Last week I blogged on the subject of news items that bore. I could well have included Afghanistan in my list. News that bores, is news that never changes…ten years into the West’s Afghan adventure, ten years on from 9/11, the danger is that for the citizen, little changes in Afghanistan.

Well now something has happened that is not about “our boys”, not about the war, nor even about the Taliban or al-Qaeda. That something is the most extraordinary insight into the scale of corruption in Kabul and its direct link with President Hamid Karzai’s Western-backed Government.

A week ago, unnoticed in the world’s media, the Governor of the Afghan Central Bank fled the country in fear for his life. Today he is holed up in Northern Virginia. He has been tracked there by the FT who have spoken to him.

Abdul Qadeer Fitrat was appointed to head the bank in 2007. Mr Fitrat is a brave man. On the heels of the well known but perhaps by now “boring” story of the collapse of the Kabul Bank last September, Mr Fitrat appeared in Parliament in Kabul in April and read out a list of people who, he said, had benefited from Kabul Bank loans. His reading of this list of Kharzai cronies and other figures at the centre of Afghanistan’s burgeoning capitalist life, was broadcast on television.

It was after a run on the Kabul Bank last September that Mr Fitrat had seen to it that the entire management of the bank was replaced, declaring that the whole bank little more than a Ponzi scheme. It was a scheme, he said, from which well connected businessmen, Karzai relatives, and Afghan Ministers benefited.

When the Kabul Bank collapsed there were £900m in outstanding loans to these people – a mere £62m has ever been recovered. Mr Fitrat detailed these allegations on the floor of the Afghan Parliament. He tells the FT his life is in “imminent danger”.

‘These people will go unpunished, the ex-Governor has said.

“I have seen no co-operation from the law, ten months after the collapse,” he said.

To abuse Shakespeare, there is something rotten in the heart of Afghanistan. Mr Fitrat has dared to expose it. Now the very forces that are battling to sustain President Karzai and his crew, have had to assist in the flight and protection of the man once at the very heart of the financial governance of the “democratic Afghanistan” that Afghan, British, American, and other Nato forces have lost their lives trying to build.

Boring? Or is it time we explored the implication of the flight from Afghanistan of the Governor of the Afghan Central Bank “in fear for his life”?

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Yesterday morning two gunmen in Lahore, riding along on a motorcycle, shot and killed a lone Saudi diplomat on his way to work at the Saudi consulate. Last Wednesday, militants threw two hand grenades at the Saudi consulate in Karachi – no one was injured. One unnamed Pakistani Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the killing; another named by Al-Jazeera English as Ehsanhullah Ehsan, said: “We support the action but we are not afraid. Had we done it, we would have claimed it.”

So, have the Taliban turned on the hand which once fed it? Saudi money and more helped the American effort to recruit and train the Taliban in the 1980s to assist in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The Saudi Ambassador to Pakistan has responded to the killing of his diplomat by saying: “no one who carries out this kind of action can be a Muslim”.

Which brings me to a remarkable, even shocking, article in Saturday’s New York Times headlined “Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater Founder”. It describes a plane load of Colombian mercenaries, landing at dead of night in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and transferring to a secret desert military complex.

The article goes on to chart the build up of an 800 member battalion of foreign troops. The contract for this mercenary force is, according to the newspaper, worth some $529 million. And is being run by the billionaire, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (renamed Xe Services) – who provided thousands of “security personnel” for the American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and four of whose men stand accused of killing seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007.

The NYT identifies some $42 million that Blackwater (Xe Services) paid in fines levied last year by the US government for the unlicensed training of foreign troops in Jordan.

The 21st Century has seen the alarming and rapid growth of such forces across the world’s conflict zones. Beyond the protection that entities like the UAE believe they cannot provide for themselves these “security corporations” have become increasingly close to the action in the assorted wars in which we are involved. Despite the fines, there is huge money to be made from “military protection”.

But are our interests really being served by the growth of what look perilously close to highly trained mercenary forces? What measures are being taken by the UN and the international community to regulate these things? The United Nations may well be exercised by Governments that kill their own people. But what if the work is done by “outside agencies”, at arms length from the authorities? What role are these outfits already playing in the myriad attempts to suppress the Arab Spring?

