 It's taking control of Afghanistan. The Taliban have been keen to portray themselves as a more moderate force than the organisation which ran the country in the 1990s. And in that attempt to change their image, they've gained a surprising ally, the chief of the British Army. And how do you feel about collaborating with the enemy when they have carried out such atrocities against the UK military personnel over the years? I think you have to be very careful using the word enemy. I think people need to understand who the Taliban actually are. And of course, what they are, a disparate collection of tribespeople. As President Karzai put it to me only yesterday, they're country boys. And the plain fact is that they happen to live by a code of honour, understand it, which has been their standard for many, many years. It's called Pashtun Wali. It has honour at the heart of what they do. They are bound together by a common purpose, which is they don't like corrupt governance. They don't like governance that is self-serving. And they want an Afghanistan that is inclusive for all. So I think rather than talking about the... Except women. What? Except women. Well, again, I think we have to wait and see. I mean, I don't know what they mean. We can't support the way that they treat women. Surely. Well, I think you have to listen to what they're saying at the moment. And I think you have to listen to the facts on the ground. They are definitely... They're saying they're going to have to abide by sharia law. Yeah. And I'm not saying that's anything that you and I would approve of particularly. I'm just trying to find that. Absolutely. But I do think that they have changed. And I think they recognize that over the course of the last 20 years, Afghanistan has evolved. They recognize the fundamental role that women have played in that evolution. And yes, they at the moment will undoubtedly say that they want to respect women's rights under Islamic law. And that will be a sharia law. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't allowed them to be involved in government and in education and in medicine and those things that they need them to be involved in. So I think we have to be patient. We have to give them the space to show how they are going to step up to the plate and whether or not we can work with them will very much depend upon how they treat all Afghans. That was Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the Defence Staff. Since giving that interview, he's taken a lot of heat for taking the Taliban at their word. Lynn O'Donnell is a journalist in Afghanistan. She tweeted, British army lines to take, General Sir Nick Carter calls the murderers liars, misogynists and drug dealers of the Taliban reasonable changed. And there we were thinking he was a serious person, a fool, an apologist, an embarrassment and liability. Shame on you. Andrew Neal, who you'll know as chair of GB News, former star host at the BBC, UK Chief of Defence joins Taliban PR team. Didn't he tell us a few months ago that the Afghan army was a formidable fighting machine? The Senate Carter is also getting some flak because he said the Afghan army would be able to defeat the Taliban. Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandi called the comments unpalatable. That was speaking to Sky shortly after that interview. Personally, I do think Nick Carter did sound a bit naive in that clip, saying the thing that gels the Taliban together is they're against corruption and also completely taking them at their word that they want an Afghanistan that is inclusive to all is, you know, I think going way too far. You should be a lot more critical of what these people are saying than that, given what they did in the past and what they've been doing more recently. At the same time, I did think it was interesting having the boss of the British army avoid some of the tropes that we get from some of our, you know, quite hawkish liberal politicians, which is to just see the Taliban as something which is evil incarnate, which it would be wrong to even negotiate with on any level. It did seem like he had a more nuanced take than some people we heard in the House of Commons today, for example, even if clearly, as I say, he got some things wrong. Aaron, what did you think of the comments there from Nick Carter and also the response to them? Yeah, it was at one point I was almost expecting him to say, therefore, you know, in Afghanistan for the many, not the few. You know, it was like he was eulogising, you know, the social justice element of the Taliban, which not even, you know, not even Taliban public relations people do. And I'm sure that's part of what they offer their domestic audience. I don't doubt it. And clearly, the sort of the way they're represented in the West is evil, monstrous ogres. And it's obviously a great proof to it. That can't be the only side to them, because clearly, to emerge that quickly, they have they have some consent from somewhere. I know it's really hard for a Western audience to accept, but that's because we're not in receipt of all the facts. You know, if you were a part of a wedding party and your entire extended family was killed in a drone strike, you probably would look to them as the people capable of transforming the country for the better. I'm not I'm not legitimising. Anyway, I don't agree with what he said, but I agree with what you've just said there, Michael, which is there is a really interesting contrast. And I thought the person who really struck it perfectly well was the superb