By Aidan Lomas – Editor-in-Chief
It’s been a chaotic month since Afghanistan fell into the hands of the Taliban. On the one hand, a nation which has been the centre of international conflict for 20 years is now, once again, the graveyard of empires. On the other, the Taliban’s swift conquest of the nation is attributable to one thing, and one thing only; the worst US foreign policy disaster in the ‘great’ republic’s history. What was once a bastion of democracy and “freedom”, is now an unreliable and untrustworthy shell of the America once known confidently as the “land of the free”.
One land that certainly isn’t free – and likely never will be again – is the land of Afghanistan. I can still remember in my teen years – around 2014 or 2015 – seeing images of the Taliban strapping themselves to the back of Toyota pickup trucks along side some stolen heavy machinery. They weren’t a legitimate governing candidate, nor were they candidate’s for the Nobel Peace Prize; instead, they were a gaggle of brainwashed, misinformed, mislead morons who felt murder, violence, and chaos was preferable to the liberal democratic values which we in the West have, until recently, fought so hard to preserve and expand. Now, and worryingly emphatically, the Taliban are demanding recognition as the legitimate governors of Afghanistan. I once believed that the world itself isn’t mad, we’re just paying more attention to the mad things about it. Having watched a US President bury his head in the sand and cowardly run away from a conflict, I now believe the world isn’t mad, but instead we’ve merely lowered the standards to which we hold ourselves accountable…
Read more of this article when the Gown’s online issue is released on 16th of September.
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