300. Why Ukraine invaded Russia, the Musk-Trump love-in, and Rory’s visit to Afghanistan

24:16So Lensky was looking a bit tired and lacking in confidence. This week, I would say it's flipped back. So Lensky did one of his famous nightly broadcasts to the nation. And it was very confident he was talking about how, you know, we're taking on the aggressor in their own territory. And it felt like a judo move. It felt like nobody was expecting it. Nobody saw it coming. Nobody imagines for a minute that the intentions of Ukraine upon Russia is the same as the intention that Russia had upon Ukraine when it invaded two and a half years ago. But it does seem to have put them off balance. I watched consecutively.

24:51Lensky's speech to the nation that he does pretty much every night. Very confident, very upbeat. It looked like he'd slept well over the last couple of weeks. He just looked fit again. And Putin looking very stressed, very botoxed. His military team looking a silent and terrified as ever. And they must be thinking this is a terrible failure of intelligence for them not to have seen this coming, totally taken by surprise. Now, of course, what is done, the way Putin tries to use it in the judo sense is essentially, they're now sort of displaying these pictures of flats and buildings in parts of sovereign Russia, which are now sort of, you know, look like a war zone and trying to sort of say that this underlines that they are the aggressor rather than the aggressor.

25:34Now, it'd be fascinating to see how long they hold this out because, you know, there is a risk that yes, they have the success of taking them by surprise. Russia now to move troops into an area they weren't expecting to have to move troops to. The Ukrainians do seem to have a new lease of life in relation to use of drones and so forth. But it's kind of one of those things we have yet to see a military strategist on the television or the radio convincingly give me an explanation as to why this is an act of genius. Yes, I mean, I've been talking to various people around this. So this Yaroslav Trafimov, who's a Ukrainian who's the chief foreign affairs correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who's written great book on Ukraine, has tended to emphasize this as an amazing moral boost that it's the symbolic act that's extraordinary because as you pointed out, it's surprising, takes the fight to the enemy, but it's only can really work if two other things happen.

26:27One is they would have to hold on to that territory and secondly, they would have to be a peace negotiation quite soon. If they could hold on to it and there was a peace negotiation quite soon, then they're in a strong position because they can talk about land swaps instead of just freezing the existing Russian control of Luhansk and a lot of dunyets. I've also been talking and we've talked about them in the past, Shashank Joshi from the economist who's done a lot of good stuff on this and Jack Watling. They keep emphasizing that we have to not forget that under this sort of tactical victory, there are big strategic problems still facing the Ukrainians.

27:00One of them is recruiting enough people. The Russians have done much, much better at contracting. They offer these big bounties, having initially conscripted some people. They now offer very, very generous financial terms. You sign up for a one -year contract and actually it's putting a lot of money into the Russian economy. The Russian economy isn't growing very fast. I mean, astonishingly, I mean, at this another three percent. Yeah, we don't talk enough about this. I mean, again, it reminds me of what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. I remember being at meetings with top people inside the British government who were so confident that the Russian economy would collapse because of our sanctions.

27:33It was the same. When they invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago, they were knocked out of all the global payment systems and there were massive sanctions on Russian gas and on them. The assumption was we'd bring the economy to its knees. The reality is the Russian economy is now performing better than any major economy, if the last quarter. So anyway, part of this is putting money into contracts. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, most of their recruits are older. If you go to Kiev, I was talking to somebody just got back from Kiev. The young people are still running the cafes or in the streets and it's partly because they refuse to join the army because they don't trust their commanders not to use them as cannon fodder.

28:09They don't believe in the training and because also there's not proper troop limitations. So if you're sent up to the front line, you're just stuck there. There's not much sense that you're ever going to be removed and you think you're going to be stuck there until you die. That brings us to the final thing which is training. We've talked a lot about training and Germany's been doing training, Britain's been doing training, but it hasn't managed to get Ukraine into the position to do these combined arms maneuvers. It's not able to coordinate properly. Artillery, tanks, infantry on its advances.

