Like a latter day Dr Doolittle (and he really does do very little) Foreign Secretary David Miliband is to announce today that UK strategy on Afghanistan should now revolve around getting the Afghan government to speak to the “moderate” Taliban. The BBC interview wee Dougie Alexander about this and the usual references to the Northern Ireland peace process are thrown around to approving murmurs from the BBC.
Let me put this one straight.
Firstly, the Taliban are an Islamic malignancy with a Dark Ages mindset. The idea that there is a “moderate” section is like suggesting that there were some “moderate” Nazis. It seems to me that the BBC, in line with it’s Nulabour masters, are determined to pretend that some of those Taliban chaps will see sense if they are taken in from the cold and reasoned with.
Second, the comparison with Northern Ireland is lunatic. The British Government created the fiction here that there were “good” and “bad” terrorists – little consolation to the next of kin of their victims. “Good” terrorists play along with the fiction, “bad” terrorists don’t. This was served up as a “peace process” which enabled the Government to reward the mass killers in the terrorist establishment, betray their victims , disembowel the force of law and order, and win the plaudits of the liberal intelligentsia in the process. This depravity is the template that Miliband somehow seeks to impose on the Taliban. The head-cutters and limb amputators that make up the Taliban elite do not think in the way the IRA did, except when it comes to murder. They will take all concessions offered, of course, and then look for more.
Appeasing evil is pretty much all that Miliband and his ilk are capable of doing and they can be assured of a sympathetic hearing from the moral relativists that infest the BBC. There is, as Sir Winston Churchill once put it, NO point of compromise between the fireman and the arsonist.
As a final reference point, did you read THIS about the Taliban’s new terror chief? Why, he makes Butcher Boy Martin McGuinness seem like an almost decent cove.