World

Sometimes government leaks tell the public what they did not know. But sometimes leaks just confirm what everyone knew. The view held by the US ambassador in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” and “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden,” will come as no surprise to anyone. But the timing of the leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s cables in The New York Times will nonetheless be quite explosive. Does it matter? Not really. Hamid Kazrai has in most people’s minds joined Anastasio Somoza García, Ngo Dinh Diem, even for a while Saddam Hussein as the West’s, well, what was that phrase used by FDR?

There has been one thing missing from the debate between Google and the People’s Republic of China. The decommunisation of the world was not supposed to happen this way. Countries which dismantled their systems of oppression and fear were supposed to prosper economically; while any who declined to do so would remain in economic permafrost. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that the former communist country which has prospered most in the past 20 years has been the one which crushed its revolution beneath the wheels of tanks. No matter that it continues to oppress its people, China is an economic powerhouse whose growth will dominate the global economy for

FDR was plainly confident when he indicted the “practices of unscrupulous money lenders” during his 1933 inauguration address; Obama’s speech yesterday was scented with desperation. He exchanged eloquence for provocation. “If these folks want a fight a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have.” Bankers do not want a fight with a President seeking cheap political capital; they want to turn profits and do business. Obama’s proposals frustrate that aim – by carving up corporations and neutering investment banking on the grounds of excess risk. As Iain Martin notes, Obama has departed from the G20’s emerging narrative, and though the details are imprecise there is no doubt of the

Many will claim that the Taliban’s recent attack in Kabul shows how powerful the insurgency has become. No doubt the psychological impact – the real aim of all terrorists – will be felt for some time. Faroshga market, one of the city’s most popular shopping malls, lay in ruins and the normally bustling streets of Kabul emptied. But the attack was an operational failure. All seven militants died in the attack; five were gunned down and two killed themselves. Three soldiers and two civilians — including one child — were killed. Seventy-one others were injured, including 35 civilians, but the majority are only slightly wounded. Such a toll must frustrate

Since September 11, Britain has lost one war and is not winning another. But the question of why this is the case remains depressingly low down the agenda. There is remarkably little interest in why the “British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq”, to quote Gordon Brown’s and David Miliband’s favourite counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen. Today, the Tories launched their green paper on national security with speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. The document is a mixed bag. But the Tories deserve credit for squarely facing up to the fact that Britain is now an “incubator of extremism and an exporter of terrorism”. They are also

Google’s decision to publicly confront the Chinese government over cyber attacks that have been hitting Google customers for the past year or so poses a difficult challenge for the Obama administration. The threat by Google to shut down its operations in China over the attacks is the first public acknowledgement by a major US corporation of the attacks which the US intelligence community has known about for almost a decade. The facts are that China has been waging a cyber war against the US government and companies that involve literally millions of attacks each day. Every major US corporation operating in China has been targeted, as have universities, research laboratories

The Spectator will have to amend its list of political scandals because if the sinisterly-named Selwyn Black’s allegations stand up, then Iris Robinson’s in a league of her own. An older woman seduces a toy boy and strives to set him up in business: this is a remake of The Graduate with high politics thrown into the mix.    There is a further, potentially serious complication. The BBC allege that DUP leader Peter Robinson was aware of his wife’s financial misdemeanours but neglected to inform the appropriate authorities, as the ministerial code dictates he should. Robinson denies this with the tenacity of a man fighting for his political life. The delicate