28:39There are lots of reasons for that, but probably the most fundamental reason is Ukrainians won't take their front line troops back to train them and they certainly aren't prepared to take them out of the country. We aren't really prepared to do significant training inside Ukraine itself. So the result is that you have an under -demand, under -trained Ukrainian army and that will still be the vulnerability despite the tactical success. Yeah, I do. Just on this point about morale though, it is important. I think that if you go through the things that can bear in mind that the Kremlin is still saying everything is going according to plan, this is a problem, but we can deal with that.

29:15These people will pay heavy price, but everything is sort of on track. They've been saying that for two and a half years, including in the first few days when they said that the plan was to do it in a few, few days. If you go through the things that from a Ukrainian perspective where you're probably thinking we're doing better than people you've spayed to do, it strikes me that they've mastered this kind of drone warfare stuff. They've managed to get drones right into Russia, including as far as the Kremlin. They've got pretty consistently their shelling towns and villages close to the border.

29:43We had the mutiny, I mean, it seems so long ago now, but we talked at length about it at the time. The mutiny by the Wagner mercenaries who then marched on Moscow. And of course he's dead now, like I see another critic fell out of a window last week as well. Just over a year ago in the Vagnamutiny. Yeah. Exactly. We don't know the number of Russian casualties, but we know that it's very, very large. And you've also had quite a few warships going down in the Black Sea. So if you're sitting there as Ukraine wanting, I mean, Zelensky one day somebody will, well, there will be books written about these nightly broadcasts that he does because he manages somehow to keep the same message going, but make them sound fresh and energetic and so forth.

30:23So I think the morale point is not to be underestimated. I just don't see where they go from here in terms of that particular piece of the war. Well, let's take a break and remember to keep coming back to this.

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31:48Welcome back to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastakambal and Rory, before we go into China Serbia and your trip to Afghanistan, David Davis, listen to it, we didn't leading with a senior conservative politician, and all the senior conservative politicians. Correct. And it seems to have gone down very, very well with those who thought that Rory Stewart was giving him a hard time. I don't think David will have appreciated. Most of our guests get pretty positive commentary. He didn't. And if I tell you what my Mrs said, Fiona, she said she thought you had the patience of a saint.

32:27She thought he was arrogant. She couldn't stand the way that he wouldn't accept but he ever got anything wrong. And she couldn't stand the fact that he sort of looked at something like Brexit and just sort of laughed it all off. The most astonishing thing for me was I challenged him over the fact that he voted against gay marriage and asked him whether he regretted it. And he said he understood it very well and the reason he voted against it is that Church of England priests would be compelled to marry gay couples regardless of their religious beliefs. And it's just simply wrong. I mean, it's completely upside down.

33:02In fact, you can't actually get married in the Church of England if you're gay. And this was the gay marriage legislation was about the civil law, about the government, wasn't about imposing things on churches. So it really made me wonder. Did he really lead a campaign against something without even understanding the basics of the legislation? Well, Rory, he's not here to answer for himself. Yeah, he's. Anyway, the only thing that I would say though is I get beaten up so much generally by your supporters whenever I'm aggressive towards labor and peace, they all believe I'm terribly biased. So I hope they understand that I'm equally capable of confronting conservative and peaceful.

33:37There was also, we I posted yesterday a collection of four photographs that sort of summed up the interview because it started with him looking very, very jolly and and quite fresh. It looked at me sort of looking on smiling quizzically. You had a very pee -vish, aggressive look and then it ended up with him sort of slumped back at his chair like somebody who kind of knocked him out. So I do strongly recommend that people listen to it. It's very, very interesting, very enjoyable. And yeah, he probably does come over as rather glib at times. But there we are. Now you've you've come across something which I was very interested in.

