BORIS JOHNSON: I’d strap the Taliban into their chairs on Sunday and make them watch our Lionesses – until they understand the skill, strength and talent that women possess
Can they do it? Can our amazing Lionesses actually beat the Spanish tomorrow?
I think they will, and they will accomplish something that has eluded our male sporting heroes for more than 50 years. They will have gone out with three lions on their shirts and won a major international tournament; and in a sense it doesn’t matter whether they win or not, because they have already beaten the men — just by getting into the final of a FIFA football World Cup for the first time since 1966.
These hoplite*-helmet-hairstyled women are part of a sporting sensation — the global arrival of women’s football. It is expected that two billion people across the world will have tuned into this women’s World Cup, up from 1.19 billion in 2019.
The growth is phenomenal, and there is only one group of male politicians that really needs to be compelled to watch it.
If I could, I would strap them into their chairs on Sunday and make them watch until they understood the excitement that goes with a great sporting competition, in which none of the participants gives a monkey’s if they show off a lot of their arms or their legs — and in which some even bare their bras in triumph after scoring a goal.
Can our amazing Lionesses actually beat the Spanish tomorrow? I think they will, and they will accomplish something that has eluded our male sporting heroes for more than 50 years, writes Boris Johnson
They will have gone out with three lions on their shirts and won a major international tournament
Above all, I would force the quivering men of this all-male government to accept the key point: that the skill and courage of the Lionesses are admired by everyone — by women, by men, by the entire family, by every member of the human race.
Who needs to grasp this elementary stuff? Which government has failed to wake up to the modern world? I mean, of course, the Taliban, the present rulers of Kabul.
It is almost exactly two years since the tragedy of the Western departure from Afghanistan, and in that time the Taliban have shown themselves to be, in many ways, every bit as bad as our worst nightmares.
Women’s football in Afghanistan? I am afraid the whole situation is enough to make you weep.
I am proud the UK gave visas to more than 100 players, coaches and others associated with the women’s team. Indeed, I am proud of the way we helped thousands upon thousands of Afghans to leave, at great speed, and to find sanctuary in this country.
But women’s football has been wiped out — simply effaced from the cultural landscape, like the Bamiyan Buddhas*. And it is far worse than that.
Girls are now banned from secondary school, let alone university. Women may not work for international organisations. They may not even travel within the country without a male chaperone — and if they were to go around with their hair up in a ponytail like the Lionesses, they would be at risk of being publicly beaten for their effrontery.
The Afghan economy is disintegrating, with millions of people now on the brink of starvation.
Women’s football in Afghanistan? I am afraid the whole situation is enough to make you weep
I am one of those who bitterly regret the speed of the Western exit in 2021. I think it possible that even a greatly reduced American presence would have been enough to maintain confidence, to prevent a collapse. It was that sense of a disorderly exit, and those chaotic and distressing scenes at the airport, that were so damaging to the West’s prestige.
Yet I also understand that Joe Biden felt he had no good choices. His predecessor, Donald Trump, had already agreed to pull out every last American soldier, bar none.
What was Biden’s alternative? He saw an unending military commitment, in which he would be constantly required to ramp up the U.S. presence and to send U.S. forces to fight the Taliban, when there was no realistic prospect of defeating them — not without exorbitant cost, and even then with no certainty that any kind of victory would last.
Once that fundamental decision had been made in Washington — to pull out — I am afraid it was always likely that Kabul would eventually fall to the Taliban, and that the horror of their rule would begin again; or, at least, we can see that in retrospect.
At the time, we honestly believed the Afghan army would hang on. We believed we had done enough to train them to resist the Taliban. It is clear — with hindsight — that without that ultimate guarantee of a Western military presence, that was just wishful thinking. Without the U.S. in some way by their side, they just did not have the capacity to resist.
As we stare at the chaos of Afghanistan today, we are being asked, not least by the Taliban themselves, to engage with the victors. They want our aid, our investment, and they want us to unfreeze Afghan assets.
Well, we must eventually engage — especially if we want to prevent Afghanistan from simply incubating more terrorists.
Before we do so, we need the Taliban to understand the circularity of the country’s problems. There is no amount of aid that will do the slightest bit of good if they persist in their brutal and benighted behaviour.
In a sense it doesn’t matter whether they win or not, because they have already beaten the men — just by getting into the final of a FIFA football World Cup for the first time since 1966
It is not the fault of the West that only 23 per cent of Afghan women are literate, as against 52 per cent of the men. It is the fault of these theocrats and their disgusting repression of female education.
What happens if you fail to educate girls? You retard the chances not just of those girls but of their children. You get all the disasters that afflict the poorest countries on earth, from infant mortality to terrorism to civil war.
Look at Niger, also now in chaos, where 90 per cent of girls are almost uneducated.
Look at Yemen, Burkina Faso, Chad. In each country, this crisis — illiteracy, preponderantly female — is not just a symptom but a cause.
It is not difficult to teach a girl to read. But you will never succeed if your society is governed by bigoted and chauvinistic men who actively believe that a girl who can read — let alone a girl who understands the offside rule in football — is somehow an offence against the word of God.
Plenty of people, mainly on the Left, will suggest that this approach is wrong and culturally imperialist. They will claim we should not be judgmental about people’s traditions. We will not get a hearing from the Taliban, they say, if we persist in calling them medieval.
I say to hell with all that. To call these people medieval is an insult to the relative equality and enlightenment of the Middle Ages. It is the bigotry — the sexism and the crushing of female education — that is the prime and chronic cause of the economic disaster; because if you don’t educate the girls, you hold back the whole family and you hold back your society. That’s what we must cure first.
Yes, we will probably have to engage with the Taliban — but first let them guarantee 12 years of education for every girl, and make them promise to allow women to play football again. It’s not cultural imperialism. It’s human decency. And they will find the Afghan people rather love it.
Dictionary corner
Hoplite: A heavily armed footsoldier of Ancient Greece
Culture corner
Bamiyan Buddhas: Two 6th-century monuments carved into a cliffside in the Bamyan Valley in Afghanistan which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 because they were ‘gods of the infidels’
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