Reports filter in from Kabul, a city that has become a living monument to the tyranny of beards and bigotry. A group of women, braver than any man in Westminster, took to the streets to protest the Taliban's slow-motion genocide of the female half of the population. They held placards aloft, demanding education, freedom, and a life beyond the four walls of a prison dressed up as a home. The Taliban's response? The same as always: bullets. Not words, not compromise, but bullets. Because in the calculus of medieval thugs, a woman's life is a currency they spend freely.
The Foreign Office, safely ensconced in its mahogany-panelled offices in Whitehall, has 'condemned' the attack. Oh, the bravery of a strongly worded statement. I can picture the scene: a junior minister, still warm from his morning latte, dictating a press release that will do precisely nothing. The Taliban, I'm sure, will read this and weep into their Kalashnikovs. 'Oh no,' they'll say, 'the British are cross with us. Let us immediately dismantle our system of gender apartheid and embrace the 21st century.' Or perhaps not. Perhaps they'll just shoot another woman.
This is not a protest. This is a slaughterhouse parade. The women of Afghanistan are being systematically erased, and the world yawns. The UN tuts, the Foreign Office condemns, and the Taliban carries on as if the planet's moral compass had been replaced by a tumbleweed. We have become expert at expressing concern, at issuing statements, at looking grave on television. But the women bleeding into the dust of Kabul do not need our concern. They need our rage. They need our intervention. They need the kind of diplomatic action that involves more than a sternly worded letter.
I write this from a bar in Soho, gin in hand, watching the world burn. The irony is not lost on me. My own country, with its history of colonial interference, now wrings its hands over the fate of women it first abandoned. The Taliban's bullets are made in China, their ideology imported from Saudi Arabia, and our response? A press release. We have outsourced our morality to a photocopier.
To the women who marched: you are braver than a thousand pinstriped hypocrites. To the Taliban: your days are numbered, not by the British government, but by the inevitable tide of history. And to the reader: do not look away. For if we ignore their screams, we deafen ourselves to our own humanity.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with another gin and tonic. The world is mad, and I am simply its court jester.