34:13But it's China and Serbia, but I want you to begin by taking us back to your memories of this extraordinary event where you having been running things and downing street for Tony Blair was sent to Kosovo. So we're now in 1999. This is the Kosovo invasion. So everybody remembers, Slobda Milosevic, who was then running Serbia, had deployed troops into Kosovo, which was an autonomous area of Serbia with a very strong Albanian population, was engaged in ethnic cleansing, driving out Albanians across the border. NATO intervened to protect the Albanian population and challenge MOSFIS. This was after the wars in Bosnia, so very much in the Balkans in general.

34:51Very sensitive time you were deployed. And at that point, NATO managed to drop a bomb on the Chinese embassy on which over to you. This is what I wanted to raise because I always in Paris for the Olympics. I picked up my favorite monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatic, which had this huge article about China's serblations. And basically said that this was the incident, which at the time we thought we handled masterfully after the terrible mistake that was made in terms of Diplomatic reparation. Just remind us of the incident. So I'll tell you what I'll do. I don't think I've done this on the podcast before, but I'm going to read you a very short extract from my diary of May 1999.

35:29I went to bed. It was asleep when the phone went and it was switched, the downing of that NATO. And American, very clipped, very precise. Mr Campbell, General Clark asked me to call you and let you know we've hit the Chinese embassy in Bill Gray. He said it in exactly the same tone, as he might have said, General Clark has had his breakfast and is now on his way to work. I asked him to repeat which he did word for word. I assume it was a deliberate, I said. No surre came back the robot voice. It was an accident. Then this is me, fucking hell, 24 -carat disaster. First to convoy, we'd hit a convoy, then a bus, then a hospital, and now we've hit the Chinese fucking embassy.

36:11I got out of bed, started ringing around the other capital, I was working up a response. There was nothing to do but admit to a terrible error. Depending on how the Chinese react, this could be absolutely disastrous. Three days later, Monday, May the 10th, very short this. The Chinese are being a lot trickier now. Hypocritically, given their own position on demonstrations, they're now encouraging the demos. The demos going on all over Europe to go on. And their media has still not reported NATO's apology and admission of error. So the Chinese, as if we just decided to take out their embassy, TB was even more pissed off with the Russians, found their basic attitude that what happened inside other people's countries was their own business, disgusting when he thought what the laws of it was doing, added to which they were perpetually looking for money out of it.

36:54Now, to this day, I believe 100%, it was an error. Okay. I'm just going to interrupt for a second just to give people the details. So we're here in May. What happens is a B2 stealth bomber with two pilots flies over. It checks the list of places that they're not supposed to strike and this place isn't on the list. And they fire five precision missiles, which accurate to within 13 meters, straight into the side of the embassy, killing three Chinese diplomats, two of them women. Yeah. Back to you. Yeah. So that happened. And I mean, although I was, as you say, I was at the time secondited in NATO.

37:33So I was talking to people like West Clark, who was the supreme allied commander. And put it this way, if it was deliberate, they were doing a very, very good job of hiding it from each other and from everybody else. But to this day, what this, the reason why this article really caught my eye is because both the Serbs and the Chinese thought, and it was seem some of them continue to think that we, NATO, were taking out a Serb transmission center that was based inside the embassy. Now, if we were, then that was news to me. And it certainly looked to me like it was news to general Clark as well.

38:06And it's now a Chinese cultural exposition space. Xi Jinping opened it or laid the first stone to it. But it comes on the back of a really incredible growth and development in relations between China and Serbia, five and a half billion dollar total from 2014 to 2023. Great quote in this piece from a woman who's involved in looking at the regulatory authority that looks after the environment. And there's a lot of environmental protesters against some of the stuff that China is doing inside Serbia. And the quote is this, any decisions concerning China are a matter for the president's office. And the relationship between Xi Jinping and Alexander Vukic, the president of Serbia, I mean, you sent Rory an account of a meeting they had in May where the, I mean, it was a love in the words that they were exchanging were absolutely remarkable in terms of the sort of the mutual respect.

