The images from Kabul are impossible to ignore. Afghan women, draped in the shroud of a regime that despises them, pour into the streets to protest a rare massacre. Their voices crack with a fury that ought to shame the West. And Britain, ever the moral arbitrator from a safe distance, calls for UN intervention. How noble. How utterly vacuous.
Let us strip away the cant. The massacre is not rare. It is the logical endpoint of a system the West spent twenty years propping up with blood and treasure, only to abandon in a humiliating scramble that would make the Dunkirk evacuation look like a masterstroke of planning. The Taliban are monsters, yes, but they are monsters of our own making. We armed them, we negotiated with them, we handed them the keys to the palace. And now we express shock when they behave exactly as they always have.
Britain’s call for UN intervention is a ritualistic incantation, a phrase that costs nothing and achieves less. The UN is a talking shop, a bureaucratic mausoleum where resolutions go to die. What will it do? Pass a sternly worded condemnation? Dispatch a fact-finding mission that will return with a report that gathers dust? The women of Afghanistan do not need a committee. They need consequences.
I am reminded of the Victorian era, when Britain actually wielded power abroad, for better or worse. We sent gunboats, we built empires, we imposed order. The moral calculus was often grotesque, but at least we acted. Today, we have vacated the field, replaced action with gestures, and called it diplomacy. The massacre is not a failure of the international community. It is a revelation of its irrelevance.
Nor is this an isolated tragedy. History cycles, and the current phase is unmistakably one of decadence. The West has lost its nerve, its will to project force beyond its borders. We fret about carbon footprints while women are stoned to death. We debate pronouns while girls are sold into marriage. The priorities are inverted, the order reversed.
Some will accuse me of cynicism. No. This is clarity. The Taliban are a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a civilization that has forgotten what it is worth fighting for. Britain’s call for UN intervention is a Band-Aid on a haemorrhage. If we want to stop the massacres, we must first recover the appetite for power. Until then, we might as well scream into the abyss alongside those women of Cabul.
The tragedy is that they expect nothing from us, and we deliver precisely that.
