addict and current harm reduction worker at MTÜ Convictus, an NGO working with drug users. Arms covered in tattoos and with a tired look in his eyes, he asks me not to use his last name: he has a long history with drugs and has spent time in prison. “When these drugs appeared, it was a coping strategy,” Nikolai explains. “It was better than drinking alcohol, and many Russian-speaking people followed this and started to use drugs. It was fashionable.”

Back in the fentanyl days, places like Lasnamäe, and Estonia’s Russian-speaking society in general, held the keys to the country’s opioid market. Rasmus, who is ethnically Estonian, learned Russian explicitly to purchase opioids from local dealers. “In the poorer regions of Tallinn, like Lasnamäe, Kopli, and so on, you could say that in every [housing project] there was a dealer,” he explains, adding that fentanyl was easy to get, but only if you spoke Russian.

Soon enough, even though he once told himself he would never shoot up, Rasmus was injected by a dealer not long after he got hooked on the drug. His first such experience was overwhelming, and he overdosed as soon as the fentanyl entered his body — but in doing so, he finalized his initiation into the hardcore, Russian-led Estonian drug culture that has driven the country’s opioid epidemic for so long.

Indeed, at MTÜ Convictus’s base in downtown Tallinn, while most of the clientele are still Russian speakers, more and more ethnic Estonians are showing up as well, pointing to the expanding reach of the crisis’s long tentacles. Regardless of linguistic or ethnic background, Convictus provides users with a place to exchange used needles for clean ones, get food, obtain naloxone, meet with social workers, or even just drink some warm tea. Yulia Rõbalko, another harm reduction worker at the center, exchanges biscuits for used needles.

Harm reduction, she says, has two sides: one for the person, and one for the rest of society. “It works like a cycle,” Yulia Rõbalko. “You help him, he doesn’t spread disease with used needles, and so on. Normal people don’t see that.”

This blindness is part of the reason why harm reduction NGOs like MTÜ Convictus, which receive public funds from the Estonian state, are increasingly at risk of budget cuts, as peer-led services are being outsourced to organizations that don’t have as strong a connection to the community. If you ask Mart Kalvet, an activist with LUNEST, a drug policy group, building robust, grassroots support networks for drug users is only the first step in creating a long-term solution to the cycle of alienation, addiction, and suffering that has perpetuated the opioid crisis in Estonia for over a quarter century.

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To secure real change within a context where a user base has already become entrenched, the state must implement a regulated, safe supply of drugs all while giving users access to the resources they need to live their lives as healthily as possible. That means not only providing sustainably funded rehab services, but also getting to the root of the problem and investing in places like Lasnamäe as real, evolving parts of country, rather than mere relics of its Soviet past. It also means treating the opioid epidemic like the public health problem it surely is, rather than an exclusively criminal one. “The harder you come down on the people who use drugs and sell drugs, the more problematic drugs appear on the street,” Kalvet says. “It’s an iron law.”

Already, Kalvet’s prophecy appears to be coming true. According to Abel-Ollo, there have been no new drug death cases in the country since May, indicating to her that there may be fewer nitazenes on the market. But if you ask Rasmus, who keeps a close eye on reports about drug arrests and court cases, even newer synthetic opioids, called brorphines, are already coming from China to replace them. Estonia’s game of whack-a-mole with opioids, it seems, will continue.

“This is where the somewhat dark-natured Scandinavian culture collides with the dark-natured, but in another way, Eastern Europe and Slavic culture,” Kalvet suggests, musing about the reasons for Estonia’s long dance with opioids. “We are affected by both, and not in a good way. It may be a cultural yearning for some warmth that our history has not provided us with.” From roaming Swedish armies in the 17th century, to Nazi and Soviet occupation in the 20th century, it’s easy to see what he means.

Yet whatever impact Estonia’s cultural proclivities may have on its drug appetite, the implications of its battle with nitazenes for larger and even more socially divided countries across the West are enormous. As markets in the UK, the US, Europe, and beyond continue to experiment with nitazenes as a more lucrative replacement for fentanyl and heroin, all signs suggest that long-time users will embrace these new drugs, creating a festering social wound that will persist so long as it has lives left to destroy. More ominously still, as Estonia’s case vividly illustrates, alienated segments of society — of which the West has plenty — can act as a fertile crucible for an opioid epidemic to not only take hold, but also spread. And in a world where thoughtful, nuanced drug policy reform is hardly on any government’s radar, the outlook is truly bleak.

After years of living at the mercy of his addiction, Rasmus tried to get help. On two occasions, he checked into the only long-term detox clinic in Tallinn that uses substitute therapy. But now, government funding cuts have quadrupled the cost of treatment there, leaving users like him with nowhere to turn. When I asked him how he sees his future in a follow-up conversation on Signal, his response was stark: “Most likely dead.”

Speaking about the refugees the Government spirited into the UK, Defence Secretary John Healey said that anyone who has come into this country “is checked carefully” in advance, telling Times Radio that known criminals would naturally be precluded from coming. I’m sure Healey speaks in good faith, having been assured by Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Home Office officials that the correct protocols were followed. 

But there are reasons to worry. Robert Clark, a former soldier who worked on the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) suggests that many of this latest cohort weren’t properly vetted. They are here purely because their data was leaked. The suggestion, then, is that there haven’t been adequate checks to establish whether individuals had been radicalized or had extremist connections. Even the individual who threatened to leak the dataset to the Taliban has apparently been allowed into the UK, along with his family. I would suggest he has already provided ample evidence of his character. 

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Not that vetting is an exact science. As a counterterrorism officer, I held “DV”, or developed vetting status, for over 20 years. This clearance allows someone to routinely handle top secret material unsupervised in order to assess intelligence. I worked in anticorruption, the department responsible for investigating suspect officers and recruits. I know, in short, how the process works, and it’s a far from watertight process — and that’s before you factor in the data abyss that is Afghanistan. 

Vetting foreign nationals allows authorities to assess risk. But without access to basic records from a newcomer’s place of origin, Britain is unable to perform even the most basic due diligence. Especially given this country’s rising community tensions, you don’t have to be especially cynical to suggest this might explain Whitehall’s frantic attempts to keep this operation secret. 

At the outset, it’s worth emphasising that the British authorities aren’t completely blind when it comes to the Afghan arrivals. Operation Herrick, the UK military deployment to the country, operated for 12 years. British intelligence officers, from the military and Secret Intelligence Service, ran a range of local agents and informants in-country. At the same time, the Army has a proven, professional intelligence capability — UK police forces closely followed their intelligence corps model when developing their own information management models. And, to be fair, Afghans arriving on other refugee schemes do seem to have been checked out. 

But the question I would ask here is how much their intelligence-gathering envisaged a situation like “Operation Rubific”. Presumably, while in Afghanistan, army sources would have been pointed towards operations against insurgents, not harvesting routine data of the sort often invaluable to vetting officers — the sort which would include employment and family histories, as well as financial records. Yes, there might be tangential or collateral intelligence, whether criminal records or local gossip. But there will also be gaps.

Then there’s the problem of local recordkeeping. Even if we were able to access pre-Taliban police records, I doubt that would yield a great deal of useful information. Add to this cultural differences, whereby matters considered noteworthy here would never be recorded in Afghanistan. This is a country with an unenlightened attitude to women and safeguarding. 

If, meanwhile, relocated Afghans have ever been to the EU, or have family there who they might seek to bring here, we’ll also need to access foreign records. That poses yet another information headache for hard-pressed British officers, especially when European standards aren’t always great. I remember dealing with the Polish police force and receiving an impressive amount of data, including criminal records and case files, allowing me to make an informed assessment of risk to an individual. On the other hand, asking the same questions of a police force in the Low Countries or Romania only got me the basics. 

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There’s a broader problem here too. Basic police checks run the names of individuals through a range of systems. As someone’s vetting level increases — in other words, the risk their role or presence poses — inquiries will include character references and financial disclosures. “Developed Vetting”, the highest level, involves officers holding intrusive one-to-one interviews with candidates. The point here is that all these procedures rely on the quality of data available. And, again, that poses real challenges for arrivals from somewhere like Afghanistan, especially when Operation Herrick was wound down over a decade ago, leaving a significant information gap.

The data gap, then, is full of risks — and that’s before we consider the broader political dimension. As former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace assures us, his motives for hushing up Operation Rubific were primarily for those of operational security. But concerns around the public reaction — including serious disorder — would surely have featured. As one Cabinet Office official noted, “15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots” during last summer’s riots were in the 20% of local authorities hosting the highest numbers of resettled Afghans.

Might this explain why the superinjunction lasted so long? Our politicians know our multicultural model has the potential to turn into a powder keg. They would surely have been keen to prevent Operation Rubific from lighting another fuse.

But if this middle-aged bruiser was happy making money from the basics, hawking Kalashnikovs to twitchy tribal leaders, in 2021 the unthinkable happened. That summer, Nato’s mission in Afghanistan abruptly crumbled, with the Taliban seizing Kabul in a blitzkrieg strike. The result? A mountain of foreign military hardware, from machine guns to drones, all unclaimed and up for the taking.

All this helped men like Sher Khan, flush with weapons and keen to talk shop. Yet if Afghanistan’s arms trade is booming, there are rising signs that the chaos of the American departure could yet bring more death, as high-quality Western weapons are snatched up by extremists and terrorists across the region — with the US itself unable, or unwilling, to stop them.

It’s hard to overstate how much equipment Nato left behind after its botched evacuation of Bagram Airbase. According to one report, published a few months after the Taliban returned to power, Afghanistan’s new rulers had seized over 300,000 small arms, 26,000 heavy weapons, and about 61,000 military vehicles. This claim broadly aligns with an assessment by the US Department of Defense, which found that over $7 billion worth of matériel had essentially been abandoned to the Taliban.

At the same time, these numbers chime with videos the Taliban has published of its annual victory parades, showing former fighters cruising about in Humvees and Oshkosh ATVs. That’s rounded out by an airforce of roughly 40 aircraft, 100 helicopters and over half-a-dozen drones.

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Taken together, this bonanza has allowed Khan to expand his business. “Following the collapse of the former government,” he explains, “I expanded into more American-made weapons” — everything from M16 rifles (popular with Nato infantry) to Beretta pistols (a standard US side-arm). The man himself never goes anywhere without his trusty M4 Carbine, mass produced by Colt. That’s shadowed by less lethal equipment too, including 160,000 radios and 16,000 night-vision goggles.

In part, Khan receives his stock from the Taliban itself; its members happy for a payday at the Pentagon’s expense. At the same time, he also gets equipment from members of the toppled security forces, on the run from the Islamists and looking to get rid of any evidence of their association with the fallen regime.

Yet if Sher Khan has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from arms deals since 2021, the US is finally taking action. During his very first cabinet meeting, Donald Trump described Afghanistan as “one of the biggest sellers” of military equipment on earth, while proposing to buy its weapons back. Trump was typically wrong on the specifics — Afghanistan’s arms sales pale compared to America’s or even Israel’s — but the Taliban was quick to reject the offer, even threatening to use its cache against “invaders who dare to seize them.”

Beyond this war of words, though, little has been done to actually repatriate America’s Afghan war pile. And no wonder: after decades of fighting, it’d be hard to know even know where to start. Never mind all that Nato equipment, says Justine Fleischner, a global weapons expert — there are also those Soviet arms Sher Khan plied so successfully.

As his experiences imply, meanwhile, many of these weapons are increasingly escaping Taliban control, with swathes of their rugged country effectively outside government control. Some of these areas are ruled by Taliban allies like al-Qaeda. According to a recent report by the UN, indeed, Kabul tolerates al-Qaeda safe houses and training camps across Afghanistan. Then there are militants in nearby countries, from Kashmiri extremists to jihadis on the Iran-Pakistan border, all eager for high-tech US hardware.

“These weapons have even been found with various groups in countries far beyond Afghanistan and the region,” one former Afghan security official tells UnHerd, “which is likely to become a serious problem in the near future.”

It’s a fair point: Afghan weapons, especially small arms, have lately been used in terrorist attacks from Kashmir to Balochistan.

To be fair, the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Despite its broad inability to do much to stop the guns from flowing, the US can, at least, put pressure on its neighbors. After the former regime collapsed, some Afghan soldiers were able to escape by helicopter to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Their machines were promptly seized, with Uzbekistan since transferring seven Black Hawk helicopters back to the US, much to the Taliban’s chagrin.

The Kabul government has its own reasons to worry too. For if it’s happy to indulge al-Qaeda, Kabul continues to fight Islamic State, among other rival jihadist groups. More to the point, there’s increasing evidence that these factions have turned US weapons back against the Taliban, their fighters parading American rifles in grainy online clips.

All that makes taking stock of existing caches important for Afghanistan’s new masters, even as the government has taken tentative steps to regulate the local arms trade. “The new authorities do not permit individuals outside their ranks to engage in arms trading,” Sher Khan says, adding that private traders are now banned from selling US weapons.

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But if this strategy frustrates private dealers like Khan, the UN suggests that any crackdowns remain small-scale. Besides, the Taliban has other incentives not to squeeze the arms trade too tightly.

One dynamic here is that the government allows for local commanders to keep 20% of whatever weapons they seize as “war spoils” — an arrangement that essentially ensures their loyalty, while also providing them with cash and a measure of social cache. Any change could therefore spell trouble, especially, Fleischner says, when America’s chaotic departure means it’s hard for the Taliban to know exactly what’s floating about.

It hardly helps, of course, that the Afghan economy is so broken. With GDP per capita hovering around the $415 mark, arms dealing can be a real boon — especially when US-made weapons can be three-to-five times as expensive as their rusting Russian counterparts.

With all this in mind, it’s just as well that Trump ultimately seems indifferent about stopping the trade. “In my view,” says the former official, “the United States does not fundamentally have a problem with the presence of these weapons in Afghanistan.” Rather, he suggests, Trump’s grandstanding is just that, an excuse to deflect responsibility for the 2021 debacle onto the Biden administration, and an attempt to get ahead of the news cycle in case stolen weapons are used against US targets.

Back in southern Afghanistan, Sher Khan seems pretty relaxed about the future too, arguing that Trump is “unlikely” to stop the tide. Besides, he adds, a “significant portion” of his weapons have already been sold or vanished abroad. That’s good news for him — though not for the region as a whole.

***

An Afghan journalist who cannot be named for security reasons contributed to this report.

“I had an immediate and acute feeling: what the hell’s the point of having a navy if you’re not going to use it,” Leach remarked in an interview, a decade later.

The First Sea Lord’s prediction was correct — Britain did retake the Falklands. But the admiral did not just fight off the Argentine military. He also bested an opponent closer to home. In 1981, Defense Secretary John Nott had formulated plans for major cuts to the Royal Navy’s surface vessels and air power. In Nott’s view, the Navy should concentrate on anti-submarine duties. After the highly public actions in the South Atlantic — and the consequent boost to Thatcher’s image — Nott’s reductions were scaled back. Nott himself eventually resigned.

