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‘The NATO Commander in Eastern Afghanistan has said that this year 54 foreign bases have already been closed…’ Last December Channel 4 aired a documentary entitled Billion Dollar Base: Deconstructing Camp Bastion, the predominating ‘takeaways’ from which were a) what phenomenal amounts of money we’d spent on our eight-year operation in and around Helmand Province, and b) how unimpressed the Afghan brass were by what ‘little’ we were leaving behind. I found myself watching most of it through gritted teeth; but it was hard, nevertheless, not to have some sympathy for the incoming Afghan soldiery. A new documentary film has now taken up that very story. Tell Spring Not to

After years of hearing how terrible Western interventions are in the Middle East (Exhibits A, B and C the fiascos of Iraq, Afghanistan and post-Gaddafi Libya), it will be interesting to see how a Saudi-led all-Muslim intervention fares in Yemen. My prediction is it won’t be much better than those of the infidels. For a start we are dealing with the poorest country in the Arab world. Whereas Iraq sits on a lake of oil, squandering the proceeds with a venality that is ghastly to behold, Yemen is running out of water, let alone oil. With an estimated GDP per capita of $2,500, the country comes 187th in the world.

We all need stories ‘to help us make sense of the complexity of reality’, intones the sensible sounding voice of Adam Curtis at the start of his new documentary about Afghanistan, Bitter Lake. But stories told by ‘those in power’ are ‘increasingly unconvincing and hollow’. What a relief then that Curtis has raided the archives of BBC News on our behalf for footage of the west’s 13 year engagement in Afghanistan to construct his own more than two hour long story. His conclusion: the crisis in Afghanistan is all the fault of the witless Americans! The problem all began on a US warship parked in the Suez Canal in 1945

British troops have now left Afghanistan, but the debate about the conflict itself and what happens next rumbles on. There have been a number of calls for a review of the conflict so that the government can learn lessons about what did and didn’t work – as well as what might happen next in the country, given there isn’t a great deal of confidence that the handover definitely heralds a new era of peace. I now understand that while there is currently no plan for a formal review or inquiry, ministers plan to hold discussions about lessons learned from the conflict as part of the regular National Security Council meetings

Britain has ended combat operations in Afghanistan. The war did topple the Taleban, but it hasn’t got rid of them. It has improved some things in Afghanistan – better roads, better education, better newspapers – but the country is still corrupt, bankrupt and dangerous. When Britain and America decided to go into Afghanistan in 2001, The Spectator ran an editorial entitled Why We Must Win. This is not a war against Islam, but against terrorists who espouse a virulent strain of that religion, a fundamentalism that most moderate Arabs themselves regard as a menace. This is not even a war against Afghanistan, but an attempt to topple a vile regime.

Emile Simpson’s War from the Ground Up, hailed by no less an authority than Michael Howard (the historian, not the politician) as a Clausewitz-for-our-times, is on my “to read” list. So I was interested to discover that he’s the latest subject of the Financial Times’s reliably excellent “Lunch with the FT” feature. The whole article merits attention but among the good bits is this: As a young soldier in the Prussian army, Clausewitz fought at a time when the whole conception of conflict was being revolutionised. In the late 18th century, war was not unlimited: the great powers would try to defeat the enemy on the battlefield to gain an advantage but they rarely

Aaron Ellis makes a good point: the comparison between Mali and Afghanistan is flawed. But I disagree with him as to why. Afghanistan was a failed state long before al-Qaeda settled there (as a last resort). The pattern is slightly different in Mali: Islamists have further destabilised an already weak country in a strategically sensitive area. Mali has been wracked by unrest, both ethnic and religious, for some time. The country is so poor (as a glance at the CIA World Fact Book’s approximations demonstrates) that is precarious politically; so precarious that it threatened to undermine some of its delicate neighbours along the Sahel (the massive and growing strip where

Few people have been more important in America’s recent wars than David Petraeus. Petraeus led the surge of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and redefined the US approach to counter-insurgency warfare. He was the most influential military figure of the post-war era and successful enough for some of those close to Obama to hold deep concerns about the prospect of Petraeus running against Obama. 14 months ago, he was put in charge of the CIA by President Obama. There he expanded Predator strikes to Yemen and pushed for a larger drone fleet. But yesterday, Petraeus resigned over an extra-marital affair with his biographer. It is a sad end to

It seems strange now to recall that, it was not so many years ago, around the time of the millennium, that some in Whitehall were talking about how to scale down Remembrance Sunday. One theory was that marking the centenaries of the start and end of the Great War could also mark an appropriate moment to bring the solemn Cenotaph ceremonials to a gentle end. The assumption was that Remembrance would gradually lose its resonance and relevance once the generations who fought the Great War had all passed on. Such thinking did also reflect the mistaken New Labour view of the Dome era: that Britain would be able to face

England have just beaten Afghanistan in the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup currently being held in Sri Lanka. In the end, it was a comprehensive victory for Stuart Broad’s men but how wonderful it is to see cultural and sporting life returning to a country where such ‘frivolities’ were outlawed by the Taliban. This is Afghanistan’s second appearance at a major cricketing tournament and follows Rohullah Nikpai’s efforts in the Olympics a few weeks ago where he won the country’s second ever medal.

Talking to diplomatic sources this evening, there’s a depressed recognition that the Taliban and its allies have scored a major victory in forcing Nato to scale back joint patrols with Afghan forces. Here, the government has mishandled the news. Number 10 is trying to deny the strategic importance of this shift, while the normally sure-footed Philip Hammond made a series of clumsy answers to questions in parliament. Part of the problem is that Hammond was sent to the Ministry of Defence not for his interest in military matters but for his commitment to balancing the books. In private, he says that he hopes his legacy will be a genuinely, balanced

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. Spokesmen for the British Army, which

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. However, the greater protection of these vehicles came at a price, in terms of weight and manoeuvrability (and air-transportability): the Mastiff