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There is a difference between 1. Telling the world what is acceptable and 2. Imposing liberal values on the world. 2 involves 1 but it does not follow that 1 involves 2. The reason I have been primarily talking about military intervention on this thread is because (drumroll please...) this is a thread about NATO and its allies ending the presence of its military personnel in Afghanistan.

Here is the Doha Peace Agreement signed by Donald Trump. The words "women" and "girls" do not appear. The words "human rights" do not appear.

Of course, this slavery is not sanctioned by the Indian state (contra the Taliban expressly authorising the forced marriage, beating and rape of women), and the Indian constitution expressly prohibits both slavery and servitude. The problem in India is one of inability to enforce basic human rights, not an active desire on its state systematically and deliberately to deny them. The state isn't strong enough, politically or economically, or indeed socially within many communities, to crack down on things like bonded servitude and child labour. Absolutely no one suggests that the UK and other countries should not be taking action to address these issues. But in this case, it is not clear how a military intervention would make a blind bit of difference. By contrast it is very clear how a military intervention made the difference for the women and girls of Kabul and Afghanistan's other major population centres.

It won't. The Taliban were negotiating with Trump, because they saw he was a strategic blunderbus and that they could engineer a situation where NATO prematurely withdrew troops. That the Biden administration didn't properly revisit this is an absolute catastrophe. There was absolutely no attempt in those negotiations to address the way that the Taliban treats women and girls. Both because Trump didn't care and because that simply isn't something that they would compromise on in any enforceable, lasting or meaningful way. The UN is a toothless organisation. Absolutely no progress will be made there while the Russians and Chinese have an interest in blocking anything (including sanctions) in the Security Council. Saying that we should "hand it over to NATO" literally just means "America should hand it over to an organisation most of whose foreign policies are determined by America and its allies". That doesn't solve or improve anything. I've never suggested that we can "send the army into every country that uses rape as a weapon". But when we do send the army into countries, and a consequence of our presence is that for at least part of the civilian population that rape can no longer be used as a weapon, we are morally obliged to take all feasible steps to ensure the conditions in those places do not revert as and when we are no longer there.

If you're a taxpayer you pay my salary. Unlucky.

I think it says a lot more about you that you're grabbing the popcorn at the prospect of women being denied bodily autonomy because it might upset someone on the internet.

The World Cup shouldn't be going to Qatar, we agree. The US and UK shouldn't sell arms to Saudi Arabia and should impose economic sanctions on them for how they treat women, LGBT people and ethnic minorities and for their role in the conflict in Yemen. We agree. Yes we should. We agree. But in some cases it does require military force to be used. People who go door to door looking for teenage girls to rape as a trophy aren't interested in "negotiating" their way out of barbarity.

I'm not asking "the world" to "adopt this rule". It is not a set of "liberal norms" that women and girls should not be forcibly married, beaten for being alone in public, raped by soldiers as trophies. It is among the absolute bare fucking minimum set of norms that gives moral legitimacy to the existence of political power. And no, the West just sitting back and passively doing nothing does not mean there will be "peace" in the world. It means that Russia and China will dominate more of the planet, enable more despotic and brutal regimes to oppress their people, and will destabilise the peace in the West that you and hundreds of millions of others take for granted.

I'm sure you think you're being clever here, but both the International Security Assistance Force (for the actual war in Afghanistan) and the Resolute Support Mission (from 2014 onwards when the main combat mission drew to a close) were NATO-led missions. As recently as February, seven countries had more than 500 troops deployed in Resolute Support Mission, including six NATO member states (US, UK, Germany, Italy, Romania and Turkey) and one NATO partner state (Georgia). In total, almost forty countries, most of which are either NATO members or NATO partners, had a continuing military presence in Afghanistan just six months ago. It was very clearly a mission that would not have been possible without NATO, was led and co-ordinated by NATO's joint command, and which involved predominantly NATO military personnel. Equally, since the laws of thermodynamics prohibit travelling backwards in spacetime, there's not much point demanding an exit strategy before committing to something that happened 20 years ago. I stand here today and demand that Neville Chamberlain gives us a clear exit strategy for World War 2! More importantly, given the severity of the consequences of withdrawal from Afghanistan, we should have had a clear exit strategy before we exited the country. Something Joe Biden and his "poodles" (as you like to call them) sorely lacked. I don't care whether you supported, or did not support, the original intervention. For the record, I supported it, albeit I was ten so you probably shouldn't read too much either way into the perspective I took then (even though it was demonstrably right). As I explained before crowing away about how we should "never have gone in" is not itself a justification for withdrawal, or indeed for withdrawal at this point in time. It can only be such a justification if you think that the countries who sent their military into Afghanistan in the first place somehow have no moral responsibility for the stability of the region and safety of those in Afghanistan as a result of having intervened. If you'll forgive the analogy, you are basically saying that someone who fathers a child in an extramarital affair should stop paying child support because "he never should have had the affair". But he did have the affair. And he fathered a child. That he's upset his wife and that the finances for bringing up her children are diminished is neither here nor there. The father has a duty, an obligation, to clean up his own mess and to set up his kids until they are able to look after themselves.