The Falklands War was not just fought on land, sea and in the air. It was also a battle in London, over budgets and resources. That is worth bearing in mind now, with the discussion of British involvement in an international peacekeeping force in Ukraine. In reality, the contribution that the British Army of 2025 could make is profoundly limited. The army now has around 75,000 regular troops — i.e. full-time — down from 102,000 in 2010 and 153,000 in 1990. Modern armies can only project a small proportion of their overall headcount into the field, given the logistics needed to sustain troops in theater, training and other responsibilities at home, and the need for operational tours of a manageable length. Today Britain could probably cobble together a brigade-sized force that, with enablers like logisticians, signallers and intelligence, might amount to around 7,000 troops.

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At the height of the post-9/11 wars, Britain ran two enduring deployments in parallel, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and both around 10,000 strong. Most of those troops came from the army. That was hard enough then, but today sustaining a single brigade beyond one initial six-month deployment would be far more complex. Equally, the equipment a British contingent could take now would be limited. In the late 2000s, as the army’s operations in Afghanistan ramped up, the organization scaled back the programs needed to maintain, upgrade and potentially replace its heavy vehicle fleet: the Challenger 2 tank, the AS-90 self-propelled artillery piece, and the Warrior armored infantry fighting vehicle. Instead, resources went towards a new generation of vehicles designed to resist roadside bombs, the signature weapons of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.

Coming up for two decades on, almost the entire working British AS-90 fleet has been given to Ukraine. Most Challenger 2s are tied up in a much-delayed upgrade program, and so are also unavailable, while Warrior is on its last legs. As an interim artillery capability, Britain bought 14 wheeled self-propelled Archer guns from Sweden; perhaps eight of these are deployable.

The likely British formation that could initially go to Ukraine, 7th Light Mechanised Brigade, is equipped with Foxhound and Jackal, Afghanistan vintage vehicles, which have little protection against conventional heavy weapons. “The problem with it though is it doesn’t have any heavy weapons,” Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army officer, says of 7th Brigade. “It doesn’t have sufficient armored protection — armored vehicles — and it doesn’t have any artillery.”

“The British Army is in the worst state it’s been since Dunkirk,” adds Francis Tusa, the editor of the Defense Analysis newsletter. “The only difference was, of course, in 1940 the war production had started two and a half years previously, and they were able to re-equip the army quite rapidly. It’s not the case here.”

The store cupboard, then, is pretty bare. However, the aspect that is often missed in the public debate is the difference in the way a potential operation is perceived internally, within a professional military, compared to externally. This boils down to a question of obligation versus opportunity. From an outsider’s perspective, sending British troops to Ukraine — particularly with very uncertain US support — is a fraught political call. Inside the British Army, however, for the past three decades at least, a chance to deploy into the field has almost always been perceived with great enthusiasm, up to the point where things go badly wrong.

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The reason for this is that the central business of armies — fighting — does not occur all the time. You can spend a working lifetime in uniform without ever doing it for real. Since the British Army pulled out of Helmand in late 2014 — more than 10 years ago now — it has sent troops to Eastern Europe and deployed special forces, in small numbers, in combat in the Middle East. But the field army has not had a clear role at all. And 10 years is two entire generations of junior soldiers and officers. The “Spicier Subaltern Memes” Instagram account gives an insight into the culture that results. “When you asked the guy who called you a REMF to talk about his last operational tour,” reads one post, as a mechanical mouth spouts gibberish. A REMF is a “rear echelon mother fucker”, the traditional slight troops in combat throw at those in safe rear area jobs.

In this world, the prospect of a real operation becomes an exciting one. A big deployment does not just mean troops on the ground. It would mean resources, equipment, budgets, promotions, perhaps equally a sense of renewed mission. The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave a theoretical post-Afghanistan purpose to the army, but not the resources to really step up to that. Sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine could open the resource taps, though it seems that the recent announcements from Downing Street do not follow much actual consultation with the army’s own planners. “If you do want 72,000 soldiers to be available at the drop of a hat,” Tusa writes, “the operations budget is probably going to have to treble, if not quadruple.”

The senior army leadership of 2025 are seasoned and experienced individuals. Roly Walker, the current Chief of the General Staff, led a battlegroup in Afghanistan in 2009. But his cohort have spent their entire working lives in a shrinking institution. The prospect of purpose and action is therefore — for entirely understandable reasons — often an enticing one for them too. However, excitement can also become a blinding force.

After interviewing numerous retired senior officers for my book, I came to the conclusion that their job is largely a custodial one. The vast shrinking of the British military that has occurred since the Second World War means that the opportunity to actually command troops in the field at the scale that corresponds to rank is almost gone. In 2023, the British Army had nine lieutenant generals, a rank that historically would command a corps, maybe 30,000 troops. None of them will ever do that in an army that contains in total fewer than 100,000 soldiers.

In this context, the real emotional pull of senior command is different. You are given, for a few years, the helm of an institution to which you have devoted your entire adult life, and which for your whole career has been subject to salami-slicing cuts. As a result, the ultimate priority of those at the top of the army is to keep the army safe. That generally means keeping it safe from the Treasury.

The problem is that a can-do culture that thinks an operation is always better than no operation, and that it’s always best to crack on with the limited resources available, has got the army into serious trouble before. There’s a plausible case that the post-2006 Helmand campaign was fought — at least in part — to save the British infantry from manpower reductions. “It’s use them or lose them,” Richard Dannatt, the then head of the army, reportedly once told British ambassador to Afghanistan in the summer of 2007. Helmand could provide a role for troops freed up by the end of operations in Northern Ireland and the drawdown in Iraq. There was a chance to echo the Falklands dividend that spared the Royal Navy in the Eighties. The irony is that the poor outcome of the Afghanistan operation led to the army losing much of the trust of its political masters, and the infantry were cut anyway.

The early gung-ho Helmand tours — reflected on the emerging platforms of social media, and subsequently officially endorsed by the medal and promotion systems — became highly aspirational for other units to match. But the campaign bogged down and IEDs restricted movement. The rapid march of the Taliban in 2021 eventually showed that the idea that the West had created a local military that could hold terrain was cant. But right up until the end of the British operations, there were individuals keen to deploy. They knew that in an organization in which credibility — both individual and collective — is so important, a Helmand medal would assure them status.

It is not always better to do something than to do nothing.

There is also a potential ratchet here. The more the army is cut, the smaller the realistic contribution it can make is. Yet paradoxically, the smaller the army is, then potentially a big operational deployment becomes even more enticing — the magic ticket to resources and prestige. There will undoubtedly be ambitious officers in army headquarters at Marlborough Lines in Andover imagining how an enduring troop deployment in Ukraine could transform their own careers. But they might do well to also recall the other thing that Henry Leach (at least) claims to have told Margaret Thatcher in 1982. Yes, he said, Britain could retake the Falklands. But there was also a risk that they might lose the entire fleet trying to do so.

On December 1, 2022, the Taliban issued a decree closing down the two local stations run by the BBC’s rivals: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to a Taliban spokesman, they were being silenced for their “non-compliance with journalistic principles and one-sided broadcasts”. Remarkably, though, the militants are happy to indulge their British counterpart, which broadcasts from Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto, while also hosting local variants of the BBC news website.

But while the Corporation clearly enjoys its unusual role, is editorial independence really maintained? For as UnHerd has discovered, BBC funds frequently end up Taliban coffers, channeled via organisations led by extremists at the very heart of government. More worrying still, these relationships seemingly shape the Corporations coverage in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that just two weeks before the Corporation’s rivals were banned, its South Asia bureau chief, Jacky Martens, met with Sirajuddin Haqqani: the Taliban’s deputy leader and Afghanistan’s interior minister. The notorious jihadi, proscribed on both sides of the Atlantic for terrorism, clearly enjoyed his encounter with Martens. According to a statement from Haqqani’s ministry, the BBC was “an important media outlet at the international level” and could rely on the Taliban’s “cooperation”. While others had been hostile when reporting the country’s “internal” issues, the BBC was “impartial”.

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How, then, to explain such enthusiasm?

One answer is likely financial. The BBC refuses to disclose exactly how much it pays the Taliban, but the Corporation sends considerable sums to Radio and Television of Afghanistan (RTA), the group’s propaganda network. As a BBC spokesperson confirmed, these figures cover items including the use of transmitters, power and maintenance: but also “security”. BBC Afghan service sources say this last service is provided by Taliban fighters, led by Haqqani from his office in Kabul.

As for BBC Media Action, the Corporation’s charitable wing, we have obtained a copy of a “memorandum of understanding” between the organisation and RTA covering health education projects worth $1.9 million. The organisation has also confirmed that Media Action has paid both “fees” demanded by the Taliban and income tax on staff salaries — money that feeds the Taliban’s exchequer. Until early February, when President Trump and Elon Musk effectively shut down USAID, the agency was one of BBC Media Action’s biggest sources of income, financing its scheme to train Afghan journalists.

And if that chimes with other foreign organizations in Afghanistan — which pay levies as high as 60% of a project’s total budget to secure the Taliban’s blessing — the BBC’s situation is complicated further by who, exactly, its money goes to.

Aside from his avowed extremism, Haqqani is also the former head of the so-called Haqqani Network, a group responsible for kidnapping American citizens and conducting deadly suicide bombings. Since Haqqani remains on Britain’s sanctions list, it is a criminal offense under UK law to have any financial dealings with him. Qari Mohammad Yousef Ahmadi, head of RTA, is on the sanctions list too, not least for writing articles glorifying attacks on Western troops.

When asked about these links, the BBC said the Corporation is sure its dealings with Ahmadi and Haqqani don’t breach UK law, citing FCDO guidance that suggest that “a public body in which a designated person holds a leadership position is not automatically subject to sanctions”. 

For its part, BBC Media Action also insisted it wasn’t in breach of sanctions, stating that “we have no reason to believe that any benefit has been provided to any person or entity who or which has been sanctioned” and that the FCDO was “fully sighted” on all Media Action’s work. 

But a London-based sanctions expert we spoke to was less convinced. The risk sanctions had been breached would be considerable if it could be shown that Haqqani or Ahmadi exercised a “high degree of control” over the bodies that deal with the BBC or its charity — and derived direct benefit from their funding.

To listen in, you might think that the BBC has paid a high price for the privilege of remaining in Afghanistan. For one thing, it no longer broadcasts programs showcasing Western music, nor the once-popular songs of local pop stars. Condemned by the Taliban as un-Islamic, they used to be mainstays of the BBC’s Afghan schedule. Asked about this, the BBC said it had recently used part of a track by an Afghan female singer to accompany a news story, and that it sometimes broadcast “traditional” Afghan music. 

Anti-Taliban stories found elsewhere on the BBC are also absent from the Afghan service — and sometimes aren’t broadcast at all. One example was a powerful TV report on the collapse of female education under the Islamists. Covering Afghanistan’s last female schools, it showed students wearing burkas and reciting the Quran. These places were starkly contrasted with shots of the now-empty schools that thrived before 2021, when girls were taught a full secular curriculum. 

In the end, though, the BBC decided not to run the film. Staff who worked on it were told by their editors that it was “too sensitive” to broadcast. 

Such compromises predictably frustrate the Corporation’s female staff. One BBC Afghan service journalist, speaking anonymously, says it was “incredibly difficult” to persuade editors to cover women’s rights and freedom of speech. She continues: “People call and beg us to play more music on air, but we don’t — because if we do, our operations inside Afghanistan could be shut down.” Women themselves are being purged too. There used to be several female presenters on the BBC station broadcasting in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Now only one remains. On its sister Pashto station, women presenters are totally absent. 

The same journalist adds that Taliban complaints have sometimes led to internal investigations of BBC staff — as Ali Hamedani, the co-author of this article, learnt first-hand. 

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An experienced BBC journalist, Hamedani is gay and had often reported on anti-LGBT discrimination in Afghanistan. In October 2022, the month before Martens met Haqqani, Hamedani covered the killing of a local gay student. Forces answerable to Haqqani detained Hamed Sabour at a Kabul checkpoint, before torturing and shooting him dead. His killers then made a video of Sabour’s execution and sent it to his family.

Before broadcasting his story, Hamedani interviewed Sabouri’s relatives and friends. Yet after the Taliban submitted a complaint, he was forced to undergo an internal disciplinary investigation that lasted almost a year, requiring him to prove his story was accurate — including providing a photograph of the murder victim’s body. He was only cleared 11 months after his initial report.

Yet, it seems that not everyone at the BBC was up to speed, for when we asked last week why Hamedani had been investigated, its spokesperson said his report “contained an image of a living man who wasn’t Hamed Sabouri. It therefore did not comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines.” This is simply false: Hamedani’s report, though made for TV and radio, clearly contained no images of the victim. The incorrect photo appeared in The Guardian, which later acknowledged its mistake, and on a BBC Instagram feed — for which Hamedani had no responsibility. 

Despite all this, the BBC has defended its work in Afghanistan. The Corporation says it’s proud to be “the only international news media organization still broadcasting” in the country. Media Action defends its actions too, stating it “plays a critical role supporting local journalists to provide life-saving information on matters including health, nutrition and food security”. It’s also “proud of our work with local radio stations to support some of the last remaining women journalists working in radio in the country”. 

Yet perhaps the most telling statement comes from the Taliban itself. “The BBC is a credible source of news for Afghanistan,” says its official government spokesperson. “[The Corporation] collaborates constructively with the Islamic Emirate.” With praise like that, it’s hard to see how the Corporation can truly wave the flag for journalistic impartiality.

But it was also a threat. In 2007, 22,000 African Union (AU) troops were brought into Somalia to support Mogadishu’s fragile government. But at the end of this year, they are scheduled to leave. And there’s every reason to believe that al-Shabaab could take over and destabilise neighbouring nations with a large Somali diaspora. Indeed, there are already reports that al-Shabaab is in contact with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Such an alliance would further imperil international shipping routes and have enormous consequences for the world economy.

It could also spark more serious threats closer to home. After all, in the aftermath of 9/11, it was in Somalia — not Iraq or Afghanistan — that a new generation of Western jihadists were spawned.

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By the turn of the century, London had already become a haven for dissident preachers and jihadi ideologues: Abu Qatada, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, Hani al-Sibai and Abu Hamza al-Masri. But it also produced its own English-speaking radicals, who coalesced in a square mile known as Lisson Green, in the very same borough as the Houses of Parliament.

Many of the youngsters who grew up in the area had been too young to be meaningfully aware of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan or Bosnia, but they swam in the ideological currents of the aftermath. Sheikh Abu Qatadah, a top jihadi ideologue, used to deliver sermons there on Fridays. As did Anwar Awlaki, a firebrand preacher who openly gave jihadist talks and was a favourite of Mohammed Emwazi, the man who would later become known as “Jihadi John”. Just down the road, Muhammad al-Rifai, a man who claimed to be the Caliph of the whole Muslim world, lived in a council flat.

A few years ago, one of those who heard their sermons agreed to speak to me using the pseudonym Abdullah. Abdullah grew up in Lisson Green and attended the youth club where I worked for one summer in 2003. He told me about the Islamist currents that dominated the area: even the local five-a-side soccer team was named the “Shishanees” (the Chechens). Abdullah became devout during his teenage years and joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organisation that called for the return of the Caliphate. As an activist, he invited many of its members to his secondary school to give speeches to the Muslim pupils.

