Afghanistan

Thursday

James Walton

And the Mountain Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini – review

The American comedian Stephen Colbert once joked that when he publicly criticised the novels of Khaled Hosseini, his front garden was invaded by angry members of women’s books groups. They were carrying flaming torches in one hand and bottles of white wine in the other. It’s a joke that neatly sums up two significant facts about Hosseini’s status as a writer. First — and not to be underestimated, of course — it proves that he’s famous enough to make jokes about. But it also reminds us that his fame has been driven by ordinary book-lovers rather than literary professionals. His two previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cutting and running from Afghanistan

MPs on the Defence Select Committee made a similar warning this morning about the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as Con Coughlin made in The Spectator last month. He wrote that Britain’s ‘attempt to undertake a dignified retreat from Kabul has all the makings of yet another Afghan disaster’. You can read the full piece here, but here are the main points that it makes, followed by the main warnings from the select committee’s report: 1. Is the ANSF ready to take over? Because of a failure to defeat or reach a political settlement with the Taleban, the withdrawal plan depends on trusting Afghan troops ‘who have already shown a worrying

Thursday

William Dalrymple

‘I was detained as a potential suicide bomber’

To the Lahore Literary Festival. As I cross the border from India, Pakistan is experiencing an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence: 400 Shias have been killed in bomb attacks this year, while more than 150 houses and two churches belonging to the Christians have been burned in mob attacks. Yet Pakistan always manages to stumble on. Sixty-five years after partition, Lahore still feels like Delhi’s sister city, and is much more like my adopted home than either Madras or Calcutta is. Moreover, there are some hopeful signs. Zardari’s government is about to complete its term in office — the first time in the country’s history that an elected government will

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Leaving Afghanistan and Fraser Nelson vs. John Rentoul

Is the British Army enjoying a straightforward and safe withdrawal from Afghanistan? No, according to this week’s Spectator. The Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin writes the withdrawal is one of the most daunting challenges ever undertaken by our army. In the latest View from 22 podcast, Con reports on what the troops think about the withdrawal, the cost of removing our forces and equipment, the unstable political situation in Afghanistan and the implications of an unstable regime back in the UK. Following on from Fraser’s post celebrating Nigel Lawson’s 1988 budget, this week’s debate features Fraser and John Rentoul from the Independent on Sunday going head to head on Lawson, John

Thursday

James Delingpole

Bluestone 42: Dad’s Army it isn’t

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42

Sunday

James Forsyth

William Hague: Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan is where the threat to the British homeland is coming from

On the Sunday Politics, William Hague confirmed that the greatest terrorist threat to the British homeland come from Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he argued that without intervention, the Sahel could become as dangerous to Britain. Those hoping for Hague to put flesh on the bones of the government’s European strategy will have been disappointed. The Tory leadership remains determined not to give out anything akin to a renegotiation scorecard. When pressed by Andrew Neil on whether he would advocate leaving if only the status quo was on offer, Hague said that the government would have to ‘use our judgment at the time.’ On gay marriage, Hague reiterated his support

Thursday

David Blackburn

Mali is a British concern because it is a European concern

Aaron Ellis makes a good point: the comparison between Mali and Afghanistan is flawed. But I disagree with him as to why. Afghanistan was a failed state long before al-Qaeda settled there (as a last resort). The pattern is slightly different in Mali: Islamists have further destabilised an already weak country in a strategically sensitive area. Mali has been wracked by unrest, both ethnic and religious, for some time. The country is so poor (as a glance at the CIA World Fact Book’s approximations demonstrates) that is precarious politically; so precarious that it threatened to undermine some of its delicate neighbours along the Sahel (the massive and growing strip where

Aaron Ellis

Mali is not another Afghanistan

Why should we worry if jihadists control a poor, landlocked country thousands of miles away? As the French push on with the ‘reconquest’ of Mali, there’s a feeling here that Britain must play its part in preventing a terrorist safe haven on Europe’s southern border. Some compare the situation to pre-9/11 Afghanistan. Back in May, Ian Birrell warned that we ‘have seen the damage caused by a broken, chaotic country – and how Islamist terror groups promising stability can fill the void.’ The ‘shockwaves’ from Mali ‘could be felt far beyond its own borders’ just as the ones from Afghanistan were felt in New York and Washington. Bob Carr, Australia’s

Tuesday

Alex Massie

If Barack Obama is an isolationist then isolationism no longer has any meaning – Spectator Blogs

Con Coughlin suggests Barack Obama has “given up” fighting al-Qaeda which, frankly, is a curious assessment given the ongoing drone war (and other operations) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roger Kimball, however, makes Coughlin look like a piker since, according to Kimball, Obama’s inauguration speech yesterday contained shades of Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. These may be extreme reactions but there is evidently a widespread sense that Obama is some form of “neo-isolationist” hellbent on retreating from a big, bad and dangerous world so he may instead concentrate upon our old chum “nation-building at home”. If by this you mean Obama is unlikely, as matters presently stand, to send 250,000 American troops

Friday

David Blackburn

Lord Ashdown: Get out of Afghanistan quickly

The headline on Lord Ashdown’s piece on Afghanistan in today’s Times (£) will please Lib Dem strategists. ‘This awful mistake mustn’t claim more lives.’ It allows the Lib Dems to play the anti-war card: we are the party that will bring Our Boys (and Girls) home. The strategists could take plenty of other lines from Ashdown’s quotable article. ‘All that we can achieve has been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost… Our failure in Afghanistan has not been military. It has been political.’ Ashdown’s analysis echoes that of prestigious think tanks such as the Centre to Strategic and International Studies

