There are likely more non-Muslim women in Australia worried about the Taliban enforcing Sharia law in Afghanistan, than Muslim women in Afghanistan worrying about it.

I know the scenes at Kabul airport don't demonstrate this, but the ease with which the Taliban took control of the entire country with just 50,000 to 60,000 fighters, does demonstrate they have massive internal support.

In 2013 the Pew Research group published an extensive study on Muslims around the world. While there are flaws in all research, it's hard to argue that Sharia law doesn't have majority support in Afghanistan when 99% of their Muslims surveyed believe it should be the law of the land.

We should stop judging Muslims by our Western standards. If they found Sharia Law so offensive, they wouldn't keep chucking out secular governments in favour of Islamic fundamentalism. The men of Afghanistan, and in any Muslim majority country, are only able to institute Sharia law with the support of a large component of the women.

Unfortunately we have seen Islamic fundamentalism grow throughout the world even in our near neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia. The UN even allowed Muslim countries to have their own version of the UN Charter of Human Rights because the West were too weak to call Islam out.

Afghanistan and the world is reaping what it has sown in their antagonism towards The West, democracy and capitalism.

Our world leaders, global organisations, academic institutions, and bureaucracies are full of the useful idiots who have let this happen.

Australians should focus on stopping the Islamic creep in our own country before it's too late. Prayer rooms at the MCG were a terrible signal that we have plenty of useful idiots in our society.

Tim adds:

Absolutely right James; they believe in Sharia in these places. We were fools to think we could transform Afghanistan (or Iraq) into a Western democracy by just giving them the trappings.

People would have to change at their core, adopt Western ways of thinking and Western beliefs. That is a LOT harder to do than just change governments.

What we have needed is to defend our own culture and way of life. How do we export it when we don't believe in it ourselves? It was an insane effort.

1 Ask yourself this. Given the amount of power women have in the United States, Britain and elsewhere in the west, why are they so helpless in Muslim countries?

2 An excellent point Bill. Women have always had whatever they wanted in society - any society.

They are the ones teaching the next generation, after all. If they were really unhappy in the Islamic world they would teach their children that Islam sucks and the allegiance to it would end.

That's what happened in the West with Christianity, after all. Or at least with enough women and their children to pretty much dry it up.

3 I'm not sure you're right, guys. You're looking at that hellhole as if it were another America, where women really could choose. In Muslim countries, women have NO rights, and if they talk back to their husbands, they are beaten or even killed. And the husbands control what the women teach their children -- not that the women know anything different from the Koran anyhow.

4 BUT Dana, the women are the ones teaching the children early on, and if they really are that dissatisfied they would - poison their minds towards Islam. The reality is they teach their kids early on to be good little Muslims and perpetuate the cycle. Sure some don't like it but it's fairly obvious enough aren't completely disgusted by it.

5 Tim, it would be nice to think that Muslim women are "subverting" their kids. But they're not. They've bought into the whole shebang because that's the way they were raised. And it's what they believe, and are teaching their kids. Be subservient to the males, to Daddy (even if he wants to do bad things to you).

Muslim women hold out no hope to us.

6 I agree Dana. It's why the Islamic world will never change. Only something that fundamentally changes their way of looking at the world can fix them.