Robert Sharp

“Are you going to blog about it?” I was asked, last week, about the fall of Kabul.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

It’s not that I don’t think the return of the Taliban to power Afghanistan is not noteworthy. On the contrary, I’m sure it will be one of the 21st Century’s historical milestones. It is just that it is clearly the product of a hundred different factors, ranging from the geopolitical to the local, that I probably don’t understand. It seems to me that any piece of writing that seeks to say “we should have done things differently” must start a couple of centuries ago. And even with the understanding of how we got here, I’ve not seen or read anything that presents a plausible plan to make things better.

Best to turn past the images of geurillla fighting, and read instead about the pandemic, the wildfires, the ‘point of no returns’ climate warnings, and the incel massacre in Plymouth.

But one very particular aspect does, I think, warrant a very particular comment, and that is our failure to support those Afghans who have supported British military and diplomatic efforts in the country.

In an interview with Roman Mars, the journalist Marc Fennell talks about his podcast Stuff The British Stole and the complexities of our interwoven historical legacies.

A big part of why I like this medium, it allows you to take the audience down the pathway that respects their intelligence, that you can hold more than one idea at once. When we look at the past, there is a tendency to either focus on the good things or only on the bad things, and my attitude particularly to colonialism is you will encounter these arguments and people will say “well, you know, if it weren’t for colonialism you wouldn’t have laws and you wouldn’t have railroads” but then at the other end of the spectrum … because of colonialism there was genocide, and there were children taken away from families, horrendous stuff.” And my attuitude to history and the thing this series taught me is that those two things don’t ever balance each other out. And they definitely don’t cancel each other out. All they do is they co-exist. And I think we as a species are smart enough to hold both those ideas at the same time. And not try to force them to balance each other out in some sort of historical weighing match. Its doesn’t work that way. And I think what’s good about stories like this is you can actually guide the audience through those things. And we emerge out the other end with a more complex understanding. Like I say to people, “I want you to stand in the mess.”

Marc Fennell, ‘Stuff thhe British Stole’ episode of the 99% Invisible podcast, 13 July 2021.

This idea of complexity and the holding of contradictory, competing ideas, is one that we encounter a lot in discussions of politics, history and culture. Fennell’s insight is not new, but it is a timely repetition of something that does, unfortunately, need repeating.