Saturday

James Forsyth

David Petraeus quits as CIA director over affair

Few people have been more important in America’s recent wars than David Petraeus. Petraeus led the surge of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and redefined the US approach to counter-insurgency warfare. He was the most influential military figure of the post-war era and successful enough for some of those close to Obama to hold deep concerns about the prospect of Petraeus running against Obama. 14 months ago, he was put in charge of the CIA by President Obama. There he expanded Predator strikes to Yemen and pushed for a larger drone fleet. But yesterday, Petraeus resigned over an extra-marital affair with his biographer. It is a sad end to

Saturday

David Blackburn

George Osborne’s Afghan letter from America

George Osborne is a keen observer of American politics, so perhaps it is little surprise to read in the Telegraph that the chancellor is arguing for faster withdrawal from Afghanistan. The American presidential race has confronted national war-weariness. The Obama camp has long held that the 2014 drawdown date is firm; that is when the troops will come hom. It is even thought that US training and logistical support to Kabul will be curtailed together with combat operations. The Romney camp’s view has been less clear, which suggests that it has not wanted to leave itself exposed during the campaign by committing to anything from a position of comparative ignorance

Thursday

Sunder Katwala

How should we mark the Great War’s centenary?

It seems strange now to recall that, it was not so many years ago, around the time of the millennium, that some in Whitehall were talking about how to scale down Remembrance Sunday. One theory was that marking the centenaries of the start and end of the Great War could also mark an appropriate moment to bring the solemn Cenotaph ceremonials to a gentle end. The assumption was that Remembrance would gradually lose its resonance and relevance once the generations who fought the Great War had all passed on. Such thinking did also reflect the mistaken New Labour view of the Dome era: that Britain would be able to face

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview – Patrick Hennessey, Kandak: Fighting with the Afghans

“It always struck me that it was a much easier war to support the closer you got to it,” says Patrick Hennessey of the war in Afghanistan. Hennessey, who served in Helmand with the Grenadier Guards in 2007, continues: “It was so obvious that we were making the country better and that we were broadly supported by the locals, certainly in a way that we weren’t in Iraq in 2006. I know that most Guardsmen preferred Afghanistan to Iraq in that respect because they felt they were doing something tangible and positive and that it was being appreciated by the people in the country, if not necessarily the people at

Friday

Shiraz Maher

Afghanistan’s triumph: the return of cricket and other ‘frivolities’

England have just beaten Afghanistan in the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup currently being held in Sri Lanka. In the end, it was a comprehensive victory for Stuart Broad’s men but how wonderful it is to see cultural and sporting life returning to a country where such ‘frivolities’ were outlawed by the Taliban. This is Afghanistan’s second appearance at a major cricketing tournament and follows Rohullah Nikpai’s efforts in the Olympics a few weeks ago where he won the country’s second ever medal.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Philip Hammond’s tarnished relations with military top brass fly into the open

Talking to diplomatic sources this evening, there’s a depressed recognition that the Taliban and its allies have scored a major victory in forcing Nato to scale back joint patrols with Afghan forces. Here, the government has mishandled the news. Number 10 is trying to deny the strategic importance of this shift, while the normally sure-footed Philip Hammond made a series of clumsy answers to questions in parliament. Part of the problem is that Hammond was sent to the Ministry of Defence not for his interest in military matters but for his commitment to balancing the books. In private, he says that he hopes his legacy will be a genuinely, balanced

Sunday

David Blackburn

Green on blue is a problem for both green and blue

The enormous naval deployment in the Persian Gulf, coupled with the deluge of leaks and rumours about a pre-emptive strike by Israeli forces on Iran, has perhaps diverted attention from the war in Afghanistan until the events of this weekend. The attack on Camp Bastion by 15 Taliban fighters masquerading as US troops, which killed 2 American marines and destroyed or damaged considerable materiel and installations, has captured headlines over the weekend, not least because the Taliban claimed that their primary target was Prince Harry. One possible response to the Taliban’s propaganda gambit is to point out that they failed in their alleged objective. Spokesmen for the British Army, which

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron intervenes on disabled troops

David Cameron made a surprise visit to Camp Bastion this afternoon. After a lunch of German sausage and potato with the troops, the Prime Minister made one announcement that may rile military chiefs, and another designed to keep them on side. The possibly irritating statement was that Cameron is ‘confident’ he could meet his promise to bring British troops back from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. He said an announcement about the number of soldiers to be brought back in 2013 will be made at the end of this year. But senior military sources have warned the Press Association that ‘we need to maintain a strong presence’ in Afghanistan

Monday

Matt Cavanagh

Foxhound arrives in Afghanistan – five years too late

There was welcome news yesterday for our forces in Afghanistan, and for those who want to see them supplied with the best equipment, with pictures of the first ‘Foxhound’ patrol vehicles arriving in Helmand. Foxhound is the long-awaited replacement for the Snatch Land Rover, whose inadequate protection against Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq and then Afghanistan became glaringly obvious as far back as 2005. In the intervening years, the Ministry of Defence has procured a number of vehicles offering much better protection, starting with the Mastiff in late 2006. However, the greater protection of these vehicles came at a price, in terms of weight and manoeuvrability (and air-transportability): the Mastiff

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The politics of international rescue

A visibly relieved David Cameron gave a statement outside No. 10 earlier today about the successful rescue of four aid workers from a cave on the Afghan/Tajikistan border, including a Northern Irish aid worker, Helen Johnston. The Prime Minister said he had personally authorized the operation, which must have been some decision given the recent history of such rescues. He praised British troops, and gave a brief mention to American ones for carrying out ‘a related operation’. But I was struck by the difference in emphasis between Cameron’s video statement and that of the British commander in Kabul, for whom the main point of the rescue was its multinational nature. Ms