The youngsters stewed in this ideological cauldron when a new conflict emerged in Somalia. The fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre’s government in 1991 created a power vacuum and a decade-long civil war. Eventually, the Somali people’s desire for peace and order resulted in the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). This group, founded by religious scholars, established a semblance of law and order in the capital Mogadishu and succeeded in pushing out the nation’s CIA-backed warlords by 2006. In Lisson Green, this was a cause for celebration. A new generation of British Muslims had grown up with tales of Western jihadis and their spirited adventures in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, and they were eager to emulate them. Suddenly, they saw their opportunity in Somalia.

They were encouraged in this by Abdul Majid, an outspoken Somali-British local who drew many youngsters into his orbit, especially Bilal Berjawi, who attended the same youth club as Abdullah. Berjawi was a pug-faced bruiser with a Beckham-like voice and a reputation as a fighter. He attracted a circle of boys from the youth club and they travelled to Somalia in 2007.

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Some described the times under the ICU as idyllic. Some, such as Mohammed Ezzouek, went there claiming to want to study Islam and live under Islamic law. But the good times did not last. The Ethiopian government, alarmed by the presence of the ICU on its border, pushed them out of Mogadishu and rearmed the warlords who were back in the capital by the end of the year. This attack on the ICU radicalised its youth wing and it later split off as a separate organisation known as Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen — the Young Mujahideen Movement, or al-Shabaab for short. And as they embarked on a war against the Ethiopians, al-Shabaab declared allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Faced with this threat, the young men from Lisson Green fled Somalia trying to reach safety in Kenya. Once there, some were detained and interrogated, while a handful returned to the UK having turned their back on both Somalia and Islamist ideology. Others, however, became more radicalised. And chief among them was Berjawi, who became a full member of al-Shabaab and was purportedly trained by Harun Fazul, the man behind the 1998 terrorist bombings in East Africa. Indeed, Fazul chose Berjawi as the leader of the London network. Over the next few years, Berjawi came in and out of the UK to fundraise for the group.

After proving himself, Berjawi went on to become an important commander for al-Shabaab, until he was killed in 2012 by the US in a drone strike, reportedly with British complicity. But Berjawi left behind those he recruited: in particular, Mohammed Sakr, Mohammed Emwazi and Alexanda Kotey. Sakr and Emwazi tried to enter Somalia again in 2009, using a cover story that they were going on safari in Tanzania. In Syria, Emwazi and Kotey would become the Western faces of the Caliphate.

Meanwhile, those who could not take part in jihad in Syria were recruited to carry out terror attacks in the UK. Michael Adebolajo, an associate of Berjawi who had tried to join al-Shabaab, murdered British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013. Three years later, two promising university students, Tarik Hassane and Suhaib Majeed, were convicted for their part in an Isis terror plot in West London; both men were from Lisson Green or nearby. They had been acting under Kotey’s instructions.

This was the effect of the rise of al-Shabaab. At the time, policymakers appeared to be more preoccupied with threats emerging from Afghanistan and Iraq, or dealing with the aftermath of major terror attacks such as the one that took place in London on 7/7, to appreciate the presence al-Shabaab had on a small but significant number of young Muslims in the West. Somalia appeared distant and war-torn.

Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation, with a turbo-charged jihadi discourse heightened by the horrific situation in Palestine. Young disaffected Muslims watch as the media appears outraged by Russian targeting of hospitals in Ukraine but relatively indifferent when the IDF targets hospitals in Gaza. They see themselves as othered, devalued and forgotten. Spurred on by social media and Telegram groups, they see the likes of the Taliban defeating the Americans or the Houthis doing something for Gaza while the rest of the Muslim world appears impotent.

For them, al-Shabaab offers an animating force. If its flags rise in Mogadishu, a new generation of Western jihadists could return to the Horn of Africa.

Until then, Biden’s legendary resilience seemed unbreakable. This was, after all, a quality he acquired at the price of intense suffering. By the time Biden appeared as a newly elected senator on the Washington scene in 1973, he had already suffered two life-altering tragedies. First, the rapid downfall of his businessman father from affluence to poverty when Biden was seven years old; and second, the more terrible blow of the accidental death of his wife and one-year-old daughter some 40 days after he was first elected.

Yet still Biden marched on, winning re-election to the Senate every six years until 2008, when he was concurrently elected Vice President with Barack Obama. It was, more than anything, proof of his mastery of “retail politics”, which allowed him to keep different clusters of voters happy. In Biden’s mini-state of Delaware — whose population in 1974 was just over 600,000 when New York State already had close to 20 million — it was not hard for him to win voters one by one, especially since he chose to live in Wilmington, commuting by train to Washington each day. When I first met Biden during his first senatorial term, the legendary political guru and speaker of the house Tip O’Neill was already saying that he would be a Washington personality for decades.

Many things about Biden’s life are well-known, but only future biographers will reveal what he himself rigorously kept secret from the world: that during his eight years as VP, Obama systematically ignored his excellent advice on foreign affairs. Captive to the latest policy clichés of the NGO world, he ignored Biden’s decades of experience as a very active member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had heard from and interrogated hundreds of expert witnesses, many of them with valuable, first-hand experience in the world beyond Washington.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, by far the most important foreign-policy issues during his eight vice-presidential years, Biden radically disagreed with the strategy that Obama inherited and continued to pursue. Biden insisted that Iran would control Iraq unless its influence was drastically limited by US support for a Sunni regional government in addition to the Kurdish regional government, thereby confining Iran’s influence to a third, Shi’a, regional government.

But Obama preferred the advice of Dr Susan Rice, his national security advisor, Dr Samantha Powers, his ambassador to the UN, and Dr General Petraeus, whose stock of fashionable academic phrases about the world’s conflicts could never compete with the real-world knowledge that Biden had accumulated. As a result, Iran did what it wanted in Iraq. And it still does, largely because a central proponent of Obama’s deluded appeasement policy outlived his presidency: his personal friend Roger Malley, who was foisted on Biden and kept in the White House, until he was finally brought down by a security breach.

It was much the same in Afghanistan. Had Obama followed Biden’s advice, instead of listening to the telegenic PhD-general Petraeus, the US could have saved trillions of dollars and many American lives by abandoning the quixotic attempt to train and equip the Afghan army. From the start, Biden insisted that the military body was a total fraud — not just because Afghanistan’s so-called officers bought their promotions with bribes, but because the entire concept was rooted in a fantasy. Biden knew that Tajiks would only fight for other Tajiks, Uzbeks for Uzbeks, Hazaras for Hazaras, and so on — and that none of them would fight for the abstraction called Afghanistan.

Indeed, he needed tremendous self-discipline not to react when he saw his superficial boss being endlessly applauded at elite policy gatherings in Washington and Aspen, while he himself was ridiculed at Georgetown dinner parties. And it was a most bitter irony that it was Biden, as the newly installed president, who was universally blamed for America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months after his inauguration, following the mass surrender of the Afghan army without a fight.

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Now, as he exits the stage, Biden has decided to offer another hostage to fortune, by nominating Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate ahead of the Chicago convention next month. That Harris is a remarkably strategic politician shouldn’t be overlooked: she started her pursuit of high office before she was 18 by choosing the modest education of Howard University over Stanford — where her father would teach — because of Howard’s politically powerful Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. But this cannot do more than mitigate her tremendous shortcomings as a candidate.

As VP, she was given one task: to stop the politically disastrous flood of millions of illegal immigrants walking across the border from Mexico. In June 2021, she made a very brief and futile visit to the border instead of staying in Washington to identify and activate effective border-control measures, which did exist and were only activated by Biden himself as the election approached. When given her only opportunity to display a capacity to govern, Harris failed.

For this and many other reasons, it seems improbable that Harris would fare well in a campaign against Trump, unless her running mate can do even more for her than the sharply intelligent Vance can do for Trump. But looking at the array of figures now trying to win her favour, one must be sceptical. As someone who was befriended by Biden decades ago, I do not derive any pleasure in anticipating that his anointed successor will be removed by the Democratic Convention — or else lead her party into a November debacle.

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.

It is a significant setback for Biden, who had asked Congress for an additional $20 billion for Ukraine — on top of more than $60 billion in aid already sent to the warring ally, including more than $40 billion in direct military assistance. In response, Biden sought to reassure Ukraine and Nato allies that the funding will be approved through a separate vote.

But even if that happens, the White House will still face an increasingly uphill struggle in mustering political support for its strategy of open-ended assistance to Ukraine. Not only is Trump, with his anti-war stance, continuing to rise in the polls, but even the more hawkish elements of the US and Western establishment are starting to rethink their stance on Ukraine. Indeed, it seems to finally be dawning on them that, as one leading commentator wrote in Newsweek, “there is no realistic basis to believe that Ukraine has the capacity to attain its stated strategic objective to reclaim all its territory, including Crimea”. A correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, recently noted that Ukraine’s goal of retaking all the territory it lost now “appears a distant prospect”.

This shift is largely a result of the failure of Ukrainian’s eagerly anticipated counteroffensive. “Ukraine has liberated less than 0.25% of the territory that Russia occupied in June,” reports The Economist. “The 1,000km front line has barely shifted.” In fact, not only does Russia now control nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year, but, as The New York Times noted, in the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, “as much as 20% of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to US and European officials”. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that Ukrainian casualties have been massive — potentially in the tens of thousands, according to the BBC.

Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy of the counteroffensive is that its shortcomings were entirely predictable. As John Mearsheimer wrote: “A look at the lineup of forces on both sides and what the Ukrainian army was trying to do, coupled with an understanding of the history of conventional land war, made it clear that there was virtually no chance the attacking Ukrainian forces could defeat Russia’s defending forces and achieve their political goals.”

Does this mean that the West is finally coming round to the need for a diplomatic solution? Unfortunately not. “Asking for a ceasefire or peace talks is pointless,” according to The Economist. “Vladimir Putin shows no sign of wanting to negotiate and, even if he did, could not be trusted to stick to a deal. If Ukrainians stop fighting, they could lose their country.”

That is a questionable assertion ― Russia claims it is open to negotiations, while there is some evidence that Putin made several attempts to reach a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis in the months and weeks leading up to the war, and even in the weeks following the invasion. But it is certainly true that reaching an agreement now is much trickier. This is because the derailment of peace talks in the early days in the war has allowed Russia to gain a tactical advantage, which now makes a negotiated settlement much more difficult to achieve. Even US officials now admit that the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, “had a point” when he called for Kyiv to make the most of its gains by suing for peace late last year, and that “we may have missed a window to push for earlier talks”.

However, this is no excuse for the West to not even consider sitting down at the negotiating table. So why is there no diplomatic solution in sight? Part of the problem is that this war isn’t perceived as an existential struggle only by Ukraine, but also by Russia and the US: they both know that the outcome of this conflict will have massive geopolitical ramifications. Military defeat is therefore not an option, but neither is a settlement that may be interpreted as an admission of defeat.

And then, to make matters worse, there are those in the US establishment who want this war to continue, no matter what, because they view it as beneficial to their interests. Consider Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who recently tweeted: “Standing with our allies against Russian aggression isn’t charity. In fact  —  it’s a direct investment in replenishing America’s arsenal with American weapons built by American workers. Expanding our defence industrial base puts America in a stronger position to out-compete China.” Last year, he claimed that “the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests”.

As the Democratic Senator, Richard Blumenthal, recently put it, America is therefore getting its “money’s worth” in Ukraine: “For less than 3% of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half… All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost.” But the conflict is also serving US interest by bolstering Nato, and therefore America’s military control over Europe. Thus, in the middle of Ukraine’s bloody counteroffensive, David Ignatius had the nerve to claim in the Washington Post that “overall, this has been a triumphal summer for Nato”. The Bill Kristol-led group “Republicans for Ukraine” even released a TV ad claiming: “When America arms Ukraine, we get a lot for a little.” It was further proof that calling the conflict a proxy war is no longer just a “pro-Russian talking point”.

If, however, there is no realistic basis to believe that Ukraine has the capacity to attain its stated strategic objective of reclaiming all Russian-controlled territories, but peace (or even a ceasefire) is not an option, what options are left? Once again, the answer is provided by The Economist: “Both Ukraine and its Western supporters are coming to realise that this will be a grinding war of attrition… Instead of aiming to ‘win’ and then rebuild, the goal should be to ensure that Ukraine has the staying power to wage a long war — and can thrive despite it.”

As Nato’s chief Jens Stoltenberg recently stated: “We must prepare ourselves for a long war in Ukraine.” This now seems to be the consensus in Western establishment circles. “The US and its allies in the Group of Seven now expect the war in Ukraine may drag on for years to come and are building that possibility into their military and financial planning,” Bloomberg reported. Even America’s ultra-hawkish US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland conveyed a similar message to Kyiv, saying that the US must help Ukraine “accelerate the process of thriving in parts of Ukraine that are not occupied”, implying that the territories under Russian control would remain so for a very long time.

This means shifting from battleground operations aimed at taking back territory to measures aimed at bolstering Ukraine’s defences (to the benefit of Western arms manufacturers), coupled with increasingly brazen attacks on Russia or Russian-controlled territories, especially Crimea, which have a marginal effect on the military balance of power. Indeed, for the first time, the Biden administration is now considering sending ATACMS long-range missiles with the capability to strike deep inside Russian territory — a policy which the US has been unofficially supporting for months, and which it is now officially endorsing.

The prospect of an Afghanistan-style war of attrition is worrying for a number of reasons. Firstly, because, if Ukraine had little chance of winning a blitzkrieg-style counteroffensive, it has even less chance of winning a long-term war of attrition, given Russia’s advantage in manpower and its ability to produce more artillery and ammunitions than Ukraine and the West combined (Russia’s current ammunition production is seven times greater than that of the West). “If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable,” a senior French official told the Wall Street Journal in February.

And second, because as the conflict drags on, and potentially escalates, direct Nato involvement in the conflict — and thus the risk of an all-out war between Nato and Russia — will inevitably increase. Europeans should be especially worried by the prospect of a long war: if American military assistance starts to wane, Europe will need to carry more of the burden. Indeed, it would appear that the EU has already taken its cue from events on the other side of the Atlantic. On Monday, two days after the no-deal in the US Congress, the EU’s foreign ministers paid a surprise visit to Kyiv to express their unwavering support for Ukraine.

Whatever happens in the US, “from our side, we will continue supporting and increasing our support”, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said. To this end, there is even talk of allowing the European Investment Bank to start financing defence project. The fact that Europe, unlike America, has nothing to benefit, neither economically nor in security terms, from a permanent militarisation of relations with its nuclear-armed neighbour doesn’t seem to be an issue.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to conclude that this “Europeanisation” of the war — with Germany as the vassal-in-chief, as foreseen by Wolfgang Streeck — would represent a double win for America: it would allow it to disentangle itself from the conflict, politically and financially, while continuing to indirectly preside over the region, via the EU. In other words, the EU would end up fighting a proxy war on America’s behalf, almost entirely to the latter’s benefit — the ultimate act of vassalisation.

