The Labour Left can barely disguise their satisfaction at the West's defeat in Afghanistan

Making my way through Leicester Square one Saturday evening in October 2001, I surveyed the hundreds of discarded anti-war placards that that day’s protesters had left on the pavements before heading to the pub for some self-congratulatory refreshments.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were still raw in everyone’s memories and political discussions had since centred on how to bring the attacks’ mastermind, Osama bin Laden, understood to be an honoured guest of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to justice.

One mud-soaked placard in particular caught my attention: it read: “Hands off Afghanistan’s oil”. It also had the inevitable and recognisable “Socialist Workers’ Party” (SWP) trademark at the top of the display. Did Afghanistan have oil? If so, I wasn’t aware of it. And as a newly-elected MP who expected to have to deal with fallout from the impending conflict, I decided I should get the facts on this.

Of course it didn’t and doesn’t. But the middle class warriors of the nascent Stop The War campaign needed a public reason to oppose the invasion, other than the real one, of course, which was simply opposition to anything America did.

Today, it must be hard for the likes of Jeremy Corbyn (former president of Stop The War) and his parliamentary colleagues in the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs to conceal a smile at the defeat of the Nato mission in Afghanistan and the return to power of the mad clerics of the Taliban. “We told you so” is never a good slogan to deploy in parliamentary debates but expect numerous variations on that theme as the Commons meets today in emergency session to debate recent events in Afghanistan.

It was Stop The War who campaigned against America’s determination to bring bin Laden to justice, who never provided any realistic alternative to invasion in order to apprehend the mass murderer. Of course, it is also the hard Left whose hatred of America led it to colour any expressions of sympathy for 9/11 with moralistic lectures on US foreign policy on Palestine and Saudi Arabia, almost as if the subtext was “You were asking for it”.

The SWP, as well as being the guiding force behind Stop The War since its inception, is also accused of having organised a successful cover up to protect a rapist in its midst, so could hardly be expected to express any sincere concern for the plight of women and girls in Taliban-in Afghanistan, then or now. But you might have expected that others under the hard Left umbrella – particularly Labour MPs (as well as Corbyn himself) – could bring themselves at least to recognise that Afghan women’s lives have been transformed for the better by the presence of allied troops in the last 20 years.

Instead, we have the likes of Richard Burgon, the Leeds MP and former deputy leadership candidate, demanding that reparations now be paid to the Taliban government to compensate them for the inconvenience to which they were put over the last 20 years. It’s easy to understand why the barbarians at the gates of Kabul (on the inside, unfortunately) might consider themselves hard done by. All those women and girls who were allowed out of their homes, not forced to wear a burqa, encouraged to go to school, given medical care, allowed a degree of freedom never imagined under the old regime – that sort of thing must make your average psychopathic, God-obsessed misogynist lose a lot of sleep.

The idea that British taxes should be spent in compensating Islamist extremists is so far beyond the pale that it beggars belief that Keir Starmer, Burgon’s nominal boss, has not yet withdrawn the whip from him. Whether the suggestion emerged out of sheer stupidity or from deliberate malice, it hardly puts the Labour Party in a good light, however much of a minority Burgon’s ravings are within the party.

Nevertheless, those of us who supported the invasion and occupation, who recognised the importance of seeing bin Laden captured or killed, who believed in the moral compulsion of what used to be called “liberal intervention”, must now admit: the likes of Corbyn and Burgon got it right and we got it wrong. Afghanistan did indeed turn out to be as unreformable, its people as ungovernable, its culture as impervious to western liberalism, as they predicted.

That revelation, so resisted for such a long time, is heart-breaking. The broken clocks of the Socialist Campaign Group will savour this moment of triumph while the rest of us consider what could have been done instead. Should we have allowed Bin Laden to remain, untouched, in Afghanistan as we buried his 3000 victims in New York and Washington DC? Would it have been better for the people of Afghanistan to have allowed the Taliban to continue their reign of terror against their own people and to continue to allow Al-Qaeda training camps to proliferate in the wastelands of Helmand and Kandahar?

This is where the grown-ups are separated from the infants. Because grown-up politics demand that difficult decisions with mixed consequences are taken. Whisper it, but occasionally the right thing to do is also the most difficult course.

The infants will deny such a truth. Politics is easy, they will say; war and peace are the most simple matters of all – you must be against the first and in favour of the second, and any suggestion that things aren’t that simple puts you on The Wrong Side of History.

Well, the children can enjoy their (and the Taliban's) moment of triumph. The adults got their backsides kicked over the last 20 years, and especially in the last week. It should count in our favour that we were beaten trying to do the right thing. But in the playground of hard Left politics, the only thing that counts is what’s written on your placard.