The Truth Behind The Fall Of The UK - Rory Stewart

You've just come back from Afghanistan. What is the atmosphere like now after the last few years, since the Taliban took over? What's it actually like on the ground?

Well, I, I think the first thing, um, is just that it's surreal. So I was in Afghanistan first when the Taliban were in their last. So they, they ran the country in the late 1990s through to September the 11th. And it was a time when it was one of the most, I guess, sort of shocking governments on Earth. Th- there were public executions in the main stadiums. Kabul, the capital city, was a ghost town. There were very few people living there, very few vehicles, half the buildings were still in ruins from the civil war. And, uh, they were hanging televisions from trees. I mean, they were, they were on a campaign against any kind of image. So they were literally... You could see television kind of suspended from trees. Then we invaded Afghanistan, and I walked across Afghanistan just after the invasion, so I walked from the west to the east of the country. And I saw a country slowly emerging from the Taliban. I stayed in a lot of village houses along the way. The US and its allies then spent one and a half trillion dollars, that's $1.5 thousand billion, in Afghanistan trying to build a nation, build a democracy, and after almost exactly 20 years there, they pulled out. So having invaded to get rid of the Taliban, they pulled out and handed the country back to the Taliban again. So I turn up, uh, and I'm turning up at the airport that used to have kind of big pictures of Hamid Karzai, who was the, um, who was the US backed president. Now, of course, no such pr- pictures at all. Um, you suddenly see everybody's returned to wearing traditional dress, so you used to see a lot of people in T-shirts and jeans. Now they're mostly back in shalwar kameez. Very few women on the streets. Uh, the government is basically run by religious, religious leaders, by clerics, by priests. And, um... But security is much better. I mean, that's the thing that people don't talk about. It's much safer than it was for 20 years. So I was able to travel up into this... Because, well, partly the Taliban don't get any marks for this. It was partly 'cause they were doing the bombing and the fighting and the killing, and now they've taken over, there's no- not much reason for them to do that anymore. But you can now travel up and down the country from one end to the other safely, and that makes a huge difference to average Afghans because, you know, tens of thousands of people were killed during this war, killed not just by the Taliban, but killed by US troops, British troops, Afghan troops. So if you were in the front lines down in southern Afghanistan, it, it was a horror show. Your relatives were getting killed all the time by either side. It's a civil war. And now it's, now it's peaceful, and that, that shouldn't be underestimated. I mean, I think many Afghans will say, "Okay, we don't like the way the Taliban are behaving. We don't like the way they're treating women. We feel a real absence of freedom, but my goodness, we're grateful that we're not liable to be killed at any moment."