(Image: AP)

Look, I don’t want to be mean about Scott Morrison but he said something really stupid yesterday and it was all about freedom and the past 20 years in Afghanistan which now appear to have come to nought with Afghans fleeing for their lives.

“Freedom’s always worth it, fighting for it, whatever the outcome,” the prime minister said. 

Freedom? Freedom from what?

It is precisely the rationale the Taliban use — in their case the freedom to live in an Islamic state rid of the yoke of the US invader and rid of the great stalking horse of the infidel: democracy. Turns out some people equate freedom with living in a theocracy. 

But again, without being mean, what do you expect from a bloke from the shire and the sum of whose experience was state director of the Liberal Party when the Afghanistan invasion kicked off 20 years ago? 

It’s disconcerting that Morrison evokes freedom after all we know of how the past 20 years have worked out not only in Afghanistan but in the Middle East. It was the language of president George W Bush and then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.  

Freedom. Freedom and democracy. Freedom through democracy. The code is clear to any Islamist: it in fact is all about taking away the power of the men of God and and replacing it with the power — and the fallibility — of the people.

It made a kind of sense to anyone in the West who woke up on September 12, 2001, to find that the world had changed in a depressing and thoroughly disorienting way. New York’s Twin Towers, the very symbols of capitalism’s power and prestige, had been felled.

It changed everything, and it was a moment you cannot forget — ever.   

It was easy to sell the line that Osama bin Laden started this. And that we are going to end it.

The language experts went into overdrive. The US would attack its Islamic world enemies as a defensive act. Perversely we were sold the dishonest idea that Iraq was the problem and that fixing it — invading it and killing Saddam Hussein — would be a lesson to the wider Middle East. 

Abu Ghraib. Renditions. Secret SAS operations. Guantanamo Bay. Hamas terrorists. The war on Islamic extremism was taking casualties at home in terms of transparency, the rule of law and — perhaps most perverse of all — our freedoms.

In the way of the US marketing of war we came to know the names of hitherto obscure individuals. There was Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban who founded the first Islamic emirate of Afghanistan in 1996 and who was the elusive target of US drone strikes.

And of course there was bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. He was the son of a wealthy Saudi family, holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. His particular gift to the world was to hit Western targets in the West, a change from the approach of other Islamic organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood who attacked Western targets in Islamic countries.

Naming the baddies worked as a kind of Hollywood storyline for the clash of civilisations. Getting bin Laden was an end in itself.  

Yesterday Morrison, unfortunately, seized on the bin Laden mission, along with “freedom”, as the reason for the war in Afghanistan: “But importantly the reason we went there was to track down Osama bin Laden and to ensure that we denied al-Qaeda a base of operations out of Afghanistan.”

But wiser heads always warned that there was something else called bin Ladenism, and that killing the figurehead would not mean an end to the movement.     

So was it worth it? 

Invading Afghanistan did have the effect of halting attacks on US soil, which was an immediate post-9/11 goal. Beyond that, though, there is a wider story of doomed US-led efforts to build civil capacity in Afghanistan and the wider Middle East. 

Egypt stands out as a prime example. The US attempted to enforce “free and fair” elections when dictator Hosni Mubarak was in power. That too was almost 20 years ago and Egypt, too, has returned to where it was: an oppressive government run on perpetual emergency rule. Egypt has been the standout lesson that democracy — and its companion, freedom — is more than what happens at the ballot box.

In that context it is hardly a surprise that decades of Western-led capacity and democracy building crashed and burned in a virtual instant in Afghanistan this week, giving way to the religious ideologues of the Taliban. Twenty years, after all, is barely a blip for a religious movement that is thinking in arcs of centuries.

The big question now is: will we see a rerun of the past with Islamic terrorism again exported overseas and an emboldened Sunni Islamic extremism in Egypt and the wider Middle East — and the attendant government suppression?

Let the cycle begin again.