What’s Next?

The Sun have a story today on British-Born Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, Iain Dale condemned them:

The Sun reveals this morning that British spy planes have picked up the voices of Taliban fighters speaking with Brummie and Bradford accents. These people are presumably British passport holders and are fighting British soldiers. When they are caught they should be charged with treason. There was a time when they would faced being hanged. To be honest, it’s what they deserve.

I just can’t get behind this kind of thing: Why are British-Born Taliban worse than Non-British Taliban? If we caught a British-Born Taliban and an Afghan-Born Taliban why would one have committed inherently worse crimes?

Am I a worse person if I’m a traitor against my country and murder a British person than if I murdered a French person? If it were India trying to keep the peace in Afghanistan, would the actions of these British Taliban be less evil?

Are the Germans who fled Germany to fight with the British Army to be looked down upon because they fought a war against their countrymen?

The Taliban are traitors against humanity, there are any number of reasons to despise them. Their nationality is utterly unimportant.

Are you ready for news from liberated and democratic Afghanistan, our allies in the War on Terror and whose government British soldiers are dying to defend? You bet you are!

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country’s rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after “liberation” and under the democratic rule of the West’s ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

Everyone repeat after me: realpolitik is awesome.