If this seems foolish, let alone dangerous, we can find some solace in the fact that reality would appear to be standing in the way of this plan. There is, after all, simply no way for the EU to plug the gap — in military, financial or political terms — if Washington scales back its support. For those of us who yearn for peace, the EU’s dysfunction might be, for once, a silver lining.

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.

Pakistan needs friends, but they are in short supply. Since Partition in August 1947, the Government has fabricated a national identity hinged around despising India. Delusions of grandeur followed — and now they are starting to shatter.

The secession of Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 after war with India should have been a rude awakening. It should also have binned the narrative that India is trying to annex its territory, since New Delhi facilitated the transition of East Pakistan to an independent Bangladesh, instead of gulping it down as war spoil. The creation of Bangladesh should also have disabused Pakistan of the farcical notion that adherence to Islam can forge a single national identity — if indeed that weren’t obvious from the presence of two separate Muslim-majority states along Pakistan’s western border.

Instead, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who led the country post-1971, Pakistan Islamised the constitution, propelled jihadist groups towards Afghanistan in search of more geopolitical influence, and invited investment of freshly-minted Arab petrodollars. Since then, Pakistan’s leaders have enabled the establishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Talibanisation of Pakistan itself, and the radical Islamisation of Kashmir, as well as multiple jihadist attacks on India. Yet even after decades of jihadism backfiring on Pakistan, the country’s leaders still won’t rethink their extreme, religionist narrative on India. Incumbent Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari doesn’t hesitate to use Islamist rhetoric in discussing Kashmir; Imran Khan confidently urges Indian Muslims to pick up arms against the state.

The trouble is that Islamist policies created Pakistan, rather than the other way around. Hostility towards India, therefore, is not temporary opportunism on the part of Islamists, but the consequence of centuries-old political and theological narratives. Once the British Raj took over, the Muslim elite of India became increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of eventually living in a Hindu majority nation, and struggled for religionist separation. This became the ideological raison d’être of Pakistan, in the form of the Two Nation Theory: “Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations that cannot live together.” For the past 76 years, “Muslim” Pakistan let this narrative direct its relations with “Hindu” India.

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Today, the nations’ differences are most obvious in the economic realm: Pakistan and India have foreign reserves of $3 billion and $600 billion respectively. While pointing this out might have been met with accusations of treason in Pakistan until a couple of years ago, recent events have led to the beginning of a massive rethink. After Imran Khan’s government became the latest to be ousted by the military’s machinations last year, anti-army sentiments have been simmering. But even more critically, the extent of Pakistan’s ongoing fiscal crisis has made people question the army’s grandiose rhetoric, including the gross impracticality of any ambitions for Kashmir, given the economic strides India is making. Pakistan is missing out on at least $37 billion worth of potential trade with India annually, owing to its obstinate fixation with self-inflating Islam-centric narratives.

With the already limited trade with India largely frozen since the border skirmishes of 2019, Pakistan has instead looked to China. The $62 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is Beijing’s biggest-ever overseas investment. Part of the Belt and Road Initiative, CPEC was supposed to be a fiscal lifeline, but it has instead metamorphosed into a debt trap, owing to skewed agreements predominantly dictated by Beijing. CPEC is starting to seem more like a neocolonial venture, a front for the Chinese takeover of Pakistan, which is leading to human rights abuses and mass appropriation of resources. The Chinese stranglehold has left Islamabad with little choice but to continually express gratitude to Beijing over partial loans to pay import bills issued mostly, of course, by China.

For Pakistan, which has persistently chosen to alienate all its neighbours, the only rational way forward would be to actively work towards regional cooperation — beginning with the subcontinent’s largest country. The longer Pakistan takes to come to this conclusion, the harder it will be. Today, better ties with India aren’t something that Pakistan can simply ask for; Islamabad would need to offer some incentive. It would have to right those wrongs that leaders in Pakistan have openly confessed to: the provocation of wars, the facilitation of India-bound jihadist groups such as the JeM or the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated, among others, the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Gaining India’s trust will be very, very difficult.

Moreover, Pakistan will face internal resistance from the jihadist superstructure it has buttressed for years. Every time there are ostensible steps towards initiation of peace with India, that structure responds with a coordinated manoeuvre. After the 2001 Agra Summit, there was an attack on the Indian Parliament; after Narendra Modi’s visit to Pakistan in 2015, there was the Pathankot raid. If Pakistan is to develop strong, productive ties in the region, it must stop supporting jihadist outfits of any variety. Pakistan will also have to start acknowledging the simple reality that the Indian subcontinent has a shared history spanning millennia — and hence overlapping cultures, languages, and customs. Finally, Pakistan’s economy would have to reinvent itself as growth-oriented, rather than heavily militarised and reliant on foreign aid. These steps could usher in a future of better politico-economic collaboration — and put an end to the submissive, extractive alliance with China.

Unfortunately, the supposed peaceniks in Pakistan have instead been fixated on their own anti-India agenda. For them, the recent surge in Hindutva nationalism driven by Delhi, and the targeting of Muslims, vindicates Pakistan’s separation. They tend to gloss over the fact that religious minorities are disproportionately looking to leave Pakistan for India, while Indian Muslims aren’t exactly queueing up to move in the other direction. They ignore, too, the fact that, despite Hindutva ambitions to reconvert disputed mosques into Hindu temples, there are over 300,000 mosques in India, with numerous under construction or renovation. By contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed over the past 76 years in Pakistan.

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Even leaving aside the possibility that the increasing marginalisation of Indian Muslims could be a side-effect of Pakistan’s creation, a country founded and sustained on Muslim nationalism has little grounds to criticise Hindu nationalism. And besides, all this bickering over whose nationalism is more toxic, and whose treatment of Kashmir is worse, pales into insignificance when one considers the glaring difference in the two nations’ global standing.

More than anything else, the success of Pakistan’s “bleed India with a thousand cuts” policy can be gauged by the volumes of blood the country has shed of its own people. More than 80,000 Pakistanis are direct victims of jihadist attacks. But where glorification of death in the name of “martyrdom” has belittled the colossal loss of life, Pakistan’s rapidly emptying coffers might leave the nation with no choice but to surrender — especially with Saudi Arabia pulling the plug on jihadi funding. The still-rising defence budget suggests that the Pakistan army is refusing to let go of its delusions of grandeur. It is only a matter of time, though, before it caves. At the end of the day, governments need money to run a country, and for that they need allies. A nation cannot live on stories alone.

But though Talichad won the insurgency, could he still lose the peace? Young Taliban fighters, whose daily life has been transformed by victory, have been interviewed for a new report — and it turns out many don’t like it. Put to work in Kabul’s bureaucracy, they find office work dull and restrictive, and they miss the excitement, fellowship and lofty moral purpose they felt as insurgents. Not only do they loathe office work every bit as much as the West’s much-discussed “quiet quitters”, but peacetime urban life appears to be making them soft and, well, less Taliban-ish.

This, in turn, raises some questions for the online masculinist Right in the West: the men who made a totem of Talichad. For the Taliban’s predicament now offers a counterfactual to a doctrine from these circles, that’s now leaking into the mainstream: that every facet of modern male malaise is the fault of women, and especially of feminism.

This idea circulates, in condensed form, via the term “longhouse”. This originates with the now-notorious internet anon Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), author of the influential 2018 Bronze Age Mindset. Ironically, the term accepts wholesale a set of revisionist claims made by feminist archaeologists, such as Heide Göttner-Abendroth, who argue the very earliest societies lived in collective “longhouse” dwellings — and were matriarchal.

For Göttner-Abendroth and her fellow feminists, these longhouse-dwelling matriarchies were characterised by egalitarianism and sharing of resources and caring obligations, traits they viewed as positive and worthy of revival. From the perspective of Bronze Age Pervert and his online followers, though, such societies are beneath contempt, dragging the natural excellence of some into the feminised morass of the many.

And, contra the feminists, such matriarchy isn’t something we should revive — because it’s already here. For BAP, the modern world is already one huge metaphorical “longhouse”. In it, we are told, Western men have grown contemptibly soft, relinquishing a life of confident vitality in favour of a weak and resentful mass culture of collectivism. BAPists assert that under this suffocating order, masculine excellence is resentfully nipped in the bud at every turn by a stifling, safety-obsessed egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, whose enforcers act like burrowing termites to hollow out everything good about our civilisation, leaving behind only crumbling ruins to be picked over by whiny, feeble, and increasingly asexual moral pygmies.

And this is all women’s fault. When the “longhouse” meme completed its transition to familiar jargon recently, in an explainer on the term published by First Things, the author ‘Lomez’ linked it explicitly with the growing prevalence of women in public life. In BAP’s view, “feminism and the liberation of women” is “both the proximate and the ultimate cause” of this nightmarish world, which Bronze Age Mindset characterises luridly as presided over by “some kind of half-human half-cockroach creature resplendent with horrid eggs like a big Amazon centipede…this seeks to re-absorb you”.

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As the “longhouse” concept has percolated out of group chats and Discord servers, so too has this correlation grown more accepted, between emotivism, safetyism, suffocating egalitarianism — and the rising prevalence of women in public life. Essays now come thick and fast: political scientist Richard Hanania tackled the relation between female-typical social patterns and changing norms of political debate and conflict, and the journalist Heather Mac Donald argued that the feminisation of American academia is now “almost complete”. She suggests that this has been accompanied by a transition away from norms of truth-seeking and open debate, toward a culture characterised by emotional volatility, anxiety and a fixation on vulnerability.

Conservative campaigner Christopher Rufo developed Mac Donald’s arguments to suggest that a public culture that over-emphasises “trait empathisation”, which is to say a more female-typical style of relating, has negative downstream consequences including normalising psychological disequilibrium, and leaving young people permanently infantilised. A consensus is emerging on the Right, then, that the feminisation of public life is causing (or at least linked to) a great many things the Right views as disagreeable. As these arguments bleed into mainstream discourse, though, few have the forthrightness of your average internet anon. The anti-woke activist James Lindsay may say “woke is a woman”, for example, but he’s lighter on what that implies in policy terms. Mac Donald and Rufo are likewise at pains to make clear that they aren’t saying female-typical traits and preferences are bad or in need of elimination.

Meanwhile, the anons mutter that surely the solution to a problem that started with the feminisation of public life is, well, defeminising it again — or just walking away to start something new. BAP advocates exiting the “longhouse” for life as a “Bronze Age pirate”; it’s not wholly clear what this means, but the overall impression is of all-male groups, perhaps mercenaries, or something not dissimilar to bands of Taliban insurgents. In any case, it’s clear enough that many cheered on the Taliban for evicting women from schools and workplaces, in no small part for achieving what they only fantasise about: a public square purged of women.

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But, speculating wildly, imagine the Talichad celebrators got their way and booted women out of public life. Would that result in a return of manliness? The first-person accounts of Taliban fighters now working in Kabul’s bureaucracy suggests: possibly not. For it appears that no matter how manly your mujahideen, when you transpose them to a high-tech metropolis and put them to work in Excel spreadsheets, they’ll begin to drift toward the social and psychological conditions deplored by BAPists in the West.

Bronze Age Mindset chafes against a sense of life lived in captivity, where all space is already “owned” and freedom of action always already circumscribed. And we find an echo of that same sense of constraint in the grumbles of Huzaifa, 24, about his post-victory loss of freedom: “The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.”

City life seems to drive alienation and moral degeneracy, too: several fighters lament how atomised everyone is there, and deplore the sight of their comrades succumbing to temptation: drug use, hot girls, material possessions. And cubicle-drone life is so boring and repetitive that many spend their days slacking on social media instead: “Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter,” admits Abdul Nafi. Social media addiction thus completes the transition of these young men, from “Talichads” admired by alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in the West into alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in Kabul.

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And in this case, it’s indisputably not women’s fault. As is well-documented, to mainstream lamentations and 4chan glee, there are no Afghan women in these workplaces. For the Taliban, then, the exchange of masculine camaraderie and freedom for alienation, constraint and moral degradation has not involved the female HR managers, DEI administrators and the like whom the masculinist Right generally blame for their woes. And this suggests that at least some of the “longhouse” phenomena now being reflexively blamed on women may be less a malign byproduct of literal workplace feminisation than a consequence of working an office job in a high-tech, 21st-century urban environment.

The notorious anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski made a version of this point in his manifesto, arguing that modern men and women are “oversocialised” into neurosis, powerlessness and anxiety as a byproduct of the distorting effect industrial society has on human nature. Today, “Uncle Ted” is himself a popular underground literary influence, and source of internet memes. But he was arrested before the mass spread of the internet, and to my knowledge has not commented on its contribution to the conditions he deplored. Yet perhaps the bitterest irony of all is that the internet acts as an accelerant on all the phenomena Kaczynski described. Thus, as the Taliban have taken to the internet — whether to promote recognition of their regime or just ease the boredom of cubicle life — they’ve been drawn, by degrees, into the most captivating “longhouse” of all.

The struggle sessions, cancel culture and purity spirals routinely blamed by the Hananias of this world on political feminisation happen among anonymous Right-wing body-builders too. And this is because, as I’ve argued before, social media itself forces even the most committedly masculinist groups into female-typical social patterns: covert aggression, public scolding, punishment via ostracism and so on. When your principal means of interaction incentivises endless talking, even as it forecloses physical confrontation, how is anyone meant to navigate disagreements except via stereotypically feminine social patterns such as “calling out”, backbiting, emotional drama or cancelling wrongdoers?

Things are rarely monocausal, and social and material feedback loops are complex. I don’t doubt that the presence of more women in the workplace makes some contribution to the tone of public life. Indeed, I’ve made that case myself, though needless to say I don’t think this is an argument for Taliban-style purges. But I suspect that for those very online males currently fantasising about making everything less longhouse-y, and wishing they could do so by just getting women to shut up, actually succeeding would make less difference than they imagined.

For probably the only way the online masculinist Right could exit the “longhouse” entirely would be by passing the Taliban in the opposite direction, and exiting the modern world. And, especially, exiting the internet. And it seems not even the Taliban is willing to do that.

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.

This is the paradox of the past 12 months: the existence of women is being questioned in the very place where female emancipation has come furthest, while in places where women remain shackled to medieval notions of honour and chastity, true feminism is at its strongest.

Why should we worry about dictionary definitions, when everyone knows what a woman is anyway? This may seem like a fair question. Yet simply dismissing the erasure of a word as a “culture war issue” misunderstands the forces that drive it. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay noted in their 2020 book Cynical Theories, language is now viewed as a tool of oppression, and thus must be altered in the name of so-called “liberation”. These arguments over the word “woman”, then, have wider repercussions: they are fronts in a greater war that will determine how language itself is used.

Those who would divorce “woman” from its biological implications often present their ideas as innocuous. They are, we are told, simply champions of “inclusion”. But their ideology is hardly uncontroversial, and surrendering to it is not harmless. The past year has seen reports of transgender women attacking women in female-only spaces and unfairly winning trophies in women’s sports. The spirit of these failures was perhaps best-distilled in the words of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in March was unable to define what being a woman entailed during her Senate confirmation hearing. “I’m not a biologist,” she said, as if one needed to be a professional scientist to know basic biological facts.