39:06And one of the things that players at play here, China has never recognized Kosovo. In all of Xi Jinping's statements, he talks about respecting Serbia's sovereign independence and territorial integrity. And we know what he means by that. And they've even been persuading other countries which have recognized Kosovo as an independent nation in the past to change their position and recently did that, for example, for Nauru. This is a funny moment for the two of us because it's a moment where we coincided before a sort of strange coincidence of being in Iraq because I was deployed as a British diplomat to be the British representative in Montenegro at this time, was going in an out of Kosovo because we were worried that following on Montenegro being a country just south of Serbia, worried that following on from the Bosnia wars and the Kosovo wars, we were going to end up with a Serbia Montenegro war.

39:55So as I was shuttling back and forth as a British diplomat between Sarajevo and Prisciina, you had been sent out to run Combs for NATO. Tell us a little bit how you came to get that job, how long did you go for? Were you living like, I mean, I was staying on people's floors. How were you living in Prisciina at the time? No, I was mainly based in Brussels, Rory. When I did go to Prisciina, I was staying in tents similar to those of the officer class, put it that way, quite good catering and all that stuff. But what happened was that a previous error when we bombed a convoy had led to absolute chaos in our communications because all the independent country, all the different countries of America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, all said different things the blame game got played and it was truly awful.

40:46It went on for weeks and it was Clinton, Bill Clinton who said to Tony that he thought I should go out there and just try and coordinate and try and grip it. And so can I just get you what's involved there? I mean, when Bill Clinton thinks we need Alistair to do this, what in the back of his mind and without flattering you too much, but what do you think he reckons the difference between a good and a bad Combs operation? Is what is it that he was hoping you would be able to do that wasn't being done in the past and just give us two or three ingredients of the kind of things that you might do in managing that kind of operation, Janus, to try to bring a bit of order to things.

41:23I think the main thing will be coordination and discipline. Coordination. So for example, when it came to the Chinese embassy thing, we coordinated the response. So what does that mean? How does that mean? What it meant? What it meant? So like in my diaries said, phoning around all the other capital, get a message out, nobody says anything until we all say the same thing. Okay, so just to get sort of brass tax, the idea is I want to be called first that's hence you being working up in the middle of the night by General Wesley Clark's man. And then you immediately get out of bed and you say everybody's silence, no communication, we're going to have a central communication, which I'm going to bring together.

41:57Is that right? Yeah. And then what would happen? We had these myself, Catherine Colona, who went on to be French for our minister who was Shera exposed woman, Jamie Shea, who was based in NATO, Jamie Rubin, who was the American State Department. And who we can stay? In feud on leading. Yeah, I call it through the cast and higher from from the German government. So we had the sort of the main NATO plus the main countries. We all had the capacity to call a conference call at any time 24 hours a day. So anyone of us could have done that. And this was obviously a massive thing. It was going to be a massive thing.

42:33So this was so that's the first thing coordination and discipline. And Havie Solano, who was the civilian head of NATO if he and West Clark had not been supportive, it wouldn't have worked. They realized we needed to bring a bit of campaign discipline. And so it was about getting the best people, getting good people from London and Washington. I made some of my most enduring friendships, including with Jamie Rubin, as it happens, through the fact that we sort of brought in from people from different parts of the world. We were in the same place, access to the same data, access to the same information.

43:06And over time persuading the military, this was going to help that. And so the the fascinating thing is we're now that this is 1999. We're now in 2024. It's a 25 years later. This single accident by two pilots and a B2 stealth bomber has serious international strategic repercussions because you know, as we pointed out, Xi Jinping, when he does the Chinese Premier, when he does his visit to Europe, visits France, sure that's his main visit. But then the only other countries he visits are Hungary and Serbia. And we can develop this a little bit more. And I'm going to share for real geeks a speech that Victor Orban has just made it a summer camp where he talks about geopolitics, talks about Hungary's relationship with China, Hungary's relationship with the US.

