By Bob Seely
Yet another bishop puts his foot in it by saying: “The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.” Sadly this bishop, The Rt Rev Stephen Venner, is the new bishop for the armed forces.
I had to think a bit before deciding why I was offended, and it should be said that the bishop apologised for his remarks, but criticism of what he said is still valid.
It’s not the fact that the man is bishop for the armed forces, and that his remarks may damage moral, although I suspect they will, and I have no doubt that our enemy will use his statement against our troops.
It’s not the fact that he calls for understanding. Maybe he has little understanding of our enemy, but the Armed Forces are not stupid. They have no illusion about who we are fighting; a hard core of skilled insurgents fired up with Pashtun nationalism and a vicious, intolerant God, and a broader mass of young, bored, Pashtun men, many of whom would be reconcilable if they saw progress in their country. They fight because they are paid, because they are bored, because they are indoctrinated, because tribes come together at the approach of an outsider, regardless of whether that outsider is the Afghan state or the British army.
I think what is objectionable about the bishop’s thoughts are: his ignorance about our enemy, his self-defeating self-hatred, an overfondness for humanising those who hate us, and a moral relativism - a sometimes useful tool for understanding the complexity of the world - taken to absurdity.
He talks of the Taleban’s faith. The Taleban’s illiterate version of Islam is taught to them by ignorant mullahs full of bile and hate. Their version of Islam is no more grounded in intellectual or religious truth, humanity, or the integrity of tradition than the Nazi’s interpretation of Christianity or the Soviet Union’s version of mutuality. Muslims will be as offended by the bishop’s ignorance as Christians. The majority of Sunni and Shia Muslims know that, in the eyes of people like the core Taleban and Al Qaeda, they are apostate.
The integrity of the core, fanatical Taleban, is on a par with the dedication of the SS during World War II, or comparable to those Christian anti-abortionist fundamentalists who murder doctors in the US. Would this bishop seriously consider praising these people for their faith? Maybe the bishop would like to speak in favour of the dedication of the SS or the Soviet NKVD, who at various points in World War II continued to butcher their political and ethnic victims rather than fight an external enemy – those surely were acts of dedication too? Will he? No, of course not, because such an act would show how foolish are those arguments.
I think there is also a self-hatred in his views. Why is it that some on the Left, and some in the CoE, seem drawn to those who hate us? Praising people who are evil does not make one morally good. Indeed, very often, because it is done with no moral understanding of the depth of their inhumanity, it merely makes the church appear to lack integrity and moral fibre. We know the world is a complex place, but moral relativism taken to this extreme results in moral squalor. The bishop pleaded guilty to naivety. That’s a bad - no, that’s an appalling quality - in a man who is meant to be giving moral guidance to those who are called to fight.
More broadly, can anyone tell me why some CoE types hate our society, and why therefore they see those who hate us as being fundamentally justified in some deep-rooted way? I haven’t worked out if that form of societal self-abuse is based on a hatred of capitalism, a loss of place, a resentment at the lack of connection between the intelligentsia and the rest of society, etc. Whatever it is, I think the reasons for the embittered ennui are lost in time, suffice to say that like a cartoon character who runs over the cliff edge only to keep on going, some in the intelligentsia and the CoE retain a knee-jerk desire not only to listen to, but also to show a distasteful sympathy to, those who hate us; in doing so they show their own lack of moral depth.
Taleban fighters are indoctrinated, ignorant and impoverished. Thousands perished when the Taleban took control of Afghanistan, some in wholesale slaughters. Their leaders supported or cheered at acts which killed thousands of civilians in New York and dozens in London. Their ideology is no more compatible with civilisation than National Socialism of Nazi Germany or Soviet socialism of the USSR. It is quite true that, as with the Germans and the Russians, we will have to make peace with as many Pashtuns as can be won over. Many Taleban, including the majority of those who plant IED roadside bombs and other devices, act out of complex motives: to which should be added a strange layer of tribal dynamic, twisted faith and ethnic identity.
But to see in their amputations, murder, grotesque oppression of women and religious and gender bigotry a dedication to their faith or loyalty to each other is to miss the point. It is a very strange interpretation by the bishop, however his words were taken. He was right to apologise. Whether that will be enough to repair his damaged relations to the servicemen and women he is meant to serve is another matter. I suspect not.