A word of clarification. I am immensely sympathetic to the plight of transgender people and believe they ought to have the same moral and legal rights as everyone else. To be against militant trans activists’ gender ideology is not to be transphobic. Rather, it is simply to agree, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie succinctly put it, that “trans women are trans women”. Adichie was savaged for this and other statements evincing wrongthink, but acknowledging that trans women are distinct from women, that there are potential conflicts between their rights, and that gender ideology opens the door to abusive men masquerading as women, should not be controversial. Standing up for the rights of transgender people should not mean pretending sex does not exist altogether.

Indulging in this fantasy can have perverse, and dangerous, repercussions — both at home and abroad. Here in the West, it culminates in a myopic worldview which holds that a bestselling author (and domestic abuse survivor) should be trolled for funding a women-only service for victims of sexual abuse. Elsewhere in the world, the erosion of our understanding of what it means to be a “woman” has more immediate consequences.

Consider what has taken place in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan in just the past two months. In Kenya, while women in America debated what we should call a person born with a cervix, FGM has taken a new and insidious form. In Iran, the female-led protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested for breaking mandatory dress code laws, have been met with an equally inhumane response. Reports abound of Iran’s security services raping protestors and shooting at the faces and genitals of female protesters. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban government reintroduced Sharia Law, meaning women are now barred from walking outside without a male relative and must cover up with a burqa or hijab when outside the home. Earlier this month, a woman was publicly flogged for entering a shop without a male guardian. Last week, the Taliban banned women from studying at university

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Is it really a coincidence that, in the same year the West forgot what it means to be a woman, we decided it was acceptable to turn our backs on women in those countries? The above is what happens when a society stops caring what it means to be a woman; when a centuries-old fight for emancipation becomes relegated to semantics. Of course, this takes a different form in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan. But there still seem to me to be similarities between today’s gender activists and theocratic subjugators. Both believe, on the basis of a contentious ideology, that they have a monopoly on truth. And both, in a sense, are champions of the subjective over the objective: in one case, particular religious beliefs are said to tell us how society should be run — and in the other, mere feelings are said to abolish material reality.

This is why gender ideology advocates are a threat not just to women but to Western ideals, too. Western culture prides itself on the achievements of the Enlightenment and science — in other words, on objectivity. It was on an objective basis that previous generations of feminists staked their claim: their plight was based on an appeal to reason. Now, so-called “progressives” — another term that has been redefined into meaninglessness — stake their claim on subjective feelings and happily ignore or dismiss its material effects.

The effects of this are slowly taking shape. In the Seventies, the anti-Shah Iranians threw in their lot with the ayatollahs in the delusional hope that the ayatollahs would share power after the revolution. They learned very quickly that fanatics cannot be trusted or restrained. Similarly, many Western feminists ended up allying themselves with progressivism, and now far too many women have felt the terrible consequences of that alliance. If the spirit of true feminism is to be reclaimed, we need more JK Rowlings and fewer Ketanji Brown Jacksons.

It is not just feminism and the rights of women that are at stake here: so, too, are the best ideals of the West itself. If 2022 is the year of the “woman”, let’s hope 2023 will be the year when we can delete those quotation marks.

In the officers’ mess at Hyde Park Barracks, there hung a depiction of the regiment’s officers from 1857. It showed an all-male, blue-blooded ensemble, in elaborate dress. The new painting was to take the same format, but was meant to showcase how the Household Cavalry — traditionally the socially “smartest” section of the British Army — had changed. The unit now had black and Sikh officers. In common with other infantry and armoured units at the time, there were still no women formally within the regiment, but there were some working with it, including a vet.

The young painter, Louise Pragnell, agreed to take on the project. In time, the huge 3m-by-1m painting almost drove her insane. The resulting image also embodied the British Army’s confused attitude to diversity in the 21st century.

Olver explained the concept: “We’ve got these two women here, and we’ve got a Sikh and we’ve got two black guys.” The sitting took place in May 2008 at the barracks south of the Serpentine. The 25 subjects wore a variety of dress, from ceremonial “state kit” with its gleaming breastplate to the scarlet bum-freezer jacket of mess kit, service dress, or combats. Some eschewed uniform altogether, coming in polo kit, hunting gear and Ascot tails. There was a strong equine theme.

As a message, the scene was a mixed one: we have black people, it said. We have women. But we’re all still really posh. Notably, both the black officers — one Ghanaian, the other Zimbabwean — spoke with received pronunciation. Meanwhile, one sitter liked the idea of a soldier servant pouring him a glass of champagne while he stared imperiously in the other direction. That hardly seemed to concur with the diversity message, but Pragnell included it.

I’m always reminded of these mixed messages, whenever a row erupts about diversity in the British military. In August, the head of Royal Air Force recruitment resigned, reportedly due to a focus on hitting “impossible” diversity targets. (In response James Heappey, the armed forces minister, denied claims that job offers for white men had been put on “pause” to achieve such targets, clarifying that air force leadership had paused offering training slots to all candidates while they examined how they might take legal steps — so-called positive action — to assist improving diversity levels on courses.)

Earlier in the year, shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the British Army put all non-essential work on hold for a “diversity training day”, to address concerns including drug and alcohol abuse, bullying and racism. In his first speech in post last December, Admiral Tony Radakin, professional head of the armed forces, said that diversity is “not about wokefulness”. “It is about woefulness,” he added. “The woefulness of too few women. The woefulness of not reflecting the ethnic, religious and cognitive diversity of our nation.”

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Indeed, the British Armed Forces have long failed to reflect the society they are tasked to defend. The full-time military is still 90.4% white and 88.7% male. Female representation is roughly equal between the services, but ethnic minorities make up 14% of the army (in which 40% of ethnic minority personnel originate from abroad), compared to 4.9% of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and only 3.5% of the air force.

Meanwhile, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to military diversity: social class. Just as Louise Pragnell’s painting displayed ethnic diversity but class homogeneity, all three services are still split into distinct commissioned and non-commissioned universes — between officers and soldiers, in army language. Each track features its own entry requirements and career trajectories. And this split is traditionally based on class: historically, officers were posh; the soldiers were not.

There is some movement between these worlds. For instance, the army sends some promising young soldiers to train at the officer academy at Sandhurst, alongside direct-entry, predominantly graduate cadets. At the other end of the spectrum, there is also now no section of the army where it is impossible to live on your pay as an officer — in the past high mess bills and the prohibitive costs of tailored uniforms could mean a private income was required. Nonetheless, the officer-soldier divide is still the defining fault line in the military’s organisation, and it is most acute in the army. In 2019, 49% of Sandhurst direct-entrant cadets had attended fee-paying schools — whereas the equivalent figure for the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth was 36%. (The RAF does not gather information on educational background.)

Britain’s military institutions are pushing a race and gender diversity agenda, while largely failing to acknowledge that their basic shape is still profoundly non-egalitarian. British Army recruiting adverts released in 2018 included short, animated advertisements with titles like “Can I be gay in the Army?” and “Can I practise my faith in the army?” They did not ask “Will I have to call someone younger and less experienced than me ‘sir’?” or “Can I get into a smart regiment if I don’t know that shirts with single cuffs are taboo?”

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An official Ministry of Defence action plan, leaked in August, aimed to “build defence into an institutionally inclusive organisation” and “to drive significant change by ensuring that race equality is a driving principle in defence”. Every time something like this happens, anonymous Whitehall sources brief “dereliction of duty” and Tory MPs spit fire about quotas, but no one tends to remark that the diversity initiatives speak less loudly about class than race and gender. People simply accuse the military of putting diversity ahead of defence.

It is worth considering, then, whether diversity initiatives actually make the military a more effective fighting organisation. On class and race, I would suggest the arguments are clear-cut. If the army, in particular, can break away from its traditional upper-middle class leadership cadre by recruiting more working-class and non-white officers, it is likely to be less hidebound by tradition. That is important. For all the pomp of the queen’s funeral, wars are not won by polishing things.

In my book, I focus on a cavalry regiment in the run-up to and during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. This organisation — pickled in alcohol, obsessed with standards of tailoring and mess etiquette (junior officers weren’t allowed to go to bed until everyone senior to them had departed), even as the drums of war began to beat, now seems picaresque and bizarre. But that ossification came in part from decades of recruiting the same kind of people, putting them through a brutal process of hazing, and then ensuring they replicated that treatment on those that succeeded them. Recruitment across wider social background shakes up things like that.

The full integration of women is more complex. The ban on women in combat roles — infantry or armoured units — was not lifted until 2016, two years after Britain withdrew from Helmand. But the reality of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, in which there were no front lines, meant that female soldiers, for instance medics attached to infantry patrols, took the same risks as men. “Some of the best soldiers and most promising officers I know are women,” said General Patrick Sanders, at a ceremony in 2018 to mark all roles in the army becoming open to women. “Simply put the infantry will be more effective in war if we include the best talent our country can breed — male and female.”

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But whether opening armoured and infantry roles to women has improved the army is a complicated question. During the several hundred interviews I conducted for my book, I found that opinion is split. There was clear respect, even from relatively old-fashioned men, for the achievements of women. Many I spoke to suggested that naysayers had been proved wrong. Yet at the same time most men from the combat arms, soldiers and officers alike, remained — in private at least — opposed to the formal integration of women into their units. My sense is that the 2016-18 reform reflected the army leadership’s feeling that keeping some units male-only was now politically impossible, rather than a belief that it would create the most militarily effective army. (“This decision wasn’t forced upon us,” Sanders insisted).

Whenever the subject of women in “ground combat’ is raised there tends to be a lot of sexist and poorly-informed chatter about supposedly innate personality differences or the impact on male behaviour of having women nearby. Much of that is bunkum, as the bravery and effectiveness of female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan attests. But there does remain an unassailable difficulty: physical requirements.

Many crucial jobs in the contemporary military do not require physical strength. But some do, and within infantry soldiering the ability to move long distances on foot carrying weight remains essential. Some exceptional women can meet and beat fitness requirements designed for men, but they are a minority. The US Army envisioned a gender-neutral new fitness test in 2017, but trials found that only 41-52% of enlisted women were passing, compared to 83-92% of men, depending on the component of the test. Among officers the pass rates were higher, but there was still a significant difference. When the test was actually implemented this year, gender neutral scoring had to be abolished. For example, in the deadlift component, women between the ages 17-21 have to lift 54kg to pass. Men in the same age group have to lift 64kg.

In general, integrating women into ground combat units requires one of two approaches. Either the existing fitness standards are maintained, which effectively means only small numbers of women will qualify. That dooms those exceptional female performers to a kind of tokenistic existence — and isolated women, in units where the hierarchy remains male-dominated, can face the worst of military sexism and harassment.

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The British Army moved to a gender-neutral fitness tests in 2018, with then-field army sergeant major Gavin Paton remarking: “I don’t care if you are a man or a woman, I don’t care what you do, and the enemy doesn’t either.” Notably though, while the test is formally gender-neutral, there are various distinctions depending on one’s role. For instance, Infantry and Royal Armoured Corps troops are expected to complete a 2km run within 9 minutes and 45 seconds, with paratroopers expected to achieve that in 8:15. This means that women in elite units will be few, which can create hazards. Imagine being one of a handful of newly-arrived women in a Parachute battalion when a video emerges, as it did in June, of your colleagues engaged in an orgy (albeit consensual) with a civilian woman.

The alternative is to alter physical standards so that women will pass in greater numbers. That expands female presence beyond the tokenistic, and creates a pipeline for female leadership. But lowering fitness bars also alters the fundamental nature of a unit, and, to an extent, its capabilities.

For eight years after the Afghan withdrawal in 2014, the British Army suffered an identity crisis — it could make no cogent case for what it was for as an institution. The Russian invasion of Ukraine changed that. “This is our 1937 moment,” Patrick Sanders remarked in June. But if the British military’s purpose is now to deter Russian aggression, then fighting efficiently should be the key metric for policy. On those terms, the actual size of the army matters. But so does determining which diversity initiatives help, what gets hidden, and what is worthwhile but fundamentally complex.

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It’s also worth recognising that surface-level reform can hide lingering prejudice, as the conclusion of Louise Pragnell’s project to paint the Household Cavalry showed. The huge image was finally unveiled over lunch in 2010, at the mess at Knightsbridge. The regiment invited Lucian Freud, who had painted a former Household Cavalry officer, Andrew Parker-Bowles, in 2003. In The Brigadier, the ex-husband of our new Queen is decked out in swanky garb, with scarlet stripes down his trousers, but his pose is aloof: he is thrown back in an armchair, jacket unbuttoned and belly spilling out.

At the unveiling, Freud, an octogenarian by this point, with advancing Alzheimer’s, kept forgetting what was going on.

“Who are these people?” he asked Pragnell. Around the table, everyone was pretending to talk while in fact listening to what he was saying.

“They’re officers of the household cavalry,” Pragnell replied.

“So why is there a negro here?” Freud asked.

You could hear a pin drop. All at once, the whole awkwardness of the regiment’s diversity experiment was dragged into the open; the fundamental weirdness of “we’ve got two women and two black guys but we’re still posh” was exposed.

Put to one side the fact that the impetus for al-Qaeda terrorism was not “our democracy” but America’s liberal hegemony and military interventionism abroad — the exaggerations in this dramatic piece of historical revisionism echoed a speech Biden had made in Philadelphia mere days earlier. Speaking in an eerie set-up at Independence Hall, Biden had warned against the threat of a different terror, closer to home — from “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”, who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”. According to him, they promote “political violence” and “undermine democracy itself”.

After 21 years, it appears we have gone full circle: the War on Terror’s “you are either with us or against us” mentality has come home. Where George W. Bush used American exceptionalism as a basis for militarism and political absolutism, Biden has leveraged democratic exceptionalism — weaponising the mythos of democracy for partisan gains.

Seen together, Biden’s speeches highlight the often-overlooked synergy between domestic and foreign policy: his rhetoric depicts his administration’s war against the amorphous spectre of  “MAGA fascism” at home and its stated goal of militarily defeating autocracies abroad as two sides of the same coin. These speeches could ensnare sceptics on all sides of the spectrum, enmeshing them in false equivalencies. Deny the Establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy and risk being brandished as one of the “extremists” at home; defend America’s civil liberties and due process toward January 6 rioters, and you are in league with Vladimir Putin. This is troubling for any critic of US policy in Ukraine or Taiwan right now, especially the voices of anti-interventionism on the Left. Such voices are already under pressure to conform to the party line and self-censor their restrained positions for fear of being associated with Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Admittedly, the military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year was a breath of fresh air. But the Biden administration still exhibits decidedly hawkish attitudes, as showcased by the Alaska summit, the rhetoric around toppling Putin, and the recent security pledge to Taiwan. And to justify them, it spins an ideological narrative, centred on the existential clash between democracies and autocracies. What’s more, this invented Manichaeanism can be used to browbeat political opponents at any time. Put simply, in addition to creating a moralistic concept of statecraft to use abroad, this existential framework is used to silence those critical of American military interventionism and liberal hegemony, such as the foreign policy realists and restrainer critics of the Blob in Washington.