43:49He has a moment in it where he's very pro -Trump as you can imagine. But it is absolutely fascinating. And I'd love us to come back to it. We don't maybe have the time now, but maybe do a proper discussion on Hungary because it is so revealing. Orban more than anyone else, this populist leader in Hungary, more than anyone else is the kind of intellectual leader now of this strong man philosophy. And it's got everything in it. It's got the anti -immigrant stuff. It's got Christianity against Islam. It's got LGBTQ. It's got Donald Trump. It's got China. It's got the whole world view here, which maybe.

44:23You also said me something very interesting this week, which I have to confess. I had to go to Google Translate to help me because it was in Hungarian. You don't speak Hungarian, do you? I do not speak a little Serbian. But it was very interesting. It was very interesting because essentially this was a very long article in Hungarian showing that the Hungarian government is actually deliberately willfully undermining the shengen border by from July, Russians and Belarusians able to come in with so -called national cards. Now, what you've got is a small country. As you know, we interviewed your friend, General David Petreas, and that'll be on leading soon.

45:04And you made the point. He was making the point that Orban, that Trump was kind of aping Orban, this tiny country, which has now got such power within the European Union, which has such a hold over the American right, which is a sort of idol for people like Nigel Farage and Richitizen, all this lot. And yet continues to be allowed to operate, kind of hiding in plain sight, doing all the stuff which everybody in Brussels knows is bad for the European Union. Well, Alex, really fascinating, and thank you for rating that with us. And now, Afghanistan, because you have been there many, many times in the past, you've just been there again, three years on from the chaos of the withdrawal.

45:45So what's your take? Well, it was an extraordinary trip, and I felt very, very lucky to do it. And it's very strange. I mean, I first saw Afghanistan just at the end of the last time the Taliban was in poor power. And when I saw it then, Afghanistan, a Kabul particularly, was a ghost town. There were many of the buildings were in ruins. There were almost no cars in the streets. You could get across the city in about 10 minutes. This time I turned up, and it was astonishing to discover that on the surface, it felt as though very little had changed from before the Taliban take over. So the airport was looking smart.

46:21The traffic was very, very busy. Huge traffic jams in the streets. The streets were very busy. But you could immediately see one change, which is that there were far fewer women in the streets. And those that were were very carefully covered. And that men were almost all in Shah Wakameez, in traditional dress. There were far fewer people wearing Western dress. It is different. So first thing, of course, Taliban control. Very, very restrictive on women. And I traveled around the country. I wasn't just in Kabul. I went out to Bamiya and I went out to Bandeya Mia. And again and again and again, you were encountering not just at well, men, most seekers, I was mostly meeting men, talking about how angry they were that their daughters were not able to continue into school.

47:04And that many of them had teenage girls stuck at home who were very depressed, very alienated. Jury, if I can just jump in there on the point about women. So I was in Paris for part of the Olympics, you know, and in the cycling road race, I noticed two female Afghani athletes now admittedly wearing the old flag. But I checked out six, there were six Afghan athletes in Paris, three men, three women. Now I presume none of them could be there without the permission of the Taliban. Correct. They were sent by the Taliban government under the old flag. So the Taliban's attitude to women, I mean, is very, very restrictive.

47:38I mean, it's much worse than for example, in Iran. So why would they allow women to take part in the Olympics? Because they are not the Taliban of the 1990s, the 1990s, they were even more restrictive. 90s, you remember, they were basically hanging televisions from trees, doing public executions in the stadium. But this time they are encouraging women to continue in business. So there are many female businesses, they're supporting, for example, because their economy is in collapse. But they still can't do higher education. And one of the madness is that they're allowing female clinics to run with female doctors and nurses, but they're not allowing the next generation of female doctors and nurses to be trained.

48:18So how are they supposed to replace them? There's a complete contradiction between the Ministry of Employment that seems to be happy for women to work and the Ministry of Education that doesn't seem to be happy for women to get the skills they would require to go into the workplace. So that central horrifying fact, but I was also there visiting Tukquasman, which is the charity run by my wife Shashana. And there it was very striking that she still had 4 ,000 female weavers working on the ground, getting incomes, still able to run primary schools, female health clinics, despite the evacuations that horror, the charity kept going.

