Stone Age Taliban Biscuits, From Before The Age Of Sugar! by Alfred N.Muggins

     Of course the Taliban never had access to Caribbean sugar, being landlocked in a mountainous country, but even if they had had sugar they would probably not have allowed themselves to eat it, as it was a luxury (and probably it was not even mentioned in their version of the Koran?). They preferred to live lives of warrior discomfort, fighting the foreign enemies and killing their own people, rather than doing things to help their own society and participate in it.

   Alfred wondered why, if the women and the educated young minds were flourishing and doing so well in the new ‘democratic’ Afghanistan of the last 20 years, why oh why did the Taliban not wish to participate also in this more creative society? They could have eaten sugar too in the cities. If there was anything they hadn’t liked or wished to complain about they could have demonstrated like everyone else, or even got themselves elected to the Afghan Parliament!

    Even in the time of Charles 1 in England, and during the English Civil War, the puritanical Presbyterians, religious zealots of their time and place, had many representatives in Parliament, and indeed it was the ‘democratic’ (only significant property owners could vote, and only males!) Parliament that indeed fought the dictatorial King, and won! (although Oliver Cromwell did find he had to suspend the ‘democratic’ Parliament for a few short years to provide ‘necessary’ leadership!

    Anyway, I digress! But the truth be told, the Taliban could have got some of themselves elected to the Afghan Parliament, and participated in a nation uniting democracy! They could have started putting sugar into their biscuits, and might even have started trading them with the western nations, instead of making their biscuits hard like rocks, and tasteless like dust. You never know they might even have persuaded the foreign ‘occupiers’ (who incidentally had no direct votes in the Afghan Parliament and were not actually the Government of Afghanistan, contrary to false propaganda from the Taliban and their erstwhile Al Qaeda brothers (I was going to say – “and sisters!” but that would not have been at all accurate would it?)) to leave Afghanistan and go home many years before, if that were the case. They could probably, in fact, have won the war against the foreign infidel many years before, if they had chosen not to fight them, but to participate in the peaceful politics of their own country?

     Anyway years later Donald Trumpy decided it was time to lure them into politics by inviting them to take over without firing any guns, and by participating in peace negotiations. Unfortunately they didn’t take the hint, but decided to take the whole country by force, and threatening everybody with their guns anyway, and after a wave of assassinations the Afghan State and Army crumbled, and the rest is fast becoming history!