Convenience Big Store: Western meddling never helps anyone

16 August, 2021

In the headlines

At least five people have died amid "chaos" at Kabul airport after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital. The Islamists' victory is "the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in 65 years", says the Daily Mail. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace broke down on LBC radio, admitting "some people won't get back" from Afghanistan and saying: "It's sad that the West has done what it's done." It's D-day for Geronimo the alpaca as a High Court judge rules on his death sentence. Supporters have vowed to act as a human shield from Defra vets. Britain is set for a 31C heatwave next week as a heat plume arrives from Spain. "Here comes the tum," says the Daily Star.

Comment of the day

Western meddling never helps anyone

We were "right to get the hell out of Afghanistan", says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. In fact, "we should never have gone in". It is an iron law: neoliberal meddling in the Middle East and beyond has always been murderous and lethal. It's no use saying "we had jolly good intentions, and so sorry about the mess". Try telling that to the 240,000 people, including 70,000 civilians, who've been killed since the West's "helpful intervention" in Afghanistan. In Iraq, 450,000 locals died in a war that led to the formation of Islamic State, and thus more slaughter.

Nowhere has ended up better off for our help – "not Iraq nor Afghanistan, not Libya nor Syria nor Somalia". And they don't want us there. No one says this, but one reason the Taliban are advancing so rapidly is "that they have quite a lot of public support". It is a grotesque fallacy that these countries "desire a nice liberal democracy, perhaps run by someone like Nick Clegg, LGBT-sensitive, lots of wind turbines". They palpably do not. The consequences for us are the importation of terrorism from radical Muslims who "somehow, goodness knows why, feel aggrieved by our helpfulness". Most of the comments I read in the press bemoan our "betrayal" in withdrawing. When will we learn we're not welcome?

Time for the truth about the Wuhan lab leak

China thought it had "closed the lid" on the Wuhan lab leak theory, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. In February a team of visiting World Health Organisation scientists declared a lab leak "very unlikely". Only now they're changing their tune. The mission's leader, Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, has said he thinks it "likely" that a staffer at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control did contract the virus. Why the change? First, "the politics was always in the room". Embarek faced up to 60 Chinese Communist Party officials, many of whom were not scientists. His team was vetted by Beijing. Important files were withheld.

Embarek also faced his own boss, WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus, who gained his position "through Chinese backing". No wonder he declared himself "impressed" by China. Imagine the international scrutiny if Covid-19 had first appeared in, say, Oxford or Chapel Hill. "The fear totalitarianism inspires can be very effective. More dismaying, in a way, is the discovery that it works abroad, too." Nevertheless, a plague that has killed almost 4.5 million people should have provoked "the most rigorous inquiry". We upbraid the CCP for its "hidden persecution" of the Uighurs, its plot against Hong Kong's democracy and worse. Why are we reluctant to do so when it comes to the thing "that affects us all – the global pandemic"?

Inside politics

Whether or not you own a car affects your political leanings, says The Economist. At the 2019 general election the Tories had a 17-point lead among motorists. Labour had the same lead among the carless. Boris Johnson's green ambitions could "dissolve this bond", although some flashy infrastructure may keep Tory motorists on side. The Royal College of Art has been commissioned to design plug points for electric cars "as handsome as Giles Gilbert Scott's famous red phone box".

Noted

Getty Images

The American Midwest is home to 86,000 wild mustangs and numbers are increasing by up to 20% a year, says Natasha Daly in National Geographic. Helicopters round them up so they can receive fertility-control injections or be carted off to government-run ranches. Activists argue it's "inhumane" to break up herds, but climate change and overpopulation mean the mustangs are running out of water and food, enduring "a slow, painful deterioration".

Zeitgeist

Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about teaching in British state schools, won the 2020 Orwell prize. This month the author was forced to apologise for talking about students with "chocolate-coloured skin" and "almond-shaped eyes". But Kate described me perfectly, says one of Clanchy's former students, Shukria Rezaei, in The Sunday Times. For Afghan Hazaras like myself, "almond eyes" is a beautiful reference widely used in our poetry. Authors must stand up to this "purity spiral", says Lionel Shriver in The Times. One black blogger suggested "brown, dark brown, light brown, sandy brown... we're not edible". Is it really acceptable to compare minorities to "what we walk all over, to what gets washed away"? Sandy brown will be verboten "by tomorrow morning".

Snapshot

Gone viral

A 21-year-old student from Birmingham is stuck in Kabul after flying out there for a holiday. Miles Routledge arrived in the city late last week, believing the capital wouldn't fall for another month. But after a brush with the Taliban (he told them he was Welsh rather than admit to being British), he ended up in a UN safe house and, according to his latest Facebook post, is being evacuated to a new location. He has been streaming video blogs on the website Twitch. He believes he might be safe, says The Sun, because of a £15 joke purchase that gives him the right to use the title "Lord" – as seen on his American Express card.

Snapshot answer

It's two apprentices from Cavendish Pianos, the only company producing pianos built wholly in the UK. Husband and wife Adam and Charlie Cox began training a new generation of craftsmen in 2013, after the Japanese giant Yamaha bought the UK's only other homegrown company, Kemble. "Compared with the giant production lines in the Far East, we are making something more like organic bacon," says Adam. The pianos are made from British beech and oak that "will be working longer than we will".