The situation in Afghanistan sounds oddly familiar:
We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban — and they have very good reason for doing so — the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.
A powerful, centralized, urban government does not share the values of its conservative, religious, rural heartland? The authentic voice of the people must be heard — as long as they vote for secularism, gender equality, and progress?
The authentic voice of the people can go f— themselves. What matters is a stable pluralist system of justice. We shouldn’t let the majority anywhere near that as they’ve never done anything good with it before.