Afghanistan

Sunday

David Blackburn

Green on blue is a problem for both green and blue

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron intervenes on disabled troops

From our UK edition

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 if the government is to meet its aims in the state.

Monday

Matt Cavanagh

Foxhound arrives in Afghanistan – five years too late

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The politics of international rescue

From our UK edition

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.

Matthew Parris

I hope our Jubilee Queen, unlike the last, outlives a hopeless foreign war

From our UK edition

War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare victory; but bloodied, shocked, shamed and considerably cut down to size. The whole campaign had been an ill-conceived, over-confident and grisly blunder. Even Kipling hated it. How could the numerical superiority and technical might of Britain’s armed forces be fought to cruel draw by a smaller band of ill-equipped zealots, as light on their feet as the modern-day terrorist? It was humiliating.

Alex Moorehead

All the world’s a stage

From our UK edition

In Translations, Brian Friel’s play about English military and cultural imperialism, the frustrated teacher Manus explains how he uses ‘the wrong gesture in the wrong language’ to insult in Gaelic an English soldier. In Shakespeare in Kabul, Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar’s account of the first production of Shakespeare in Afghanistan since before the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, an Afghan theatre group, led by the French director Corinne Jaber, attempt the ‘right’ gestures in their own language as they perform Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Obama’s words meet with the Taliban’s bombs

From our UK edition

Political theatre, that’s what Barack Obama delivered in Afghanistan last night. A year on from the death of Osama Bin Laden, and with the US elections fast approaching, here was the President reheating his existing timetable for withdrawal — and offering it up as reassurance for weary Afghans and Americans alike. There were some new details, courtesy of an ‘Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement’ signed with Hamid Karzai, but this was mostly about the symbolism and rhetoric. As Obama put it himself, ‘We can see the light of a new day on the horizon.’ Except this ‘new day’ quickly slipped back into night. A couple of hours after Obama had left the country, a suicide bomb attack left at least seven people dead in Kabul.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

War is War: Horrid But Not Shocking

From our UK edition

Commenting on the publication of photographs of American soldiers in Afghanistan posing with the severed limbs of their dead Afghan opponents, Andrew Sullivan says this is "What Empire Does": The sickening pictures speak for themselves. At what point will we recognize that inserting ourselves into places like Afghanistan and Iraq will change us, has changed us, and will change us. Mercifully, this latest inhuman excrescence is not government policy, as at Abu Ghraib. But it exposes even more deeply the inherent failure and moral corruption of occupying Afghanistan and the need to withdraw sooner rather than later. Oh please. This is what war does to men at arms.

Friday

Alex Massie

Hitchens vs Galloway

From our UK edition

Since he has previously been elected in Glasgow and London, I don't know if it is so astonishing that George Galloway won a by-election in Bradford. Anyway, if you have a couple of hours to spare ou might enjoy this debate between Galloway and Christopher Hitchens. As Christopher put it: "The man's hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends. The Soviet Union let him down, Albania's gone. Saddam's been overthrown. But on to the next, in Damascus." Quite.

Saturday

Alan Judd

Ways of making men talk

From our UK edition

Eric Rosenbach is a former academic who is now deputy assistant secretary of defence in Washington. Aki Peritz used to work for the CIA and now advises the Third Way think tank. Their book, therefore, is not a breathless account of terrorist-hunting nor the sensational inside story of how, in Obama’s words, ‘We got him’ (bin Laden). Rather, it is an exposition of legal, bureaucratic, political and military developments within the US following 9/11, illustrated by summaries of how various terrorists were killed or captured. If you want thrills and spills, go elsewhere, but if you are a student of counter-terrorism or are interested in the legal limbo of rendition, detention and targeted killings, you should probably read it.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A quiet PMQs, ahead of today’s main event

From our UK edition

It started like a bit of good old political knockabout. PMQs opened with a planted question from Mark Menzies (Con, Fylde) asking the PM about Britain’s sick-note culture. Cameron, looking suitably grave, declared that the fake-sniffle problem afflicts even senior management. Ed Miliband, he told us, had recently claimed he was too ill to attend a rally called by health workers. Three hours later he was seen heartily cheering at a football match having been driven to the ground in a Rolls Royce. ‘What was it,’ asked Cameron, ‘that first attracted the Labour leader to the multimillionaire owner of Hull football club?’ This prompted howls and jeers from every part of the house. Ed Miliband ignored them.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Afghanistan overshadows Cameron’s America trip

From our UK edition

Afghanistan, what now? After a week of death and retaliation in the country, it appears that a car bomb has been detonated on the runway at Camp Bastion — probably aimed at the visiting US Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta. A spokesman has since said that ‘at no point was anyone on board Mr Panetta's plane at risk,’ but it certainly highlights the dangers attached to his visit. What chance, now, that he will be successful in his goal of ‘easing tensions’? The incident cropped up very briefly in David Cameron and Barack Obama's press conference just now.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron and Obama, sans yellow mustard

From our UK edition

Above is what they call the ‘raw video’ of David Cameron's and Barack Obama's trip to a basketball game last night. It's the unrefined version of what Downing St hopes will be refined, packaged and sent to your television screen at hyperspeed: images of the PM and the President dressed casually and chatting away as the game goes on. Like I said yesterday, it's political theatre — designed to benefit both men. They were then both interviewed at halftime, which you can watch here.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Will Obama and Cameron discuss a faster pullout from Afghanistan?