Possibly, yes. But one doesn’t have to have been in favour of that at the time to be in favour of NATO forces pursuing those objectives once they are there. And the mere fact that it might not have been the only, or primary, or a main objective underpinning the initial intervention doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be relevant and dominant in the assessment about whether and when to withdraw. Because as I said earlier, once a state or group of states initiates military intervention it owns the consequences of that intervention and assumes responsibility for the protection of those over whose lives they have established a degree of control. If an army goes into a country with an appalling record on women’s rights, it and its state has a duty to protect and guarantee the basic physical safety and autonomy of as many women in that country as is feasible, until such a time that their presence is no longer required to ensure that basic physical safety and autonomy.

"We" clearly refers to "the member states of NATO who have withdrawn a military presence from Afghanistan". Those states. One of which you and I live in, and which has an elected government which acts on the behalf of the people living here on the international stage. This isn't complicated. I am not suggesting that you personally as a voter had any real say in this. Thank goodness you didn't.

As soon as we withdrew troops, at any time in the last two decades, the Taliban would have simply done what they've done now, and retaken control of the country. Humanitarian operations would have been completely and utterly futile without a military presence to hold them back. Except no. We shouldn't accept that a father gets to decide whether his daughter gets married, or to whom. Anywhere. Ever. It is never acceptable, regardless of cultural sensitivities, to whip and beat a woman for being outside without "her minder". You aren't calling for us to be sensitive to the cultural concerns of those living in Afghanistan. You are calling for us to privilege the desires and power of a specific subset of abusive men, and saying that we should tolerate the subjugation of women to such an extent that it is almost worse than when the US Constitution treated non-free people as 3/5 of a person. Sorry but this is just nonsense. While the West had a concerted military presence, the major provincial capitals, not just Kabul, were under Government control. We are right now seeing anti-Taliban protests in some of these capitals, which are being brutally suppressed and leading to deaths of civilians. Saying that the lives of women and girls in Kabul somehow "count for little" just because other people's lives haven't really changed because they're living under the Taliban now and were living under the Taliban before simply doesn't stack up. The gains in Kabul were real, and could have been effectively permanent if we'd just kept our troops there. Kabul wouldn't have been exposed (to anything like the extent that it was) if we hadn't withdrawn our troops. This is rubbish. The Taliban did not gain support because little girls started going to school in Kabul. 1. Western values aren't Christian values and vice versa. 2. We aren't imposing Western values. We are imposing values that are entirely consistent with those of hundreds of millions of Muslims on the planet. We're not trying to change ideals. We're using military power to stop specific people physically beating, raping and killing other people. Anyone who "respects the opinion" of someone who says his daughter shouldn't be allowed to choose if and who to marry, that she should be publicly beaten with a whip if she goes outside unaccompanied by her male minder, that she should be banned on pain of beating from going to school, that if she refuses to have sex with her husband or a soldier that has just turned up at the door, and that she will be stoned to death if she shows her face or her hair in public, is unequivocally wrong and doesn't themselves deserve to have their opinion respected.

They aren't going to shag you m8. Oh well that changes everything. Let's withdraw all our troops from the airport now.

No one is denying this. It depends on the nature, imminence and magnitude of the threat the terrorist poses, the existence or absence of less intrusive means of neutralising the active terrorist, and the extent to which the wedding guests can, based on the best military intelligence available, be characterised as civilians or combatants. It's going to be a pretty big clue that they're soldiers when they're wearing a military uniform.

Literally no one is disputing that we're only discussing (2) because (1) happened. But we live in 2021. The decision to withdraw troops was about a decision taking effect in 2021, with the world having had events happen between 2001 and 2021. It wasn't a decision to withdraw troops in 2001. Withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 because you should never have gone in in 2001 is a total non sequitur unless you think the act of militarily intervening in a country does not in any sense impose on you responsibility for what follows from that intervention. I do care about them. But it isn't and wasn't feasible for us to hold those territories. We tried and failed. You make a difference where you have the power to make a difference and you accept that sometimes there are things it isn't feasible to change. We know it was feasible to change things in Kabul because we... changed things in Kabul. You on the other hand appear to know absolutely nothing. You know fine well that the Taliban, its soldiers and its political leaders are not consistent in the enforcement of their theocratic codes throughout the parts of Afghanistan they control. And if you don't, you're even more of a simpleton than you've been letting on thus far.