Now that their own diplomats are dying, how much do we know about what Western-trained mercenaries the Saudis or any of these Arab regimes are hiring to protect their interests?

Last night I chaired a debate at the British Museum to coincide with a major new exhibition on Afghanistan. These days every major show at the BM is accompanied by such a debate, sponsored and continued online by the Guardian’s Comment is Free. It was a complete sell-out with some 400 people crammed into the Museum’s auditorium. An amazing mix of people – Afghan students, academics, media, politicians, teachers, and interested persons. So much so, that people had to be turned away for shortage of space.

The whole thrust of the evening was to explore what Afghanistan‘s past, represented in the exhibition, could tell us about the “now” and the future. The remarkable Afghan civic activist, Orzala Ashraf Nemat, who fought courageously for women’s rights under the Taliban regime, was joined by my erstwhile colleague and awarded documentary maker Saira Shah, Minna Jarvenpaa from the UN in Afghanistan, and Professor Michael Clarke from RUSI.

Read more in the Channel 4 News Afghanistan Special Report

The mood was of a strenuous desire to get foreign forces out of the country, but in no way to reduce commitment to Afghan development. I learned the extraordinary statistic that the Afghan Government raises $1 billion a year in taxes, whilst the international community provide some $40 billion. This is a place completely dependent upon outside interference.

But it wasn’t only the high fibre content of the evening that amazed, it was the very fact of its happening at all. A significant, if eclectic group of people coming together in this “cultural space” to talk about something current but so apparently intractable. Where else in the world? What other bastion fo the “old” could find itself so robustly challenging and questioning the new?

And whilst I’m on, I’d like to say how much I have appreciated recent threads, not least on Japan. Not least yesterday’s. There is little more rewarding than to find people from Japan itself, from the tsunami affected region itself, contributing to our dialogue and our understanding of what is happening. Thank you!

‘My wife will divorce me if I do’ – one of a number of phrases with which General David Petraeus parries the question’ – ‘will you run for President?’ For in the spartan field that is the line-up for the leadership of America, the General is increasingly talked about for the leadership of the Republican ticket for the Presidential ticket in 2016. Petraeus vs Clinton – an intriguing line-up.

I had the opportunity to meet and talk with the General whilst he was in Britain yesterday. He talks an upbeat positive account of Afghanistan and the proposed US/allied exit by 2014. President Karzai offered the hope yesterday that the hand over of Afghan provinces would start as soon as this July.

There are many ifs and buts- not the least being the supposed overcoming of the Taliban and the reintegration of some of them into Afghan civic life. But if al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been squelched out of the Afghan threat equation, they have most certainly squirted their way into Pakistan and Yemen – two of the most unstable countries on earth.

The US has invested heavily in the beleaguered 32 years serving Yemeni President Saleh. He has truncated his reign from his previously promised 2013 departure to ‘the end of the this year’. It’s a sumptuously Mubaracist parallel in Yemen. There are sons and lackeys who had all expected to ‘inherit’. But in Yemen unlike Egypt there is a tangled and deep al-Qaeda presence.

For America the war with the oft unseen foe costs $100 billion a year, not to mention the reputational damage, and the psychological devastation that the effort metes out upon the young men and women who serve in the war zone.

If Petraeus manages to extricate Uncle Sam from all this, he’ll have a justified claim to inherit Eisenhower’s mantle (secured by victory in World War Two). But there is much agony ‘twixt here and there. And one factor I have not mentioned is that the General is supra bright – way beyond the minds of the media who monitor him and the Palinesque creatures he’s likely to have to beat for the Presidential nomination. It’s an attractive – if slightly intimidating – quality, as is his personable approachability. But as one American colleague said to me last night, ‘what’s he like in a  knife fight?’ In short is America ready for a an intellectual who knows how to read a military map?

The gaping sore that is 9/11 in the American psyche remains unhealed.

We who covered the co-ordinated attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington underestimated how deep, how searing, and how long lasting this event would prove to be.

