Polly Toynbee went back to Afghanistan a year later. Her answer?
An old carpet-maker in a village out west was standing in his backyard beside the loom where his daughter was click-clacking at the warp and woof. Was it worth it, I asked? He pointed up at the sky: “We shouted with joy when the American planes came over this way. They hit a Taliban police barracks down the road. Boom! It was a big ammunition dump, we knew that. But we were amazed at how precise it was. Yes, we cheered!”
Not surprising, perhaps, as this is Hazara territory, the downtrodden, spat-upon tribe that makes up 20% of the population. But what of the bombs that missed, the innocent dead, among them Hazaras too? Hussain Dad spread his arms wide: “How many more do you think the Taliban would have killed in this last year? Thousands! And they would still be killing now. I hardly went out then. If you saw a Talib coming down the street, you hid your face, you looked away. If you looked at them, they said, ‘Who are you looking at?’ and they beat you for nothing.”
But there’s a long way to go.
The pathological loathing of women by the Taliban didn’t spring from nowhere, nor has it evaporated overnight. This is an apartheid society, a bifurcated human race where one half has been systematically excised: mothers, wives, daughters are only empty vessels, the regrettable and disgusting physical function through which men must deign to be born. Men are everything to one another here and their warm and public emotion can be a touching sight. They hug, kiss, embrace, weep together, delighting in each other’s company, laughing and probably making love quite a lot too. (Battles between warlords have been fought recently over beautiful boys, often involving kidnap and male rape.) British public-school bonding with the Afghan men of the mountains continues to this day. On my way out I picked up the latest award-winning Afghan travel book, and it was full of the same weird British romance for rugged men in rugged mountains. The only mention of women was a passing reference to the doe-eyed houris promised in heaven by the Prophet to every jihad martyr.
The country continues to need aid, and religious reformation, and there is still much to be done. It’s worth a read.