guest you got on Monday, Michael, the academic Paul, what's his Paul Rogers, Paul Rogers. Amazing. So he had a political sensitivity to the situation in Afghanistan, wasn't going to caricature the people there because it is really important to say that the Taliban today are very different to the Taliban of 20 years ago. Why? Well, it's one of the youngest countries on earth is one thing. You know, I think about half the country is basically 18 or under. They have literally no memory of the Taliban. That includes many of the younger people that are fighting for them. The sort of preceding 20 years before we go, there is, of course, civil war and more the USSR. The last 20 years has been more civilising. Not to say there was a civilising mission, but clearly there's been the emergence of civil society. There's been attempts at elections, increased literacy, et cetera, not all good. For instance, poverty has also increased, but clearly that the context of the last 20 years now with the rise of the Taliban is very different to the first time we had the Taliban, Taliban 1.0. So I can kind of see what he's getting at. Maybe it might not be as terrible as the first time. Maybe there'll be the space for civil society and women and ethnic minorities and so on to change things the better. Maybe, but it was, yeah, the tone he said wasn't that. It was almost like, I actually got a message from somebody after the interview and they said, maybe the British Army, maybe the Brits are in on this. Because it was like a, I don't think the person, the message me thinks that, but it was a really strange, it's just senior military guy to say these things. Maybe he was overcompensating. Maybe that the fundamentally now the British Army know they're gonna have to work with the Taliban at least the next couple of weeks, months to get people out, get service personnel out, NGOs out. So he probably thinks he might have to say these things because there's also a foreign audience which is watching what we say. It's not just a domestic audience. That said, it was still overkill. I think your final hypothesis is quite possible actually because he did also say in that interview, he was asked, why did you say that Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan army could still win this? I think Andrew Neal said months ago, I think he said it as recently as last week. And he said that was to try and give confidence to the Afghan army. So he said, I didn't say it because I believed it. I said it for strategic reasons because I want the Afghan army to, well, they'd have had to have been subscribers to the times. So again, slightly implausible, but you can see why he might rationalize what he says as serving a particular tactical or strategic purpose. Again, as I said, I mean, we both agree that many of the things he said, they were silly and wrong. At the same time, there are so many MPs who I think do just see the Taliban as evil incarnate. They see the Western propped up government is this liberal democratic, wondrous thing that everyone loves. And that does ignore a lot of the reality on the ground. I was reading an economist article from 2019 actually. Super interesting. It was saying for the truck drivers they interviewed in Afghanistan, the difference between the Taliban and the Afghan government was that when the Taliban taxed you going down the street, they gave you a receipt. So you'd only get taxed once. Whereas with the Afghan government, you get taxed at every checkpoint by every different military leader, because it is, according to this article, and it does seem according to lots of what has been written, that while the Taliban are morally repugnant in so many ways, they might be less corrupt than the Afghan government as it existed. And for many people, that is gonna be one of the more important things when it comes to who do you want to rule you? Again, this is not to say, I think Taliban rule is gonna be a good thing, but it's to say that clearly the speed at which they took over the country means they have some legitimacy and they have some legitimacy, not because all of the Afghan people who support the Taliban just hate women, it's because they are providing something which the US prop government was unable or unwilling to provide. Aaron, you wanna come back in on this? I think it's important to say that there does seem to be some sort of, you know, we just had a great guest on live from Kabul saying that the war, the intervention of Afghanistan after October 2001 rather, was a failure. I think it's hugely important that somebody in Kabul is saying that, what we have British politicians saying, no, it wasn't a failure. I know whose opinion is more valuable. It's really, really, really important that people don't just think, oh, well, the regime under Ghani and privacy under Khazai, you know, they were all university graduates and they were all going for lattes and on social media on phones. It's just so fatuous and childish. It's, you know, the world is not like that. I find this so strange, Michael. It's almost like we never had anthropology and we never had the idea that different societies just operate in quite different ways. And that somehow, you know, Ghani's the good guy and there was, like I said, no corruption. Fundamentally, what do people care about? The same things they care about everywhere. Housing, security, jobs, infrastructure, prospects for your children, health. And if that's not being provided, you will look elsewhere. That's what it boils down to. And I don't see why it's