Hello, I'm Rory Stewart, and I'd like to tell you about an intelligent squared event

I'm doing with the classicist author and broadcaster Mary Beard. Together we'll be discussing

politics and power from the Caesars to Sunack, who gets to Winpar, who is excluded,

does power always corrupt, or other examples of leaders who've maintained their integrity while

an authority. And how does the nature of power vary across different times and cultures?

These are just some of the questions that Mary and I will be trying to answer.

In person tickets are now sold out, but you can still watch online on the 13th of November

at 7pm BST. Put your questions first live as we discuss power and politics down the edges.

In recent days and weeks, the world has been gripped by events unfolding in Afghanistan.

As the United States has withdrawn troops and the Taliban has swept the power,

we've been trying to put together the pieces of what this means for the Afghan people

and the world more broadly. So in today's special episode, broken into two parts,

we'll be first speaking to Shabnam Nazimi, British Afghan commentator, and then in part two,

we speak to Jeremy Bone, BBC Middle East editor and Shady Hamid,

Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, and author of Islamic exceptionalism.

And the podcast is hosted by Manvin Rana, Senior Investigator of Journalist at the Times,

and host of the excellent podcast stories of our times. We hope you benefit from today's episode,

and if you'd like to hear more from our speakers, you can find links for their work

and podcasts in the episode description. But now let's go to the episode.

The Taliban, a militant Islamist group that ran most of Afghanistan in the late 1990s,

have taken back control of the country. The US led invasion under President George W. Bush in 2001,

ousted the hardline political movement from power, but they never left.

...