48:54And I saw Taliban ministers walking around this project and there is clearly a tension within the Taliban government. There are more liberal factions, I mean, liberal maybe is pushing it, but there are factions that definitely want to get women back into education. And then there's much more conservative push from Kandahar, from the Mullahs in Kandahar, who want a much more conservative vision. It's not really a Muslim vision, it's like a conservative tribal southern Afghan vision of women. And then the other big fact is security. So Afghanistan is much, much safer, much safer than it's been any time 20 years.

49:30Because the Taliban is not bombing the blazer. Exactly, they shouldn't get much credit for it. The reason it's safer is they're not doing it. But the truth matter is that I could stop and have a picnic by the roadside, I could go for a walk in the hills, I could ride donkeys. I mean, these are things which would have been very, very stupid to do for any time in the last 20 years. And that does make a huge difference to Afghanistan. And I went to this lake 300 miles from Kabul and it was basically like Bogna Regis, there were these thousands of Afghan families out there on little pedal boats, swan pedal boats on this lake and little tents and picnic town.

50:07And again, that's stuff that you haven't seen for 20 years. Did you suggest to the any of the Mullahs that they market as the Bogna Regis of Afghanistan? Yeah, I think they'd struggle to do that because at the same time, I saw one of them pulling out a taser and threatening women for getting too close to a particular group of men. So it's a very, very quite how to put it. I mean, the Afghan economy is in crisis. Treatment of women is bad, but security is much better. And I suppose if I'm going to sort of conclude, it does bring us to a theme that we touch on a lot, which is how one thinks about authoritarian governments.

50:40It is a sort of microcosm of that because it was a democracy before. Everyone with their purple fingers, Hamid Karzai, Ashraf Ghani voting, but it was a very dangerous place and it was a very corrupt place that was growing a lot of drugs. Now we're a country which is safer. You're much less likely to get killed. There are far fewer drugs being grown and it's less corrupt than the Taliban are actually able to pursue infrastructure projects which were blocked by corruption. But there's no liberty, there's no freedom, and there's portrait of women. So you can see why some Afghans feel that the situation is improved.

51:14On this drug issue, I'm fascinated by this because back in the day, I remember having lots of meetings with Richard Dihlov who was head of MI6 at the time and talking about the importance of, you know, sorting out this drug trade. And it struck me that what we were in the Americans were doing was giving lots of money to lots of people to distribute lots of farmers to persuade them to grow something other than OK. Yeah, literally you're quite right. We literally gave billions of dollars to various Afghan intermediaries. And what did they do? Did they just take the money and then the farmers carried on growing?

51:46Is that what happened? Yep, but broadly speaking, that's right. There's some great work that's been done with satellite imagery which just shows the poppy fields growing and growing and growing all the way during the US -UK intervention of Afghanistan. No matter how many billions we spent, the total amount of drugs produced just went up and up and up. And when the Taliban came in, they very significantly reduced the amount of poppy cultivation and they didn't do it by giving people money, because they didn't have any money. They did it by saying this is illegal and implementing the law. They wouldn't have seen it as a way of giving themselves a bit of an economic leg up.

52:18Well, there's some people say that one of the reasons why they collapsed in 2002 -2001 is that by stopping the poppy ruch and they lost so much revenue from the government. I mean, Afghanistan was making billions of dollars a year from producing 90 % of Europe's heroin. And so the Taliban, to some extent, are cutting off their nose despite their face. And this is one of the enduring tensions between the Taliban and the outside world. They're saying, you know, we're making all these efforts to reduce the drug heroin production. We're bankrupting our country doing it and we get no credit for it.