so hard for people to get their heads around that. Why is it so hard? And they had a long time, they're 20 years of a different way of doing things imposed by a foreign power and it hasn't really done very much for them. It hasn't done very much for them. Of course, we can talk about huge increase in women's rights, people going to school and so on. But if you're looking at, you know, poverty, if you're looking at income deprivation, access to certain social goods, not really. And they look at Iran next door. Again, people have criticisms of Iran, but it's an Islamic Republic. You know, it's a theocracy. And they look at Pakistan, a very religious country. And now they're occupied by America and both have a far higher standard of living. Now there's a bunch of reasons why they're historically wealthier than Afghanistan. Iran had oil, Pakistan is an affluent country, part of South Asia by comparison to Afghanistan. But it's not outlandish to look at those two countries next to you, look at your own mismanaged country. Everything that matters to you isn't really being provided by the government. And so look elsewhere. I don't get why this is so unthinkable. Maybe I'm missing something. Well, I think the reason it is unthinkable is because people that live in rich, stable countries, they take all of that for granted. So you don't even notice the fact that one of the big priorities for people who live in countries which aren't historically rich or stable is to have stability and to have some financial security. Right, so the stellar creases of the world, they take that for granted so much that they think, of course you would support a corrupt and competent government which respects women's rights as opposed to a less corrupt and slightly more competent but misogynist one. Now, I don't wanna make that horrible choice between those two governments but it's not completely irrational to choose one over the other. You know, I mean, if the Americans didn't want the researchers to tell about what they should have built is a country which respected women's rights and wasn't incredibly corrupt and which did bring welfare and development to the countryside because they didn't do those things. That's why we're in this particular situation. Maybe you can't do those things with guns and planes and bullets as we've suggested already. There are no good options here. Can I come back in quickly as one more thing? Yeah, do you want your final word tonight? Yeah, I just, again, it boils down to this Western European pathology. We can't do that. We can't change these things. You know, there are a bunch of ways you can support. You can support society organizations. You can support change and domestic policy which would create more overseas development aid or a fairer trade policy or more generous migration asylum policies. But you can't, I just don't understand where this comes from. Like in 1988, you had the Iran-Iraq war. You had nine years after the Iranian Revolution. The situation for Iranian women was far worse than it is today. The situation, I'm not saying it's perfect. It's not perfect, far from perfect. Actually, Iran has many, many things wrong with it. But the situation for women in Iran today is much better than it was in 1988. And that's entirely because of civil society leadership exercised by women and allies inside Iran. And it was fundamentally no different to what happened here in women's rights. You know, you have the American Revolution in the 1770s. America is not a democratic republic, I think, until after the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s. It takes America almost 200 years to get its house in order when it came to civil political rights and racial equality. Now, Iran has a revolution in 79. You know, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, well, you get 50, 60, 70 years, right? So when people say, should there be regime change in Iran? No, because I don't want Iran to look like Afghanistan or like Libya. Should there be massive political reform in Iran? Of course, there should be, absolutely. And that has to be generated by people inside the country with support, of course, from the labor movement overseas and people who share certain values and internationalist kind of principles. Of course, but we can't change that. That's not how politics works. It's not how politics works. And anything you impose on these countries is not going to be very enduring. And people say, oh, Iran, that's horrible. How could you, we can have a difference of opinion, but we've already gone over this, Michael. There are no sort of historical examples of that happening. You look at the modernization of Japan or you look at, you know, changes in other parts of the global south. They come from movements inside these countries. I don't know what else to say. You know, we can't say, here's a triangle. It's got three sides. Well, actually, I think you should have four sides. You might want it to have four sides, but we live in the world we live in. And again, you know, what's so strange about this whole debate with the left, Mike? Because often the left are presented as ideologues, impractical, utopian, but actually all that stuff really applies to kind of liberal analysis of this about, you know, we can build liberal democratic states. They can be imposed from above. We can have, you know, regime change, the better, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, my God, there's never been a more utopian project in the history of humanity and it's failed catastrophically.