Author: |Posted: 2:03 pm on 19/11/09
Category: World News Blog
Kabul was the emptiest of cities this morning.
The only way to move around – given the universal ban on private vehicles that has successfully staved off the predictable attack by the Taliban – was on foot. The traffic that usually blocks the city vanished.
We found ourselves learning that routes between places we normally travel actually take 20 minutes on foot, rather than an hour by car in the gridlocked streets.
The emptiness just added to the surreality of the occasion. Behind high walls, with foreign dignitaries, an almost virtual president of a virtual government was taking office for another five years. read more
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.
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 prescribe exactly how those (ancient) traditions (of sub-national governance) evolve, or how the systems which reflect them are implemented … but to provide the resources without which none of this (stability) would be possible, and which will be far less expensive than trying to suppress the insurgency by conventional military means.” read more
Author: |Posted: 7:30 pm on 16/11/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
Am at Guildhall where the white-tied and be-gowned have just said grace and sat down 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 transfer starting in 2010″. That means transfer to Afghan lead in districts – it doesn’t mean withdrawal from districts. There would still be substantial military and civilian presence.
The timetable he hopes can be unveiled in January 2010 would not be a linear progression to a final withdrawal date but would give some indicative dates for the first few districts to transfer, starting mid-2010.
Before that we get the formal announcement of the additional 500 UK forces being deployed. That could come closely timed to President Obama’s extra troops announcement, and that now looks likely between his return from Asia and the Thanksgiving holiday.
Author: |Posted: 6:20 pm on 16/11/09
Category: World News Blog
It seemed unlikely that it could be happening again. But it was.
After Iraq, where months of pressure from the media and serving soldiers meant that translators working for the British army – and facing regular threats from the Iraqi insurgency – were eventually offered the chance of asylum in the UK, it seemed impossible a similar situation could be recurring here in Afghanistan.
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.
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 to engage in action which inevitably sheds Muslim blood, outweighs the risk of blood being shed here by Muslim extremists.
Author: |Posted: 11:02 am on 11/11/09
Category: Snowblog
Armistice Day. The first time since the great war that we have remembered without the presence of anyone who was there.
Today I am in Coventry, a city still scarred by the last world war. Somehow today renders Armistice Day more poignant. More poignant because of the daily toll of young life in the wastes of Helmand.
Author: |Posted: 7:39 pm on 10/11/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
A colleague has gone through the messages posted on the Sun’s website by its readers. Earlier this afternoon they broke 60-40 in favour of the prime minister.
No.10 claims it’s been inundated with supportive messages, not something it is often in a position to say.
Author: |Posted: 10:14 am on 10/11/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
The Sun is insisting they are not running Jacqui Janes as part of a campaign and that the recording made of Gordon Brown’s phone call to the bereaved mother was done spontaneously by a friend who was at the Janes’s home.
Mrs Janes hits the loudspeaker button and the friend puts their BlackBerry near enough to pick up sound. The call came at 10pm on Sunday night and there was no Sun minder on the premises.
No 10 will take some convincing. read more