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This form of language game is designed to coerce critics into feigned obeisance, valorise the liberal hawks as the crux of the Democratic party, and undermine the remnants of the Anti-War Movement on the Left. It is perhaps ironic — if always inevitable — that the global Democracy Crusade would come home to haunt Americans. The abstract and ominous nature of “authoritarianism” is a convenient way to dismiss Trump supporters en masse as sympathisers with global tyranny — and to disingenuously equate realism and restraint with Trumpism.

This is an absurd equation. The Trump administration housed many globalists such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who used their tenure to advocate for “maximum pressure” against Iran, call for regime change in Venezuela, and facilitate the bombing of Syria. Moreover, criticism of US liberal imperium, and the “liberal international order” it has masterminded, comes from both sides of the political divide; it is neither partisan nor the exclusive domain of populists. While the logic of democratic exceptionalism has been routinely — if selectively — applied to justify liberal interventionism abroad, this agenda has an atrocious track record. It should remain open to criticism from all quarters, particularly in a democratic republic.

After all, the conventional wisdom underpinning the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy objective has now been seriously challenged. Such policies have routinely failed, especially because they tend to focus on the performative and procedural elements of democracy, rather than strengthening effective governance — an approach that masks profound systemic dysfunction. America’s failed policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti are perhaps the most notable examples, but so too are challenges in West Africa, where the US has been compelled to devise a new approach. The failure to prevent an anti-democratic coup in Myanmar, meanwhile, underscores the limitations of US geopolitical reach.

In a different era — at the height of the Cold War, perhaps — Biden’s Manichaean rhetoric might have been a rallying cry for many nations in the developed and developing world. But today’s era is multipolar. Nations, especially in the Global South, are unshackled from the ideological straitjacket of the Cold War and its perception of shared global threats; they are driven instead by the pursuit of economic prosperity and recovering their regional and civilisational strength. America’s democracy agenda rings hollow.

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The same is true at home. American public opinion has grown weary of the activist and internationalist posture of US foreign policy, embodied by decades of endless wars. Democracy promotion is no longer seen as an effective way to advance core US geopolitical interests. The US ruling class has therefore sought to adapt and reframe America’s global adventures and interventionism in terms of a domestic threat that would presumably be more easily marketable to the American public.

This logic has now become the operating principle behind what may be called the Biden Doctrine, which is expected to be unveiled in the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. It holds that the fight for democracy is incessant, totalising, and all-encompassing. That neutralising the alleged threat of fascism at home, personified by MAGA and former president Trump, is part of a larger apocalyptic struggle to defend the liberal international order abroad.

The Biden Doctrine elevates “democratic exceptionalism” as the ideal trope with which to advance its foreign and domestic agenda, while using it as political mallet to normalise any efforts to silence, cancel, and discredit dissent. The latter has long historical precedents with the US ruling class in the 20th century: it echoes the US. establishment’s support for anti-German hysteria in the First World War, the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, and the persecution of American socialists during the McCarthy era.

The underlying conviction is that in the increasingly polarised America, securitisation and weaponisation of threat, through its identification with domestic enemies, is a viable galvanising force — one that justifies and maintains the imperial controls of the state. In this neo-Jacobin milieu, democratism offers a crucible with which to meld and cohere domestic preferences with foreign ambitions.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden stressed the importance of building an “alliance of values” based on democratic principles. After two years on the job, his goal of democratic resurgence has become double-edged: to defeat political opponents at home and confront hegemonic challengers abroad. Biden might consider this double-edged agenda “a battle for the soul” of the United States and the “challenge of our time”. But this existential, ideologically-charged language only underscores the need for a sober assessment of this worldview — particularly at a time when America’s credibility as a model democracy is in doubt and its ability to lead remains uncertain.

A year on, how should we evaluate Biden’s declaration? Well, the Taliban has reinstalled a tyrannical theocratic government under which the precious freedoms gained by Afghan women over the past 20 years have been completely reversed. If the “best decision for America” involves trampling liberty and solidarity underfoot, then I don’t want to imagine what the worst decision would look like.

More tangibly, we were told that the Taliban would no longer harbour terrorists — Biden promised in his withdrawal speech “to make sure that Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland”. And yet, as Barbara Elias warned last year, this is not a promise the president had the power to keep. Links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda were and are too deep and strong to be severed. Elias cited worrying intelligence assessments that al-Qaeda could become a real threat to the US again as soon as 2023.

Her warning was vindicated two weeks ago, when Biden announced the successful killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri was killed in Kabul in an apartment rented by an aide of Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani, in turn, is the leader of the Haqqani network, a Taliban offshoot that the Wall Street Journal has called the group’s “most radical and violent branch”. The Taliban claimed they were unaware of Zawahiri’s presence in the heart of their capital, a statement that knowledgeable observers have rightly called out for its sheer effrontery.

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No doubt the truth about the current relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda will come out in due course. But the reasonable conclusion is that the two groups are still comfortably in bed with one another, and that al-Qaeda is once more using Afghanistan as a staging ground for its nefarious activities. We should welcome the killing of al-Zawahiri, of course, but his being found in Kabul gives the lie to Biden’s justification for the Afghanistan withdrawal.

In that withdrawal speech, Biden argued that “the real choice” was “between leaving or escalating”. This was a false dichotomy. America could have just carried on. Yes, perhaps Afghanistan was a very long way from becoming a proper democracy, but it would have been relatively inexpensive to keep a small force of a few thousand stationed there for a few more years, a fraction of the 100,000 troops stationed there in 2010–11. Even before the 2020 peace deal, US casualties in Afghanistan had been extremely low for years, with fatalities averaging in the low double digits since 2015. A small US force would have been more than enough to keep the Taliban out of total power.

From today’s perspective, however, it is no longer possible to view Biden’s withdrawal and the chaos that has ensued as a strategic error, however grave. You come back from errors, you reset and correct course. Instead, I have come to see the Afghanistan debacle as something more alarming: the result of a complete lack of strategy, or even the basic contours of a plan. What we have seen over the past year has been nothing other than chaos disguised as policymaking.

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At home, for instance, Biden took office promising to reunite a polarised nation. That went out the window last Monday, when Donald Trump’s residence was raided by the FBI less than 100 days from the midterms elections — allegedly over violations of an obscure record-keeping statute. Since then, prominent Republicans have accused the administration of parallel systems of justice, drawing comparisons with Third World countries. Who can blame them? The FBI barely made a case of Hilary Clinton’s lost cache of emails and an at-home secret server, and while federal prosecutors are investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax fraud (to say nothing of the shenanigans documented on Hunter’s infamous laptop), no one has yet seen fit to raid the First Son’s home.

Even more remarkable than the raid itself are the reports that Biden was not aware of it before it happened. Sending FBI agents to occupy the home of a former president — and Biden’s potential opponent in 2024 — is an unprecedented step. It will be politically explosive even if the bureau turns up evidence of wrongdoing, which is no guarantee given that the press, the Democratic Party, and various agencies of the US security state have investigated Trump’s alleged criminality again and again to little avail. That such a potentially destabilising step could be taken without Biden’s knowledge is almost literally unbelievable. If true, it would mean that the president is barely in charge of his own government.

This absence of a plan is also evident in Biden’s handling of Ukraine and Taiwan. Although the president deserves credit for the massive aid he has sent to Ukraine, he has repeatedly risked escalating the conflict with off-the-cuff remarks that contradict official US policy. During a visit to Poland in March, he seemed to call for regime change in Russia, inadvertently threatened to use chemical weapons, and appeared to tell American troops that they would soon be fighting in Ukraine. These comments were later clarified or “walked back” by Biden’s gaggle of minders, raising questions about whether Biden himself is the one making the decisions.

Then there was Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan. When reports of the trip began to circulate, so too did the speculations about why she was going at such an awful time. Did Biden approve of Pelosi’s trip, or was she going against his wishes? The latest reporting suggests it was the latter. If she had been backed by Biden, then, as Thomas Friedman put it, Biden would have been signing off on “something that is utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”. Instead, it seems that Biden was simply unable to stop Pelosi from doing whatever she wanted.

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What explains this potentially tragic comedy of errors? Perhaps, in part, it is a result of the Democrats’ desperate need to distinguish themselves from Trump. If Trump was unwilling to risk war over Taiwan, then Team Biden must be ready to go there. But wanting to come across as different is hardly a vision.

Trump’s personality made him unfit for office, and the events of January 6 have left a stain on America. But the Trump administration had some real foreign policy achievements under its belt, not least the breakthrough Abraham Accords. When Trump brags that neither the war in Ukraine nor the crisis over Taiwan would have happened if he had been re-elected, he is credible. For all his colourful personality, there really was a Trump domestic policy vision and a foreign policy doctrine.

The same cannot be said of his successor. A year on from the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden’s doctrine remains nebulous and disjointed, to the extent it doesn’t appear to exist at all. More and more, the Afghanistan disaster epitomises his entire administration — chaotic, ill-planned, and papered over with high-flown rhetoric that has little to do with the reality on the ground.

***

Editor’s note: This piece was written before Salman Rushdie was attacked on Friday — a subject which Ayaan will be addressing in her next column.

On Wednesday, while pundits were still helping the White House congratulate itself for killing the 71-year-old terrorist leader, China responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by launching a massive, four-day combined arms live fire exercise around the island. While the US broadcasts mixed signals about its commitment to defending Taiwan, Beijing has been absolutely clear that it is willing to go to war, and has now encircled the island in an unprecedented show of force.

The lesson of the past week could not be any clearer. The American ruling class has no sense of what role it is meant to play in world affairs. It acts with reckless senility, provoking rival powers while uncertain of its own aims. To distract from this underlying reality, it fixates on symbolically potent acts like the killing of al-Zawahiri. But for how long can this go on?

None of which is a reason to mourn for al-Zawahiri, if indeed he is really dead. This is at least the fourth report of his death over the last two decades, though the first time it has been announced by a US president. Surely the best time to have killed al-Zawahiri would have been when he came to the United States in 1993 on a Bay Area fundraising tour — the same year of the first al-Qaeda-directed World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people. But better late than never.

Assuming that the reports of his death are real, however, it would be prudent  to take the details with a grain of salt. After all, the initial details about the raid that killed al-Zawahiri’s predecessor, Osama Bin Laden, who had supposedly used his wife as a human shield, were later revealed to be false, the products of a manufactured narrative. The timing of the 2011 Bin Laden raid was no doubt connected to the exigencies of the intelligence business; it had a political dimension as well, taking place in the same year Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq.

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The circumstances around al-Zawahiri’s death raise a different set of questions. It appears that the al-Qaeda leader entered Afghanistan last August shortly after the chaotic US withdrawal and Taliban takeover of the country. He was staying in an upscale area of downtown Kabul, a short distance from where the US once housed its embassy, reportedly in a safe house owned by a senior aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. This is a significant detail because Sirajuddin, in addition to being the author of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, is the leader of the powerful Haqqani network, an outgrowth of the Haqqani dynastic clan, which has played a key role in Afghan politics for decades and whose patriarch, Jalaluddin, was once fêted by members of Congress as an anti-Soviet mujahideen commander. In addition to holding a place on Washington’s “specially designated global terrorist” list, Sirajuddin is also a member of the new Taliban government, serving as its acting interior minister.

When I arrived in Afghanistan in 2012 as a US Army officer, the Haqqani name was spoken of in grave tones. Operating from their stronghold in Paktia province, on Afghanistan’s treacherous southeastern frontier with Pakistan, the Haqqanis commanded an extended network of tribal loyalists, intelligence operatives, terrorist cells, and paramilitary forces. Under the leadership of Sirajuddin, they were kingmakers in Afghanistan’s fractious political scene and survived the two decades of US occupation by skillfully balancing relationships with al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban. Among soldiers, the Haqqanis were known for their skill at orchestrating complex terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan. In contrast with typical Taliban fighters, who were the country bumpkins of the Pashtun heartland, and whose attacks, while deadly, relied on conventional ambush tactics, the Haqqanis were more sophisticated and more lethal.

One fairly obvious conclusion to draw from the head of al-Qaeda being put up in downtown Kabul is that neither the Taliban nor the Haqqanis were overly concerned about a possible American response. But that is not the conclusion being drawn in Washington. Taking their cues from President Biden’s statement that the killing of al-Zawahiri is “proof that it’s possible to root out terrorism without being at war in Afghanistan”, foreign policy mandarins say the drone strike proves Washington’s “strategy” is working. Its success shows that the U.S. should rely more on “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capabilities — i.e. those which do not require large numbers of American troops on the ground to be effective — as the central pillar of national security policy.

In an article for the Daily Beast headlined, “Biden Keeps a Promise With His Zawahiri Strike,” David Rothkopf writes:

“The attack was more than just a strike against a longtime member of America’s most-wanted terrorist list. It was both a vindication of Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan and a demonstration of the effectiveness of Biden’s counterterrorism strategy.”

An NBC news article polishes up a different angle of the official narrative by publicising Biden’s extraordinary scrupulousness and the “surgical” nature of the attack. “The strike was so precise that it killed al-Zawahiri on a balcony without harming family members elsewhere in the house,” the article reports, citing (who else?) an anonymous Biden official. Among the story’s five different authors is Ken Dilanian, whose close relationship with the U.S. security establishment has included routinely submitting past articles to the CIA for review before they were published.

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Beyond simply cheering for the party in power, these narratives promote the idea that drone strikes are an effective strategy for destroying America’s enemies and keeping its citizens safe. “See,” say the foreign policy experts and their validators in the media, “this is how we should have done it all along. We never needed to invade Afghanistan — to say nothing of Iraq — and spend two decades nation-building in order to target al-Qaeda.”

But while they are right about the folly of nation-building, they are delusional if they think that counterterrorism represents anything new and improved in the US policy arsenal. Over-the-horizon capabilities have been a central and growing plank of American power for the past two decades. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the capabilities now being celebrated for their effectiveness and surgical precision are the very same methods employed last summer, when a different U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The official narrative about that attack, dubbed “Righteous Strike,” was that it had targeted Islamic State members who were transporting explosives and posed an imminent threat to American troops. That false narrative spread widely before the grim truth came out.

Over-the-horizon capabilities are a fine thing for a nation to have but they are simply a tool, not a strategy for achieving long-term peace. In reality, if counterterrorism worked as advertised, al-Qaeda would have collapsed years ago. “According to recent scholarship based on papers captured from Bin Laden’s hideout, the CIA’s drone campaign that targeted al-Qaeda between 2008 and 2013 devastated the core organisation, which was based in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” wrote Steve Coll in a New Yorker column published after al-Zawahiri’s death.

If it were possible for the US to drone strike its way to a lasting victory in the War on Terror, the war would already be won. But as Coll’s observation implies, the backdrop of the terrorist problem is the states which support them. Counterterrorism is great for generating publicity ops, lucrative contracts for the defence industry, and reliable sinecures for legions of experts. But in two decades of war, it was never able to address the fundamental reality of the Pakistani state’s support for al-Qaeda. Nor could it keep Afghanistan from falling right back into the hands of the Taliban.

