Author: |Posted: 2:03 pm on 19/11/09
Category: World News Blog
… assets (the police, army, ministries, government business), not power over a country.
So much of Afghanistan is outside of Nato and the Afghan government’s reach that today’s target of handing over the worse areas to Afghan security forces seems remote at best, vacuously rhetorical at worst.
The ceremony that took place under high security was the ugly end to months of electoral chaos in which democracy here began to look like a cycle of backroom dealings and arm-twisting, quite …
Author: |Posted: 12:40 pm on 18/11/09
Category: Snowblog
It is a terrible observation, but with another British soldier killed in Afghanistan yesterday we are two military deaths from 100 service people killed in the Afghan War since the beginning of this year.
With the homecomings through Wootton Bassett and the now ever-present cameras and crowds, these are events rarely seen before outside world war.
I was at Brize Norton once for the homecoming of a British soldier killed in Basra. Only the family, someone from …
Author: |Posted: 7:32 pm on 17/11/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
David Miliband’s speech on Afghanistan marks an important moment in the downgrading of expectations for what kind of Afghanistan NATO will leave behind it.
It acknowledges that Afghanistan works for the most part on “sub-national government” and will do for the foreseeable future. In one intriguing paragraph, which bears the hallmarks of much mandarin crafting, Mr Miliband says:
“Our role should not be to …
Author: |Posted: 7:30 pm on 16/11/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
… for their tuck.
Gordon Brown’s team feel he must get across to ordinary folk a sense that the Afghanistan military mission does not just grind on forever but is governed by a plan and has an ending.
David Miliband will speak more about the political plan tomorrow. Bob Ainsworth will address Nato allies soon. The prime minister wants people to understand the purpose and sense the progress.
So he’ll talk about the blows inflicted on al-Qaida and the prospect of a “timetable for …
Author: |Posted: 6:20 pm on 16/11/09
Category: World News Blog
… chance of asylum in the UK, it seemed impossible a similar situation could be recurring here in Afghanistan.
Over the past few weeks here, we’ve been interviewing former interpreters for the British Army. All served in Helmand. Some were injured at work.
One man, Yusuf, who lost his eye and teeth in an explosion in Helmand on 3 June, told us how he was shipped out of British care on Camp Bastion after five days and sent to an Afghan army hospital in Kandahar.
There, doctors found …
Author: |Posted: 10:38 am on 12/11/09
Category: World News Blog
It is all about perceptions.
Today’s leaking of a memo from the US Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry , to Washington about his concerns over sending more than 10 to 15,000 reinforcements here, is not the first leak this week.
There’s been a flurry of backhanded information coming out of Washington in the past few months.
Unless this is genuinely a reflection of an …
Author: |Posted: 9:24 am on 12/11/09
Category: Snowblog
The cable to the White House from the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, for “no more troops” is a pretty shocking shot across the military’s bows.
Following our own micro consultation with the UK public last night, one’s sense of confusion and mystification over the Afghan war only deepens.
Here in the UK the acid question must surely be whether the damage done to communal relations in Britain from deploying UK troops …
Author: |Posted: 11:02 am on 11/11/09
Category: Snowblog
… Channel 4 News.
We shall be in this city addressing the home front on the matter of the war in Afghanistan. In the meantime, and though I shall blog again later after the two-minute silence, I would commend this poem by the poet laureate, whom I had the great honour to meet on Sunday night.
LAST POST
by Carol Ann Duffy
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel …
Author: |Posted: 7:19 pm on 10/11/09
Category: World News Blog
… and accused of plotting to bomb New York, is a naturalised US citizen but he is originally from Afghanistan.
If the authorities are right about what he was planning, then that would have indisputably been a home grown terror attack on America, carried out by a man who passed the vetting process to work as a shuttle driver at Denver airport.
But at his trial I am sure we will hear plenty about his Afghan and Pakistani connections, as well as his life in the US.
The idea that a major in …
Author: |Posted: 9:47 am on 10/11/09
Category: Snowblog
… then the danger is deep indeed.
The Sun ‘discovered’ Mrs Janes, whose son was killed in Afghanistan last month.
Who provided telephone recording resource to enable her to record her conversation with Mr Brown, we don’t know, nor do we know what role the Sun played in the misspelt letter affair.
In war, journalists themselves very easily become combatants.
Whose view you ‘allow’ in a live phone-in show or what you do in a moment of a mother’s devastating grief in …
