Christina Blasey-Ford: The west deals with a lot of distasteful regimes round the world. This is a group that we've underestimated for 20 years, which is why they ended up defeating nati. I aman a very extreme islemist group tha tat uses an absolute absolutist version ofsheria as the exclusively legal system instance. So it's going to be very difficult for them to change.
Since the hardline militant group recaptured the Afghan capital Kabul in August 2021, the question of how Western powers should deal with the Taliban has become one with no easy answers. The Taliban is a fundamentalist movement, whose ideology has spawned violence and terrorism both inside and outside of Afghanistan. However, the country it now governs is one in need of urgent aid, where the plights of women and minority groups abandoned in a hasty retreat by the West mean that a refusal to engage by Western powers could become a disastrous long-term foreign policy error. For this debate, we ask: should the West work with the Taliban? Our guests are Shabnam Nasimi, Policy Advisor to the Minister of Afghan Resettlement in the UK. She is also Director of Afghan Witness, a platform dedicated to Human Rights reporting from Afghanistan. Joining Shabnam is Christina Lamb OBE, Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Times, Global Fellow for the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and author of books including Farewell Kabul, and Our Bodies, Their Battlefield. Chairing the debate is journalist, investigative reporter and broadcaster, Manveen Rana.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices