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 great lionesses beat the Spaniards tomorrow?

I think they will, and they will achieve something that has eluded our male sports heroes for over 50 years. They will have gone out with three lions on their shirt and won a major international tournament; and in a way it doesn’t matter if they win or not because they’ve already beaten the men – just by getting into the final of a FIFA World Cup football for the first time since 1966.

These women with hoplite* helmet haircuts are part of a sporting sensation — the global rise of women’s football. Two billion people around the world are expected to have tuned in to 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 who really need to be forced to watch it.

If I could, I’d strap them into their chairs on Sundays and let them watch until they understood the excitement that comes with a major sporting competition, in which none of the contestants gives a monkey if they use much of their arms or their legs—and in which some even triumphantly strip their bras after scoring a goal.

Above all, I would force the trembling men of this all-male government to accept the main point: that the skill and courage of the lionesses are admired by all – by women, by men, by the whole family, by every member of the human race. .

Who needs to understand these elementary things? What government has failed to wake up to the modern world? I mean, of course, the Taliban, the current rulers of Kabul.

It has been 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, as bad as our worst nightmares.

Women’s football in Afghanistan? I’m afraid the whole situation is enough to make you cry.

I am proud that the UK has issued visas to over 100 players, coaches and others associated with the women’s team. I am indeed proud of the way we have helped thousands and thousands of Afghans to leave at a rapid pace and find refuge in this country.

But women’s football has been wiped out – simply wiped out of the cultural landscape, like the Bamiyan Buddhas*. And it’s much worse than that.

Girls are now banned from high school, let alone college. Women are not allowed to work for international organizations. They may not even travel across the country without a male chaperone – and walking around with their hair in a ponytail like the lionesses puts them at risk of public beating for their insolence.

The Afghan economy is disintegrating and millions of people are now on the brink of starvation.

I am one of those who bitterly deplore the speed of the Western exit in 2021. I think even a greatly reduced US presence would have been enough to maintain confidence, to avoid a collapse. It was that feeling of a disorderly exit and those chaotic and disturbing scenes at the airport that were so detrimental to the prestige of the West.

Yet I also understand that Joe Biden felt he had no good choices. His predecessor, Donald Trump, had already agreed to withdraw all but none of U.S. soldiers.

What was Biden’s alternative? He envisioned a never-ending military commitment in which he would be constantly required to step up the US presence and send US troops to fight the Taliban when there was no realistic prospect of defeating them – not without disproportionate expense, and even then with no certainty that any kind of victory would last.

Once that fundamental decision was made in Washington – to withdraw – I fear that it was always likely that Kabul would eventually fall to the Taliban and the horror of their rule would begin again; or at least we can see that in hindsight.

At the time, we really believed that the Afghan army would hold out. We thought we had done enough to train them to resist the Taliban. It is – in retrospect – clear that without that ultimate guarantee of a Western military presence, that was just wishful thinking. Without the US on their side in some way, they just didn’t have the ability to resist.

As we watch the chaos of Afghanistan, we are being asked, not least by the Taliban themselves, to side with the victors. They want our help, our investment, and they want us to thaw the Afghan assets.

Well, we ultimately need to commit — especially if we want to prevent Afghanistan from simply breeding more terrorists.

Before we do, we need the Taliban to understand the circular reasoning of the country’s problems. There is no form of help that will do the slightest bit of good if they persist in their brutal and ignorant behaviour.

It is not the fault of the West that only 23 percent of Afghan women can read and write, compared to 52 percent of men. It is the fault of these theocrats and their disgusting suppression of women’s education.

What happens if you don’t educate girls? You’re not only slowing down those girls’ chances, but their children’s as well. You get all the disasters that plague the poorest countries on earth, from infant mortality to terrorism to civil war.

Look at Niger, even now in chaos, where 90 percent of girls are almost uneducated.

Look at Yemen, Burkina Faso, Chad. In every country, this crisis — illiteracy, mostly female — is not just a symptom, but a cause.

It’s not hard to teach a girl to read. But you will never succeed if your society is run 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 a violation of the law. word of God.

Many people, especially the left, will suggest that this approach is wrong and culturally imperialistic. They will argue that we should not judge people’s traditions. We’ll get no response from the Taliban, they say, if we keep 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 intolerance – sexism and the crushing of women’s education – that is the main 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 need to heal first.

Yes, we will probably have to work with the Taliban – but first let them guarantee 12 years of education for every girl, and make them promise that women will be allowed to play football again. It is not cultural imperialism. It’s human decency. And they will find that the Afghan people quite like it.

Dictionary corner

Hoplite: A heavily armed foot soldier of ancient Greece

Culture corner

Bamiyan Buddhas: Two 6th-century monuments carved into a cliff in Afghanistan’s Bamyan Valley, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 for being “gods of the infidels”