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In the most important conflicts taking place today, in Ukraine and around Taiwan, America’s over-the-horizon tools are of limited use. Even the spectacle of notching new “kills” on the high-profile terrorist scoreboard seems to be losing its lustre. Much of the appeal of counterterrorism at this point, apart from promising to prevent more fruitless two-decade occupations, is that it is a self-perpetuating institution. The counterterrorism lobby is more powerful than ever inside Washington because it offers the appearance of a guiding strategic principle behind American power, where none actually exists.

As US leadership escalates confrontation with two nuclear powers in China and Russia, it cannot even define where its nation’s vital interests are at stake in those arenas. The long exercise in hunting down terrorist groups has been a diversion from the core responsibilities of statecraft: defining one’s relationship to other countries in a way that maximises the security and prosperity of the nation.

Can Pelosi articulate how her trip to Taiwan benefited Americans? In a bare room with no aides, could Biden convincingly explain what the US involvement in Ukraine is meant to accomplish? To avoid catastrophe, America needs leaders who can answer such basic questions, not more drones.

Harskamp is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, a postcard-perfect village of neat houses and tree-lined streets that is home to just over 3,500 people. The idea that the population might increase by 20% overnight came as a shock to some. When the Garretsens neared the Harskamp Barracks, around 250 young local men were burning tyres, hurling fireworks, and howling “Our own people first!” and “Harskamp belongs to us!” Garretsen immediately got her son out of there. “There were fireworks everywhere,” she told me.

Today, on a spring afternoon on the same spot, it is hard to imagine such a scene. The Afghans have left, and the barracks are now home to around 650 people who fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a grassy patch outside the gates, a large Ukrainian flag flies. Refugees cycle past on bikes loaned by locals, giving cheery waves. Volunteers from one of the local churches hand out Dutch syrup waffles to children. A short walk away, Garretsen shows me a clothing bank, brimming with items donated by Harskamp residents.

Harskamp is representative of a wider contradiction in Europe’s treatment of refugees. In 2015 the arrival of more than one million people (most fleeing the Syrian civil war) saw wealthy European nations descend into panic and bickering. Southern nations accused their Northern counterparts of not doing enough to help. While Germany briefly opened its doors to people fleeing war, Eastern European countries rolled out razor wire at their borders, and since then the EU’s refugee policy has focused on keeping people out.

The arrival of more than six million Ukrainians, however, has been met with an outpouring of goodwill and a spirit of cooperation. For the first time, the EU has activated its Temporary Protection Directive, which means Ukrainians arriving in an EU nation have the right to live, work, attend school, and travel freely to any other EU country. There has been very little resistance: even the anti-immigrant populist parties who saw their support surge after the 2015 crisis have been broadly supportive.

The contrast between the warm welcome offered to the largely white, Christian Ukrainians compared to the more hostile reception for people from other cultures and religions has raised valid questions about racism and prejudice. Still, in Harskamp, the new spirit of tolerance appears to extend to everyone. Those I spoke to were embarrassed about the events of eight months ago. “The people here demonstrated and that’s not good,” says 29-year-old Bas Sturm, a deliveryman who organises football games between people living at the barracks and the villagers. They are determined to get it right this time.

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While the Afghans have left, about half the people staying in the barracks are non-Ukrainians, who were in the country for reasons such as work or study when Russia invaded. “We were welcomed [in Harskamp] in a way we never thought we would be,” says 20-year-old Algerian Guedah Siefedinne, who was studying business administration in Kyiv. “They didn’t care if we came from Ukraine or not. It was just, ‘you need help: you will eat, you will feel safe.’” Nigerian languages student Franklyn Ibeawuchi agrees: “They take care of us, the hospitality is so great. They have been asking us what we want, so they can assist us.”

But spend some time talking to the residents of Harskamp, and it becomes clear that their reserves of goodwill come with a significant caveat: that the refugees will eventually leave. And there is every indication that Vladimir Putin understands this.

European fears around migration have long provided opportunistic autocrats with the potential for blackmail. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi was expert at exploiting concerns about unmanaged migration, extorting various financial pledges from the EU to keep people away.  The current Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently threatens to renege on a €6 billion deal signed with the EU in 2016 to stop people crossing the Aegean Sea. Last winter, the regime of Belarus’s leader Aleksandr Lukashenko started bussing people seeking asylum to the border fence with Poland, in retaliation for EU sanctions.

Lukashenko’s ally Putin no doubt closely monitored that move. Putin has a history of stoking anti-migrant sentiment to try to destabilise the EU, both with disinformation campaigns that spread negative stories about migrants and financial assistance for anti-migrant parties. Now he is trying to light the fuse of the powder keg he created.

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The relentless Russian targeting of civilian and vital infrastructure in Ukraine — schools, hospitals, farmland, grain silos — seems calculated to make Ukraine uninhabitable, thus forcing an unprecedented number of people out of its borders. As the New York Times put it in a recent editorial: “Refugees are not a design flaw of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.”

If Putin’s aim was to exacerbate the divisions of the 2015 crisis, however, so far he has failed. Across Europe, governments and volunteer groups have come together and found short-term solutions to house the people fleeing war. Hundreds of thousands are staying in the homes of volunteers. Governments have found innovative solutions. The Netherlands has come up with 55,000 beds, including in monasteries, holiday camps, and cruise liners.

But people cannot stay on boats or in military barracks forever. Yulia Popeuchenko, a 38-year-old pharmacist from Krivoy Rog in Ukraine, is sharing one room in the Harskamp barracks with eight other family members. With a ten-year-old daughter, a one-year-old son, and a husband back home fighting, she is worried about what comes next. “It is nice and quiet here but we would like to move to a place where there will be better conditions for the children”, she tells me. “I can’t cook for my children here.”

Ira Koval, a volunteer with the Ukrainians in the Netherlands Foundation, says she sees the same situation across the country, with people becoming frustrated at the temporary solutions and no sign of any long-term planning. Meanwhile, tensions are emerging. There are reports of host families in the UK evicting their Ukrainian guests. In the Czech Republic, which is hosting more than 300,000 Ukrainians, there are concerns about the financial impact.

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It is the next phase — longer-term integration of Ukrainian refugees — that will prove the most politically testing for Europe. More often than not, existing problems in host nations tend to get projected onto new arrivals, when they cease to be seen as guests. The Netherlands, for instance, will have to find a balance between providing homes for Ukrainians when many Dutch people have been waiting years for stable housing. The country is suffering an acute housing crisis, with nearly a million new homes needed by 2030. Germany is facing similar challenges, whereas in Spain the government will have to justify assisting Ukrainians to find work when around 12% of its population is unemployed.

“Once people get the feeling other groups are being preferred over them, that fuels the radical Right and anti-immigrant parties”, says Jasmijn Slootjes, a senior policy analyst at think tank Migration Policy Institute Europe. And that is what happened in Harskamp last year. “People were afraid that they will continue to live here”, says Bas Sturm. “We have few homes here that we have to pay a lot for, and the [perception is that] refugees here get a home sooner.”

Everyone I spoke to in Harskamp laughed off the idea that people staying in the barracks will remain in the village. They tolerate the current situation because it is a temporary one — the refugees are due to leave by 3 August — but where exactly they will go next is unclear. Sturm thinks that the Afghans who left Harskamp last year have been resettled in permanent housing. But Sander Schaap, a spokesperson at the Dutch Council for Refugees, says in fact most have simply been shuttled between different temporary asylum centres. More than 35,000 refugees in the Netherlands were already awaiting permanent accommodation before the Ukrainians arrived, with many living in appalling conditions in tents.

“It’s total chaos at the moment”, Schaap says. “There’s a big lack of permanent and temporary locations all across the board, and the crisis in the asylum system is going to accelerate over the days and weeks and months to come.”

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Nevertheless, the collective experience of Harskamp over the past eight months is instructive. When the Afghans arrived, the local government failed to inform the community. This time round, the mayor held consultations and town hall meetings to discuss any concerns the villagers had. Local authorities across Europe can learn from this example: while it’s important to publicly make the moral case for hosting victims of war, they must also frankly address local worries, whether they be genuine questions over the allocation of resources or misconceptions fuelled by disinformation.

Simple measures can alleviate tensions in the short term. In Harskamp, Bas Sturm started the community football matches after witnessing the animosity towards the Afghans, and saw attitudes change quickly. But the longer-term issues like housing prove thornier. Authorities must take into account the needs of both the existing communities and refugee populations. “Whether you discuss access to housing or access to education,” says Jasmijn Slootjes, “frame it as a long term investment for the entire society and not just for those coming from Ukraine”.

In the past, many European governments have shied away from making a strong, passionate, and informed case for hosting refugees, fearful of losing political ground to the far-Right. But if countries show that having refugees on European soil — whether they are from Ukraine or elsewhere — is not a worst-case scenario but a perfectly manageable situation, they remove one more weapon from Russia’s arsenal. Because while Putin may be waging war on the people of Ukraine, he knows that the battle for Europe’s soul will be fought in placid little villages like Harskamp.

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.

The covers of the Flashman series are cultural artefacts in themselves: the image of the smirking anti-hero, sabre in hand, dressed up in his mid-Victorian cavalry finery or Oriental costume, an exotic conquest entwined around his legs, is firmly set against the cultural mood of the moment. The bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, terror of the Rugby fags until his expulsion, Flashman’s unintentionally swashbuckling career can be understood as an earlier attempt to reckon with Britain’s imperial legacy. 

From his first appearance in 1966, Fraser’s Flashman was a product of the same ironic Sixties craze for Victoriana as the Sergeant Pepper cover, or The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), with which he overlaps in narrative and tone. The empire then was not as distant as it seems now: the brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya were closer in time then than the Iraq War is to us, and the Aden insurgency was still ongoing. Fraser himself had fought the Japanese in Burma, and was commissioned as an officer in the Indian army less than 20 years before the first Flashman novel, one of the very last of generations of young British men to have done so. 

A provincial grammar school boy, born in Carlisle to Scottish parents, Fraser’s family history was as intertwined with the fortunes of the empire as that of his creation, he would later note. “Well, the men will be going away again”, Fraser recalls his grandmother observing on the outbreak of war in 1939, adding that “her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century”. Indeed, Fraser wore his dead great-uncle’s ring — “he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan”, he notes — during his own active service in Burma.

“We saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India”, Fraser would later write in his memoirs:

“The cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door … It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.” 

As for Enoch Powell, whose views on mass immigration he also shared, for Fraser the loss of India was as tragic a historical catastrophe as that of the Soviet Union is to Putin: the fading of a great imperial story, and the painful lived “experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all”.

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And yet the imperial story revealed in the Flashman Papers is far more ambivalent than the old writer’s final reminiscences would make it seem, so much so that it read on first publication as part of the great Sixties satire boom, undercutting the old British certainties with its taste for the hypocritical and sordid. In Flashman, the first novel of the series, the central character reveals himself as a bully, a coward and a rapist, who nevertheless finds himself lauded, following a series of picaresque misadventures, as the brave hero of Britain’s disastrous First Afghan War. 

“Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady” has little time for the moralism of his Victorian contemporaries, “who praise God on Sundays and sneak off to child-brothels during the week”, and whose self-denying imperial heroes are presented uniformly as a collection of fools, hypocrites and God-botherers. The empire’s red-coated defenders are merely “whoremongering, drunken clowns”, while Flashman’s own interest in the empire is purely limited to what he can extract from it. In a passage that could be lifted directly from some modern-day anti-colonial Guardian-fodder, he observes that:

“In India there was power — the power of the white man over the black — and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers … and there were as many women as you could wish for. There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot — but that is another story.”

How do we reconcile the two: the caddish anti-hero who exposes the extractive brutality of imperial rule and the writer himself, an unreconstructed imperialist in love with the glory, colour and romance of Britain’s Eastern possessions? Reading Fraser’s two volumes of memoirs together with the Flashman series, the overlap between the fictional creation and the writer himself is instructive. 

The Flashman universe is a clear working through of Fraser’s own wartime experiences, those of a provincial teenager suddenly thrust into a violent, romantic, alien world: “it is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice”.

Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.

The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.

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And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”

It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.

It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”

Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being. 

There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.

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Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.

As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.

In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.

Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.

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Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series. 

It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.

For the “post-Pacifist” German mainstream, the most bitter paradox of all is that the Russians might not have attacked Ukraine had they foreseen Germany’s response: that the Bundestag would cancel the new Russian gas pipeline, invest in regasification terminals, send weapons to Ukraine, reaffirm its fealty to Nato, and move to drastically upgrade its armed forces with a €100 billion injection.

The Russians could not possibly have known these things. The day before Putin launched his invasion, the German government declared that the new Russian gas pipeline would be inaugurated no matter what, and that they would send no weapons to Ukraine; it even affirmed it would prevent Estonia’s delivery of 122mm howitzers to Kyiv because those guns had briefly belonged to Germany when the West German army absorbed East Germany’s. Yet more egregiously, Germany also denied overflight permission for British transports delivering weapons to Ukraine. As for Nato, Germany reiterated its refusal to spend 2% or even 1% of its GDP for defence. If there were to be collective defence at all, let it be European, and directed by the decidedly civilian European Commission.

In that remote past of a month ago, those were all decidedly mainstream preferences throughout Europe, albeit with a north-south divide. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden had all resurrected their ancient Baltic connections and therefore viewed Russia as a live threat. But in Italy and Spain such attitudes were rare, and declared Putin admirers could become ministers in coalition governments. As for France, Macron did not oppose the effectively pro-Russian stance of the German government because he also wanted a European defence, led by France, of course, as the only European nuclear power.

All this has now slipped into oblivion in today’s Europe, where Nato’s centrality and its US leadership are largely uncontested. The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak, and therefore attacked Ukraine. Yet because they attacked, Nato is stronger than it has been for decades.

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By Edward Luttwak

In every country’s military, the equally abrupt reversals are causing no end of trouble for the staff officers and civil servants working on next year’s budgets. The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield, empowered as it is by anti-tank missiles that pursue armoured vehicles until they destroy them, and by portable anti-aircraft missiles that are the doom of helicopters, even if they cannot intercept much faster jets. This means that current combat helicopter and armoured vehicle purchases should be cancelled until they can be redesigned with much better protection; that is active defences that detect and intercept the incoming missiles — a process that might take years. (So far only Israel has active defence systems for its armoured vehicles )

By contrast, killer drones that can reliably destroy armoured vehicles and anything else beyond the horizon are grotesquely underfunded given their demonstrated combat value, largely because they are captive to air force priorities, set by pilots and ex-pilot senior officers. Only with political intervention can the stranglehold of the flying fraternity be overcome — they are today’s reactionary horse cavalry that resisted tanks in the Twenties. But the main thing, of course, is to have more infantry and to train it very well, and that raises the need for compulsory military service which only Sweden has confronted so far — by re-instituting it.

Because Nato has not instituted a no-flight zone, for the excellent reason that it would lead to air combat that the loser might try to nullify by escalation, and with everything happening much too fast for adult supervision, no new air combat lessons have been learned. While the heroism of Ukrainian pilots flying older models of Russian aircraft against newer models is highly admirable, it adds nothing that is not already written in The Iliad.