From our UK edition

The political theatre of David Cameron's trip to America will have Downing Street drooling. The PM is, today, not only going to become the first world leader to fly aboard Air Force One with Barack Obama, but then they're also going to take in a game of basketball together. It's a carefully calibrated blend of statesmanship and down-to-earth-ship that will suit both men. Obama, because it might appeal, in some way, to conservative voters ahead of this year's presidential election. Cameron, because, well… does Ed Miliband do this sort of thing? The theatre carries over into print too, with a joint article by Cameron and Obama in today's Washington Post.

Alex Massie

No More Heaves in Helmand

From our UK edition

Rory Stewart's article on Afghanistan, published in yesterday's Evening Standard, makes a succinct case for speeding up the west's withdrawal from Helmand and the Hindu Kush. As he says, We are not obliged to stay till the last day. Did our mission go wrong because Nato had too few troops; or because it sent too many? Could a different strategy have fixed the situation; or was it always impossible? The reason no longer matters. Whatever the explanation, things will not improve: Nato will not “solve the relationship with Pakistan”; it will never create “an effective, credible, legitimate Afghan government”; and in most parts of the country it has already lost “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. The time for one more heave is long gone.

Alex Massie

Cameron & Obama Play Winston Churchill Bingo

From our UK edition

If you thought Winston Churchill wouldn't be mentioned until the second sentence of today's "Obama-Cameron" op-ed in the Washington Post then, by gum, you're a mug. Of course the old boy makes it into the first line. What else would you expect from a puff piece published on DC's leading propaganda page? But the White House staffer responsible for this piece might still have done better: Seven decades ago, as our forces began to turn the tide of World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Washington to coordinate our joint efforts. Our victories on the battlefield proved “what can be achieved by British and Americans working together heart and hand,” he said.

Monday

Alex Massie

Afghanistan Isn’t Working

From our UK edition

For years now, Afghanistan policy has been governed by a simple question: Do the unknown costs of leaving Afghanistan trump the known costs of staying in Afghanistan? Until now the answer, at least officially, has always been Yes. But this is not a static question. The known price of remaining in Afghanistan increases all the time; the unknown consequences of withdrawal remain, at best, constant. Indeed, in as much as al-Qaeda's Afghan capability has been reduced, the costs of withdrawal may in fact be less than once they were. That scarcely means an Afghanistan without NATO troops is going to be a grand place. Nevertheless, it is clear that the American-led presence in Afghanistan is not working to prudce a sustainable political or military solution.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Afghanistan tragedy overshadows PMQs

From our UK edition

I have rarely heard the House of Commons as quiet as it was at the start of PMQs today. The sad news from Afghanistan was, rightly, weighing on MPs’ minds. The initial Cameron Miliband exchanges were on the conflict there with the two leaders agreeing with each other. In some ways, though, I wonder whether the country would not benefit more from some forensic debate about the strategic aims of the mission. However the volume level in the House increased when Joan Ruddock asked the PM if he was ‘truly proud’ of taking benefits away from disabled children.

Saturday

William Leith

The view from the top

From our UK edition

Halfway through this book, the veil lifted, and I thought: ‘I see! I see what he’s trying to do!’ Pickering gets his characters, and moves them along, and then, after 150 pages, he manages to convey a really powerful sensation of something; you might call it amorality, or nihilism, or the sense of the pointlessness of it all. For the first 12 chapters, you are walking uphill, and then you get the view. For the hero, there is horror, and a Graham Greene-like sense of things not being what they seem. Before this moment, it’s a strange set up. I suppose it’s meant to be. Malone, our Greene-ish hero, is an American airman in his late twenties. He’s in Afghanistan, but not with the military — he flies supplies around.

Friday

Peter Hoskin

What the Taliban want

From our UK edition

How go those talks with the Taliban in Doha? Quietly, that's how — although there's a report in yesterday's The Hindu that could reveal some of what's being said, and is worth the time reading because of it. According to the paper's diplomatic sources, the Taliban want Mullah Mohammed Omar installed as ‘supreme religious and political leader’ of Afghanistan. And, yes, that is the Mullah Omar who sheltered Al Qaeda when he actually was in charge of Afghanistan, and whose policy agenda included the death penalty for those converting to another religion, as well as the general subjugation of women, gay people, individuality, etc. He's currently wanted to the tune of $10 million by the US State Department.