Today this secular nation, whose refusal to either favour or move against any religion is enshrined in the constitution, is now at war with itself over whether a mosque and Islamic cultural centre should be built some two blocs away from Ground Zero.

Last week the Pew polling organisation in the United States revealed that the number of Americans who now believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim has risen from 11 per cent last year to 18 per cent today.

Add to all this, mass unemployment on a scale not seen in America since the 1930s and one is tempted to understand how this extraordinary entity that is America is seen by many to be talking itself into a double dip financial crisis.

To have been on the beach in America these past weeks, absorbing the New York Times and a lot of political back chatter, is to have seen elements of a society riven with a kind of collective nervous breakdown.

The end of the war in Iraq (is it really?); the disputed possibility of troop reductions in Afghanistan, emphasise how little the remedial military response to 9/11 has done to calm the nerves at home.

And yet when, last week, China finally overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, to hear it in America, anyone would think the US would itself be thus overwhelmed. It took sage economists to point out that the US economy is still fourteen times that of China.

What America really seems to miss is what many have come round to praising Britain for – a coalition government. Many thought Obama might be it. Alas the limits of power and perhaps his own inexperience have rendered a period of some of the most partisan division in US modern political history.

Every time I met a politically connected or motivated American on the beach, the question was the same – coalition, how does it work, what does it take, and what does it say of Cameron and Clegg?

The feverish activity across global news rooms to ferret out the best of the leaks from the morass of military material about the Afghan war disclosed on Wikileaks is continuing apace.

Undoubtedly, we are learning more of the scale, more of the mess that is military service in this war with its still indistinct concept of what “success” constitutes.

There is much finger pointing at military inaccuracy, secrecy, cover-up and the rest. But I find myself wondering how history will judge the media’s role.

Last year I reported a documentary entitled Gaza Unseen. We contrasted what the Arab TV world was transmitting of the Israeli invasion and what we were putting out.

Whilst Arab television was showing unexpurgated footage of the most appalling death, destruction, and maiming. We in Britain were subjected to much less body-strewn coverage.

Of course, the UK media is overseen by a regulatory system which is in place to ensure ”taste and decency”. Much war transcends all concepts of taste and decency. Indeed one could argue that by definition war can be both indecent and tasteless.

Indeed on such grounds my Gaza documentary had to be transmitted at 11.00 pm on Channel 4.

The other night I gave a talk at the Frontline Club and showed some reports I’d made in El Salvador and on the frontline of the Iran/Iraq war. There was a distinct  awareness in the room that many of the images that were acceptable in 1981/2 might struggle to pass the “taste and decency” test today.

My concern is that we may be doing a little of what we are today accusing the military.

I have Snowblogged before about the sanitisation of war. Could the Afghan war be waged if the unexpurgated images were transmitted?

It has long been argued that World War One would never have lasted so long had the television age already dawned. The Afghan war has raged for nigh on twice the length.

Is there not a danger that what the military and the media have left out of our accounts might have served to shorten it?

I was cycling through the southern part of Hyde Park yesterday when I noticed freshly laid flowers at the side of the carriageway.

I immediately connected them with the IRA bomb attack against the Household Cavalry. I was in too much of a hurry to pause to read the inscription on the stone close by.

Today I awakened to the voice on the radio reminding me that the attack happened on this very day 28 years ago.

Eight soldiers and seven horses were slaughtered. I remember covering it as a reporter with News at Ten. It was a searing milestone in the struggle centred on Northern Ireland. 

All these years on, I find myself thinking of the soldier deaths I report today.

The litany is endless – last night, we named the latest of four soldiers who died in Afghanistan over the weekend.

Somehow death in war has become commonplace as it never really became during the war with the IRA. It has made me think of the devastating journey the families of today’s dead are now launched upon.

What will their memories be, twenty eight years from now? How do they explain their loved ones’ deaths to the young, and those as yet unborn?

I thought too of those who were wounded, the amputees, and the witnesses who suffered in the attack in Hyde Park, and of their successors in the Afghan War.

The strife with the IRA will have been no easier to explain that today’s war. The IRA bombers have long been freed.

And in the Afghan context, talking to the enemy is all the rage. It can’t be easy for the families who grieve.

