There was never a chance of a win in the war in Afghanistan. There are never winners anyway.  Nobody has ever suborned the Afghan people despite the numerous invasions of that country. They have fighting skills going back centuries in the learning, and they have mountains in which to disappear as and when it is necessary to regroup. Besides! Who on earth gave us the right to try to bend these people to our way anyway? We have never taken too kindly to invasion ourselves.

We have no right to force our kind of democracy on them. The structure of their society is completely different.

However, using dialogue and discussion, we should be desperately trying to encourage the acceptance of men and women as equals within their society. Recent events show that rape victims, abandoned by their families, are usually seen as the sinners, and are often sent to prison, whilst the rapist, though often sent to prison too, generally for shorter terms, is seen as the one being hard done by. This attitude must surely change. This is the twenty-first century and well past time that people of whatever gender, colour, creed and sexual orientation were treated with equal dignity and as having equal rights.

In my country, the United Kingdom, we have all but destroyed the manufacturing base, and therefore, robbed our grand-children’s generation of many jobs. For that there is no excuse. The least we can do in compensation is enshrine into our way of thinking a sense that everyone is treated equally and fairly: in the work-place, in law, in society, and in faith. At least then, that generation may get fairer chances.

They may also realise that it makes good sense not to interfere in the running of other sovereign nations when one should be concentrating on running one’s own better.