Has something gone adrift within the moral compass of our ‘news’ reporting? In the past week, 64 Afghans have been killed in the largest bomb to have exploded in Kabul in 15 years. At least 340 were wounded. The Taliban set off their explosives at the very wall of the ‘elite’ security force – watch out for that word ‘elite’ – which was supposed to protect the capital. Whole families were annihilated. No autopsies for them. Local television showed an entire family – a mother and father and three children blown to pieces in a millisecond – while the city’s ambulance service reported that its entire fleet (a miserable 15 vehicles) were mobilised for the rescue effort. One ambulance was so packed with wounded that the back doors came off their hinges.
But Prince also died this week.
Now Afghanistan is the country to which we and our EU partners are happily returning refugees on the grounds that Kabul and its surrounding provinces are “safe”. It is, of course, a lie – as flagrant and potentially as bloody as the infamous weapons of mass destruction we claimed were in Iraq in 2003. By then, we had already promised the Afghans – in 2001 – that we wouldn’t let them down. We wouldn’t forget them as we did after the Soviet war. A Blair promise, of course, and thus worthless.
There was another story on Afghan television last week, which carried its own dark implications for the future. A young man called Sabour was convicted of murdering two American advisers and told the court that he had absolutely no regrets. Afghan social media began to fill with comments in support of the man. He was “a real Afghan,” said one. “A true Afghan.” So much for Afghanistan and its utterly corrupt government and our continued claim that we support this bogus administration and that our advisers are there to produce, well, not ‘Jeffersonian democracy” – as the Americans coyly admitted in 2003 – but at least stability.
But Prince also died this week.