The other day a sweet sixteen your old girl came to us for work experience – her father had died in action in Afghanistan.

I dared to ask to her about it. I was not wrong to do so, she was pleased to talk about him, she was composed, measured, and amazingly mature about the impact of her loss upon her life.

She had happy memories of her father, he had a place in her life, but in some extraordinary way she had found a way of moving on. She described how much more difficult it was proving for her younger sister.

I entered the Park yesterday through the gate next to the French Embassy in Knightsbridge.

The cycle route crosses the central reservation. There were dead brown flowers strapped to the iron fencing and the unfazed photo of a beautiful young woman who had died there crossing the road. I thought about the serendipity of death.

Last night I gave a talk at the journalists’ Frontline Club. We talked about the absence of bodies in our coverage of war.

I don’t myself like the ‘sanitisation of war’. But then I remembered the dead horses I saw on the carriageway 28 years ago.

Each was covered by blankets or tarpaulins. I thought too of the families of men who die in war.

We owe it to them to respect their grief. It could not be right, could it, for them to have their loss splashed so brutally and bloodily across our screens? Or am I myself busy sanitising war?

Eight long years and Congress is this week considering a further subvention of $33bn dollars to the Afghan war effort. It is hard to imagine what bereaved military families feel their loss is about. The shock in the Cameron “out in five years” may have been that it suggests the UK will be in there for even longer than anyone imagined.

Cast our minds back to 9/11 and many thought it reasonable to “go after” Bin Laden and his Taliban harbourers and training camps. Hard to remember that the “invasion” was not unsuccessful – in that the woman-oppressing, music and dance disliking, terror exporting Taliban were displaced as the government.

But sudden diversion to fight a war of choice in Iraq; together with the installation of the user-friendly Karzai sapped both success, support, and potentially any viable way of extricating from Afghanistan. On Washington’s Capitol Hill the chair of the House Appropriations Foreign Operations Sub-committee – congresswoman Nita Lowey is trying to halt all non-humanitarian aid to Afghanistan amid reports that the Kabul government is blocking corruption investigations which appear to reveal that $3bn has been flown out of the main airport in the past three years.

Does that mean that for every $30bn of military expenditure that Congress votes through for the Afghan war, they have to build in an extra sum of $3bn? So does this explain why the sum Congress is currently considering amounts to a staggering $33bn? (30+3=33)

The vote on the money comes as General Stanley McChrystal announces he’s leaving the US army altogether. What a chaotic situation! The man leading the spending of tens of billions of the US and UK taxpayers’ money one moment, enjoying civi-street after a bout of insubordination the next. Does the McChrystal affair reveal a deeper malaise – that the people who think they know what they are doing, don’t?

Perhaps even that the people who don’t know what they are doing (us?) do? We still have no idea why he said what he did to an unknown reporter on Rolling Stone.

Well. Charismatic certainly, efficient effect, intelligent…and running for president? Well that’s how it felt to meet General Petraeus…

He had a good line on the World Cup: “rest Rooney for Saturday, save him for the other matches.” (England play USA on Saturday).

He was full of praise for UK Afghanistan effort - he set out the UK US linkages in military.

But he was cautious on the Israel question, one senses he is representative of US security institutional fatigue with the political failure of endless efforts to win Israeli Palestinian peace.

Headline from it all – without you the coalition cannot win in Afghanistan…

Petraeusism of the day: ‘The real surge in Iraq is a surge of ideas’.

All in all, no fire-crackers, but an intriguing close-up of a man who one suspects will attempt to go much further.

A short blog to start the day. I’m just off on the bike to chair an intriguing session for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Don’t often get the call from the military. But two very special guests today: Generals David Petraeus (US) and Peter Wall (UK) are to speak and interact with an audience.
Both have Iraq experience, both are now key players in the deployment of forces in Afghanistan.

But Petraeus is of particular interest in that as Obama’s key military mind he has thought deeply about US policy in the Middle East. He has raised questions about the balance of US interests and the way its relationship with Israel is handled. In the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla debacle he may have interesting things to say.

I shall blog later about what the generals have to say and the experience of sitting amid such military might.