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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we choose some of our favorite pieces

from the magazine and ask their writers to read them out loud.

I'm Patrick Gibbons and on the podcast this week. Max Jeffrey interviews Ahmad Masoud, an Afghan resistance

leader based in Tajikistan. Former prisoner David Shipley ponders the power of restorative justice.

Patrick Kidd argues that the Church of England

must do more to encourage people to volunteer. Cindy Yu asks if the famed tiger mother is an endangered

species, and Hugh Thompson reviews Mick Connoffrey's new book Fallen, which explores Mountaineer

George Mallory's tragic 1924 Everest expedition.

Up first, Max Jeffrey.

It's fighting season in Afghanistan again.

When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring,

and the madrasas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term,

the Islamists kicked off the fighting.

Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now, an insurgent group called the National

Resistance Front are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government.

In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul. Ahmed Massoud, the NRF leader, cheerily tells me from Tajikistan where he directs his troops in exile.

We have not even had one person captured.

...