52:50So the question of whether the Taliban is going to be able to negotiate their way back into some kind of stable situation is development aid going to go in again. I'd like to pay tribute also to the work of the British diplomats. And indeed, a lot of the attached diplomats who are navigating a very difficult situation. So there are British diplomats going in and out of Afghanistan. We don't have a flag there. But they're thinking hard about how we get support to Afghan people without propping up the Taliban regime. The American government's been quite imaginative about trying to work out how to keep charities operating without sanctioning Taliban government.

53:23What are they doing? Well, I read that the Taliban have said that they're no longer going to recognize diplomatic missions, Afghanistan diplomatic missions that were set up by the former Western back government. It's not going to be so like passports, visas, all that stuff. So it's not going to be a recipe for chaos. It is the recipe for chaos. The Afghan Embassy is right next to Hyde Park. It's a building just on that road that goes out in London, up past the science, music, natural history, museum. And that's where I went to get my visa. Three weeks ago. And sure enough, the people in it were diplomats who were employed by the Republic government, the previous Democratic -ledic government, and the Taliban continued to keep them there.

54:00But the Taliban have just now announced after three years, it seems that those embassies are no longer going to be supported and no longer be able to issue visas. Which is a real problem, presumably not just people like me, but for the many, many Afghans I saw queuing up for visas in that embassy. Okay, well, listen, you've clearly had a good time. I guess two questions for me to end. One from me and one from Jack Crion, which he submitted to the Q &A, but I'm going to cheat an alignment in this one. My question is, did you meet people that you knew in your previous time in Afghanistan, who said that things were better?

54:31Did you meet people who said things were worse? And Jack's question is, what does Rory think of the Taliban trying to turn Afghanistan into a tourist destination? Which with your portrayal of kicknicks by the roadside is, you know, maybe helpful. Firstly, to Jack on traveling to Afghanistan. Listen, don't travel to Afghanistan. I mean, I went there because we have a charity on the ground and we're supporting an NGO on the ground. And it's a country that Shashan and I lived in, met in, and I've spent many years living there. There is very, very clear strict foreign office travel advice against travel to Afghanistan.

55:05And there is a recent fallout four weeks before we went, a French and Spanish tourist who had turned up in the Bazar in Bamiyan, which is one of the safest parts of the country, were shot dead in the market. So do not travel to Afghanistan as a tourist. In relation to what people felt, look, I think people are depressed. I saw many people that I knew in the old dispensation. I think people accept that securities improved. They accept that there are opportunities to do things, but they're very worried about the economy. They feel that they can't criticize the Taliban government in any way, particularly the sort of people obviously that I know best, who are often more liberal, more progressive, people living in urban areas are depressed and worried about the situation.

55:52But I don't think they see any alternative. And their dream is that the Taliban reform, and that a reform Taliban government manages to reengage with the international community. But they're not that confident this is going to happen. It's very odd being in a country run by religious men, very odd being in a country where the Taliban Minister of Culture, for example, who I met briefly, is engaged. He operated like sort of classic politician. He was friendly to people. He listened to them. He took a great interest in projects. But the reality is he and I think the entire cabinet basically are religious mullets.

56:29And it's a very, very odd way of running a country. Well, I know that they have a pretty grim attitude towards sport, which I don't know how you hang sport from trees, but I think they used to do that in pass as well. So a very big shout out from me for Manisha Talash who is an Afghan refugee in Spain who took part in the Olympics for the refugee team. And above all, Rory, you must share with me the pride in Cindy and Gamba, who is a Cameroonian born lesbian boxer who has got a degree in crime and criminal justice from the University of Bolton and who won the first Olympic medal for the refugee team.

57:11And if only we'd had a more enlightened approach to refugees, it could have been another GB medal, but there we are. Cindy won it for the refugees. And also in the closing ceremony, I know you watched the opening ceremony. I think you watched the closing ceremony, but at the end of it, when they have an athlete from all of the, each of the five continents, and they now have one also from the refugee community and the platform at the end, and it was Cindy and Gamba. So there we are. Great. See you soon. See you soon. Thank you, Alasat. Take care, bye.