At the level of grand strategy, the largest and by far most consequential discovery is that in spite of decades of talk about the “diffusion of power”, particularly with the rise of China but also of Turkey, Iran, Brazil and South Africa, it is still the same old G7 countries that hold the keys of the world. Once the US, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union make a decision, any country can be cut off from world finance and most of world commerce. Russia’s Aeroflot, for instance, had to stop flying abroad because its aircraft are leased from Western companies, and the money-transfer sanctions blocked its payments to them, leading to the confiscation of its aircraft if they land outside Russia.

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The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

That would not bother the Chinese, whose airlines do not depend on foreign lessors. But by the second day of the Ukraine war, Beijing realised that China also lives in a G7 world, with its economy utterly dependent on the daily arrival of bulk carriers loaded with animal and human food from the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and a slew of other countries. China’s economy was self-sufficient if miserably poor in 1976 when I first visited, with a population on the edge of malnutrition. But today’s citizens will not grin and bear it without their meat, eggs, or milk. Last year, Xi Jinping’s naval groupies, including the jovial retired Admiral Luo Yuan, suggested that the US could be scared off from defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion by sinking a US warship or two, perhaps even an aircraft carrier. Now Xi must realise that if a US warship is sunk, the supply of animal feed would end.

Finally for the United States, the greatest lesson of immediate importance is that its foreign and defence policies are drastically degraded by the lack of basic intelligence about foreign countries — not because the CIA fails to steal their war plans, but because it cannot acquire elementary situational awareness. This is an inevitable consequence of a cultural collapse: in the old days, a CIA officer appointed to serve in a foreign country whose language he did not know would apply himself furiously to learn as much of it as possible. But now, very few CIA officers speak any foreign language. Their superiors do not demand that they learn them, and they themselves are too busy chatting with each other to talk with the locals — other than with English-speaking local counterparts who mostly tell them what they want to hear.

This is why Biden paid a high political price for the effortless Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the rapid fall of Kabul: the CIA told the White House that the Afghan army would hold out on its own for much more than a decent interval, for years perhaps, and said nothing at all to suggest that it might crumble without a fight. Not knowing Tajik, Uzbek, or any Pathan dialect, the CIA officers who uselessly served in Kabul from their offices did not overhear the jokes on the street about the Afghan army, or hilarious accounts of how incompetent fools could become instant officers by paying a modest bribe.

Because American generals, including media-star David Petraeus, flatly refused to call upon the regiments of Pathans, Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who might fight out of ethnic solidarity, instead creating a mythical national “Afghan” army, the result was a fraud from day one. When the time came, they did not fight or even flee: they handed over their US-supplied weapons to the Taliban.

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In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse. Just as in Kabul, we had CIA officers with no situational awareness. They did not listen, or understand, or even speak Ukrainian — they proclaimed it unnecessary “because everyone speaks Russian”, before sheepishly admitting that they themselves did not. Hence the CIA told the White House that Zelenskyy would flee, that the government would dissolve, that the Ukrainian army would not fight, and that the Russians would control Kyiv in 24 hours.

Since the White House still gave credence to the CIA in spite of its long history of incompetence, it ordered the urgent, even panicked evacuation of the US diplomatic mission to Lviv. Had they had any idea at all, they might have noticed that the Russians proposed to invade Europe’s largest country with very few troops — 150,000 compared to the 800,000 sent into far smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and told the White House that with a bit of help the Ukrainians would contain the invasion.

But the CIA is highly professional in its press relations, and sure enough the New York Times promptly published an article that featured “former intelligence officers” highlighting the impossibility of ascertaining “fighting spirit”. It was as neat an illustration as any of why Kabul fell, and why Kyiv could too. Unless the US remedies its CIA problem by emptying out and fumigating the place, before restaffing it with people who care enough about the world to learn its languages, the US will continue to fly blind — and crash into the next Ukraine.

The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.

Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.

So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.

After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.

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True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the rouble (for a while).

Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into roubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital. These measures are aimed at bolstering the rouble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the rouble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.

Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.

In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.

As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.

Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.

Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.

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Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.

While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.

China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia. Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade. Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).

However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that US-led global Western order will suffer. The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”

Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.

In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

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Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

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If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

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But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.

It’s easy to read Jeffrey Cohen’s account of being held hostage in a Texan synagogue at the weekend as an uplifting tale of bravery and accomplishment: it tells of a terrifying stand-off with a deranged, gun-wielding attacker, brought to an end after nearly 11 hours when a rabbi threw a chair at the assailant and managed to escape with two other hostages (another had been released earlier in the day).

Thankfully, the only person killed that day was the terrorist, 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram. Rabbi Charlie Cytron Walker had nothing but praise for the recent security training provided to the synagogue by the FBI and Colleyville Police Department. It had prepared them for the situation and saved their lives. Other residents spoke of how the community came together. The attack’s conclusion was deemed a triumph of humanity; it was, in effect, something to be celebrated.

And yet the truth couldn’t be more different. Yes, there is still much about the Akram that remains unclear: a debate is still raging over his motivations, and whether he was inspired by Islamist ideology or whether the state of his “mental health” is to blame.

But two conclusions can already be drawn — and both are deeply concerning. The first is that the attack should never have been allowed to happen; the second is that such acts of violence are likely to become more frequent.

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By Liam Duffy

During the Obama years, terrorist attacks seemed almost routine. But for much of the past several years, we’ve seen their frequency decrease in the United States, largely thanks to the defeat of Muslim terror groups and the disillusionment of many young Muslims with radical Islam.

In that period, as Akram’s attack demonstrates, we have let our guard down. And the Islamists have noticed. They’ve taken this quiet time to regroup, raise money, recruit extensively, and grow stronger. It is classic Islamist dawa strategy.

Law enforcement is tight-lipped when it comes to confirming whether Akram fits into this narrative. But that should not prevent us from questioning how America became so complacent. How else could a suspected Islamist from the UK with connections to Tablighi Jammat enter the US without anyone blinking an eye?

Convicted criminals are usually denied entry to the US, but Akram was granted a tourist visa simply by lying on his application. With the stroke of pen, he erased his long criminal history, which included serving prison time, on three separate occasions, for harassment, theft and attacking a family member with a baseball bat. By ticking a box, he managed to expunge from history the fact that he had been under investigation by MI5 as a possible Islamist terrorist threat as recently as 2020. He was welcomed into America where he could travel freely and somehow allowed to purchase a gun.

Yet this is more than a failure of mere complacency; it is the clearest sign yet that the structures and institutions we had in place following 9/11 to counter Islamism have all but eroded.

This is largely down to a failure of leadership. To the world, the United States has spent the past decade nurturing an image of weakness and chaos. Common among jihadis is the idea that the American spirit is waning and Islam is ascending. Nothing could have bolstered this argument better than the Trump administration’s decision to make peace with the Taliban, and the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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Elsewhere, America’s political elite responded by further hamstringing their country: overseeing the politicisation of the very institutions responsible for counter-terrorism. Instead of directing our talent and resources towards justified threats, our agencies prefer to chase “domestic terrorists”, including those supposedly hiding out in school board meetings, and “white supremacists”, claiming that they represent “the most lethal threat to the homeland today”. The Obama administration even shifted away from the term counter-terrorism, instead preferring the vaguer term “countering violent extremism”. How can we expect anti-terror officials to do their job when “terrorism” itself has become a taboo word?

What makes this doubly concerning is that this problem is no longer confined to America. Rather, what we confront is a general crisis within Anglo-American societies, particularly within our respective intelligence communities. The attack may have unfolded in Tarrant County, Texas, but its seeds were sown in Blackburn.

There, British security services concluded that Akram did not pose a threat to society. There, the local community failed to speak up when he started to display multiple signs of radicalisation: he became estranged from his family, suddenly turned very religious, embraced Wahhabism, and travelled to Pakistan twice in the same year. For all their differences, the UK and the US have one thing in common: woefully and willingly unprepared anti-terror organisations.

With the chaos unfolding in Westminster right now, it seems unlikely that substantive change in Britain is on the horizon. But in the US, with midterm elections looming, and with a Congress more focused on the threat of Islamist terrorism, rebuilding the infrastructure needed to prevent terrorist attacks is within the realm of possibility. And given the bar is now so low that someone like Akram can enter the country, buy a gun and storm a synagogue, any change is likely to be an improvement.

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So yes, we should absolutely celebrate the fact that the rabbi and his congregants survived last weekend’s attack. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that Malik Faisal Akram was a one-off. Nor should we pay heed to those who over the weekend were so ready to downplay the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist ideology, as if Akram had picked a synagogue for his attack on a whim.

There are, I fear, many more like him out there. Both the US and the UK need to be more prepared. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

The overwhelming focus from authorities, political leaders and the press has become the personal and psychological dramas of the perpetrators. After every incident, the attackers’ pasts are combed and every twist and turn in their tangled biographies is retrospectively injected with significance and relevance to their (often much later) decision to kill.

Of course, the personal profiles of perpetrators are important, but the resultant disconnection of the spate of stabbings, vehicular attacks and, less frequently, shootings and bombings across Europe leaves us in danger of prematurely writing off the lingering jihadist threat.

We should know by now that militant Islamism in the West has long horizons. It was eight years between the 7/7 bombings and the murder of Lee Rigby; the following year, Isis proclaimed itself a “Caliphate” and instructed Muslims worldwide to migrate to their bloody utopia — at least 6,000 from Europe answered the call. France and Belgium suffered terribly in the years to follow, while Britain saw a wave of jihadist attacks three years later.

There is no reason that lulls should be interpreted as a waning threat, yet today attention seems elsewhere. Last October, political leaders in Britain greeted what looks like the jihadist assassination of one of their colleagues with a very serious debate on online anonymity. And only this month, thanks in part to the Americanisation of political discourse, the bloated cottage industry of which I am a part was more comfortable gorging on year-old events 3,600 miles away at the US Capitol building than discussing threats closer to home.

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In the wake of America’s withdrawal from the region, much has been made of the danger of Afghanistan once again becoming a terrorist safe haven threatening the West. Such concerns are certainly legitimate. Whenever they have controlled territory, jihadists have made the West pay: from the archipelago of training camps in Afghanistan which churned out the “Magnificent 19” hijackers, to the commandos dispatched from the Isis caliphate to gun down revellers and commuters in Paris and Brussels.

The more urgent concern, however, should be on Europe, and how the jihadist movement reconstitutes itself inside the continents borders after the Islamic State. The principal concern for security services has been the threat posed by Isis returnees, and with good reason. There is nothing new about Europeans travelling to jihadist conflict zones, but more travelled to Syria and Iraq for jihad than every previous jihadist insurgency combined. Not all made it home, but many did or will in future.

Available evidence does suggest that only a minority of foreign fighter returnees attack at home, but this should not necessarily be a cause for complacency. The statistics alone do not account for the constant ideological transformation and evolution of militant Islamism in the West: when commuters were murdered in London in 2005, or when Mohammed Merah executed Jewish schoolchildren and soldiers in France in 2012, these acts sparked internal debates on legitimacy within salafi-jihadist circles. Today, thanks to the work of salafi-jihadist scholars, there would be no such debate.

Nor do low rates of attack tell the whole story of the impact of returnees. Each generation of returnees from conflict overseas has successfully helped to cultivate a new and larger generation of extremists. Isis hotspots in Europe often directly overlap with recruitment hotspots for jihadist insurgencies from decades ago. If the Isis generation is able to socialise a new, more violent, more extreme generation of salafi-jihadists then it may be years, or even decades, until we feel the full force of the most recent returnee wave.

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That isn’t to say these jihadis are driven by pure rage and bloodlust, reflexively likely to slaughter the first infidel they see. Like any terrorist group or movement, jihadists learn from their tactical and strategic mistakes, and some believe they overplayed their hand with the attacks of 2015-17. Many believed a tipping point had been reached, and that such bloodletting would spark the civil conflict on the continent they desired, in doing so drastically and disgracefully overestimating their support within Western Muslim communities. Meanwhile, the attacks on the West also served to accelerate the aerial bombardment of the “caliphate” on the ground, only hastening its demise. This helps explain why the main jihadist groups are no longer claiming or orchestrating major attacks in the West: it isn’t only a sign of weakness, but of the movement adapting to realities.

Hakim el-Karoui and Benjamin Hodayé’s recent extensive study of European militants suggested two possible scenarios for the future of jihadism in the West: the first, as hinted at above, sees the veterans of the Syrian jihad and their future cohorts turn their crosshairs primarily towards Europe, rather than some distant war zone.

The second, arguably more unsettling, prospect, is the jihadist population in Europe reconstitutes into a social movement, accelerating what European governments term separatism. At the very least, it’s possible a faction of Europe’s salafi-jihadis remain committed to mass casualty violence against civilians and their dreams of a caliphate. Recognising the shortcomings of ISIS need not lessen commitment to the utopian ideology: “real communism has never been tried.”

In this scenario, salafi-jihadis would establish closed communities withdrawn from and hostile towards the ignorance and sin of wider society. Perhaps they would only occasionally lash out, but more people would certainly die in Europe over ‘blasphemy’ and cartoons. There is precedent here in the monastic communities established in some of the global jihadi hotspots, from Toulouse and the surrounding countryside to the isolated salafi-jihadi communes in the Caribbean.

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The myth of lone-wolf terrorism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Another French academic, Hugo Micheron, recently spoke to dozens of imprisoned jihadis and some hinted at this change in strategy. Instead of simply radicalising others for attacks, their aim is rather the total homogenisation of Western Muslim belief under their interpretation (the only true Islam, as they see it), before encouraging or enforcing separation and withdrawal from the surrounding unbelief. The objective, according to the incarcerated extremists, is to insert a salafi-jihadist project at the heart of Europe instead of a faraway battlefield. If this strain of thought becomes dominant then, as Micheron writes, jihadism becomes a social, intellectual and political challenge “before it ever picks up a Kalashnikov”.

For now, Western Jihadis have gone quiet. But it could prove a major miscalculation to interpret this lull as jihadism finally on the wane, to be usurped by some other ideological challenge. As expert Suzanne Raine recently warned, when terrorists have gone quiet in the past, it usually means they are planning. The challenge is syncing the terrorist planning cycle with the resource and short attention cycle of Western governments and publics.

Perhaps we’re lucky that many of Europe’s most committed jihadis and thinkers — ones with real experience and connections — are in prison, or stranded in Syria. Thus the residual attacks are perpetrated by losers and the misfits without links to formal cells or networks, so we put it down to mental health and soothe ourselves into believing this is all that is left of Western jihad. But those in prison will soon get out and others will make it back from Syria. They now know better than to blunder into more confrontations with Western states from a position of weakness. A movement that thinks in centuries will not rush into its next move.

Of course, the jihadist movement could collapse or fade into irrelevance. It’s just that there’s no reason to think it will, and that all the indicators — mostly from historical precedent — point the other way. Jihadis are not some nightmarish omnipotent force as they were too often portrayed during the Isis years. But while there is no call for alarmism, there may well be cause for pessimism.