1. If you knew absolutely anything about military training you would know that one of the first things NATO countries train their soldiers on is the prohibition of actions that amount to war crimes. 2. I know Killie fans are all fermers but you didn't need to bring your straw man with you from the field. 3. If someone points a gun at a soldier, or starts shooting at a soldier, the soldier is entitled to conclude they are no longer merely a civilian.

The UK and Ireland don’t just not allow forced marriage against the wishes of women or girls; they both have specific laws to criminalise those complicit in bringing it about. The following two things can simultaneously be true: (1) The US and UK should not have gone into Afganistan in 2001 (2) Having gone into Afghanistan in 2001, the US and UK should not have left it in 2021 given the prevailing military and political situation. For what it’s worth, (1) is wrong, but it doesn’t have to be wrong for (2) to be right. But, and this is the crucial bit, NATO forces in Kabul would have prevented Taliban forces from taking control of the city. That is all that matters in the context of whether or not women and girls are subject to their barbaric Sharia law. Literally read the full context you cretinous simpleton. The previous poster referred, separately, to the burqa, the hijab and Islam as three distinct things that might be treated as either “optional” or “mandatory” in a society. In Afghanistan, in places where the Taliban are in control, many women and teenage girls are forced to wear the burqa or niqab: i.e. an outfit which, among other things, covers the entire face save for a small slot that enables them to see. In other areas, the Taliban are not as strict, but still demand, on threat of violence, that women wear the hijab, covering their head, hair and neck. Under Western occupation, no women or girls in Kabul were required to wear any of these in public as a matter of law, and those who tried to force them to do so, on the contrary, would face state sanction.

This is literally why we have the Geneva Convention. Except, as I have explained already, I don’t deny that civilians are often casualties in war. Where I draw the line is at the deliberate targeting of civilians. If you are shooting someone because you genuinely believe them to be a combatant, you are not “deliberately targeting civilians”. Potentially, yes. And that’s why I wouldn’t drop a nuclear bomb on a city if instructed to. Because that would be a war crime.

No shit. Except it was already benefiting millions of Afghans. I don’t care if it doesn’t benefit NATO that women and girls in Afghanistan lived for a significant period free from the threat of forced marriage, rape and murder. Though it absolutely does benefit us. It’s shooting for something a chasm short of a “utopia” to set the baseline at “forced marriage, rape, torture and beheading are unacceptable”

I've already explained where I draw the line. If you would force anyone into a marriage, you fall the side of the line where I say we don't tolerate your culture's values. I freely accept that it may now not be viable to retake Kabul. But my point is we (NATO) should never have left in the first place. If we (NATO) hadn't left, the Taliban would not now be in control of it. That is just a fact. But most of them who wear burqas or hijabs under the Taliban do it because if they don't they will be physically beaten or even killed. No one is saying no one should wear the burqa in Kabul. One of the things we were protecting was the choice not to wear it. The objective is not to change their minds. It is to stop them doing certain things to other people. We don't make rape illegal to "change rapists' minds". It isn't a lovebombing campaign of persuasion. We make rape illegal so that if someone does it, the victim can (we hope) report it, and the power of the state can then be used to apprehend, convict and punish the rapist. And we know a world in which rapists get caught and punished is one where less rape happens and where women feel more safe. See above.

It's literally a direct instruction to commit a war crime. It would not be followed. Yes. As I explained earlier in the thread, one of my university friends arrived back from a six month or so stint in Afghanistan back in May of this year. A really good clue about whether someone is a combatant is if they have a gun, or they are shooting at you. Congratulations you can name places where civilians died in conflict. Do you want a medal?

I draw the line in the context of conscription and military operations at war crimes. No, because I am a condescending p***k.

Yes, but no commanding officer would ever tell you to "get out and murder some locals" would they? And when you are in the armed forces, you are trained to identify military from civilian targets. And in our armed forces, the culture is one in which everything is directed towards the minimisation of civilian casualties. No one is suggesting that civilians are not sometimes killed, for example in cross-fire or in error. But that is a fundamentally different proposition from the deliberate killing of civilians, whether or not under direct instruction. Which has fundamentally different moral implications.

If I am told to "get out and murder some locals" (by which you presumably mean civilians, rather than armed Taliban fighters) I would obviously refuse, accept being put in military prison, and lodge as a defence for insubordination at my court martial that I was being instructed to commit a war crime. This isn't fucking hard.

I don't oppose polygamy where all the parties involved genuinely consent to it. The vast majority of countries where Muslims are in the majority have legal bars on forced marriages. I readily accept that the enforcement of this is much more mixed. We should probably not let the Taliban take over Kabul and enforce it then, should we? But when those beliefs deny the civic agency of more than half the population, they aren't legitimate beliefs, and aren't ones we should tolerate where we are in a position to deny them legal force. Absolutely I do want to force some of my values on people. Not all of them. Just the bare minimum ones necessary to grant women and girls (and other oppressed groups) agency and physical safety.