No-one, or no-one I would rate, would deny that the Taliban are very wrong to deny females a proper education or jobs in the professions. But a few thoughts. There's no war going on within Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. The education issue affects only a tiny proportion of women there. The fact that they come from the most privileged sections of society means that the Western Media, themselves bastions of privilege, identify with them and give their plight a lot of coverage. The vast majority of Afghan girls were, and are, never going to become doctors, airline pilots or lawyers and they are being hurt by Western sanctions. And I'm pretty sure the war against the Soviet Union and their Afghan Communist clients was in a large part inspired by their insistence on educational opportunity regardless of sex. The Red Army was fighting as much for girls' education as the US and NATO troops who propped up the corrupt Afghan government until recently. But we in the West supported the Mujahedin back then. What changed when it comes to the West's attitude to female education?

I've got a pile of really good books about newspaper journalism. The thing is I can't bring myself to read them anymore. The make me too sad. Journalism is pretty much dead. Most radio and television reporting was based on what was in the papers. Now the newspapers have tiny overworked staff and that shows in their poor content. And the folk who call themselves journalists these days are more interest in expressing opinions than ferreting out and presenting facts. The line between fact and opinion isn't blurred, it's non-existent. Without newspapers to ransack, radio and television are now pretty poor conduits for the information people need to take part in democratic government. News belongs to no-one but it's expensive to gather. No-one wants to pay for news and the interweb meant for a while they didn't have to. But then the flow of proper journalism died with the demise of print media as the online outlets hoovered up their ad revenue. It's a bit like why electrical appliances no longer have lives measured in decades. A washing machine or food mixer that lasts 30 years would be really expensive due to the high quality of the components. And manufacturers don't say tell you that for the price you want to pay you'll be lucky to get six years out of an appliance. So, we take a chance. Can we afford to take the same chance on shoddy news?

Imagine an airport where all three departing flights arrive at the same time, regardless of schedule for the morning, and passengers line up on the runway at the foot of a mobile stairway next to each plane. And unlike buses, there's no indication on the aircraft of their destinations. It's easy to join the wrong queue and I did. I'm referring to Kabul Airport in the mid-2000s. Maybe this was not a typical experience of flying out of Kabul with Ariana, the Afghan state airline. But I think maybe it was. The flight out of Kuwait was interesting too. All the passengers were herded into a waiting room miles from the main terminal, miles from the main airport even. Then just before the middle of the night departure time a door was opened and the passengers raced across the runway and up some steps at the back of plane. First up, first choice of seat. And from the coverings on those seats they had been salvaged from several different planes. I can't speak to the safety of the plane but I seem to remember that Ariana had been barred from European routes at the time. But I have no complaints, they got me to Kabul and back.

Some may be surprised at the Burmese Army's poor performance against the various ethic resistance groups in Myanmar. I'm not. The so-called Army has always been nothing more than a bandit gang. That's why it is more of a business operation and political dictatorship than a fighting force. Burma has always been a country of bandit gangs. During the Second World War the biggest allied itself with the Japanese. Then it changed sides. One of the leaders Bogyoke Aung San was told by a senior British officer "You only joined us because you saw the Japs were going to lose. To which Aung San replied "Of course". His daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, who would have been welcomed into the gang if she had only been born a boy, inherited her murdered father's willingness to be candid. Asked while in power if she would do anything to save the Rohingya, she said No, there were no votes in helping the Muslim Rohingyas. I find the honesty commendable but the mindset detestable.

Years ago I covered a reunion of pilots who had made emergency landings on Fair Isle, halfway between Orkney and Shetland. The guest of honour, the main attraction, was a German pilot who crashed on Fair Isle during the Second World War. His weather reconnaissance plane had been shot down by Spitfires operating out of Sumburgh on the south tip of Shetland. The weather planes and the bombers sent to knock out the northern lighthouses, including those on Fair Isle, provided a steady trade for the Spitfires. This German claimed to have been "only a weather reconnaissance pilot". Sounds kind of harmless until you realise he was part of the German war machine intent on killing my parents, their parents, and their parents and any member of my family they could drop a bomb on. And probably your ancestors too. Anyway, those forecasts weren't for the tea time news bulletin. They were to make the Nazi's job of killing British people easier. I think the old German pilot realised his plea didn't really wash with me because he wasn't too friendly or forthcoming. Luckily for me, someone from After The Battle magazine was also there and I was able to piggyback on his interview with a guy who was probably an old Nazi. The Luftwaffe attracted right thinking Nazis. Several members of his crew died as a result of the encounter with the Spitfires and were buried on Fair Isle for a while. Then the German Government dug up nearly all their dead from both World Wars, including men executed for murdering their fellow prisoners of war for not being good enough Nazis, and reburied them in a central war cemetery just north of Birmingham on Cannock Chase.