Afghanistan

General Richard Dannatt may well be correct to demand additional men and equipment for the Afghan campaign and the military has certainly been ill-served by this government (though not only by this most recent ministry). But when the accusation of “playing politics” is thrown around let’s not forget that the good General is perfectly adept at playing that game himself. Perhaps it really is the case that he can only tour Afghanistan in an American helicopter. Perhaps it is even “self-evidently” the case that he’s only using a US chopper because there aren’t any British ones. As I say, this could all be true but it is also most convenient

I should probably be inured to articles arguing that even though europe endured “two twentieth-century apocalypses that left it depopulated and permanently traumatized” it is wrong for europeans to have drawn any conclusions, or learnt any lessons, from the First and Second World Wars. And yet, I’m afraid, I continue to be irritated by such pieces, not least because they invariably demand that europeans prove their moral seriousness by going to war more frequently, regardless of the cost or even the cause involved. Equally, it’s startling quite how many people never met a war they couldn’t embrace and champion. Michael Oren, historian and prospective Israeli ambassador to Washington, seems to

More riffing on Nelson! Fraser, that is. His Telegraph article and subsequent Coffee House post on future spending cuts argue that the Tories are, defensively, planning to leave the NHS budget untouched (and international development!) and that doing so will require 10% cuts across every other department. Including defence. Since most people would, I think, accept that the armed forces are under-funded and over-stretched as it is, imposing further cuts surely and necessarily demands a reappraisal of current commitments and future capabilities. But do we hear anything of that from the Tories? I’m not sure we do. Indeed, Liam Fox’s speech to the Scottish Tory conference suggested, as I wrote

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins reports in the NYT that talks have been taking place between the Taliban, the Afghan government and warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Sirajuddin Haqqani as to how some kind of “peace” agreement could be reached in Afghanistan. As Mr Filkins drily notes, most, in fact all, of the terms for negotiation “seem incompatible” with American policy. Still, in some senses, this may be the key part: “America cannot win this war, and the Taliban cannot win this war,” Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador and one of the intermediaries, said in an interview. “I have delivered this message to the Taliban.” Maybe

One of the odder characteristics of a certain strain of British right-wing thinking is the terror that British Prime Ministers might ever disagree with the American president. It’s almost as if there’s a fear that if Britain takes an different view then Washington will chuck us overboard and find a new european friend with whom to play. (Sometimes that’s the Germans, though at the moment the French might be thought the more likely rivals). Such fears are, I suspect, overdone. Still, here’s Con Coughlin today: But the quid pro quo for a bigger American military commitment to Afghanistan is that Washington’s European allies – which includes Britain – step up to

Joe Klein has been to Afghanistan, so that puts him one up on me. Still, having spent some time pointing out the (widely-acknowledged) complexity of the situation in Afghanistan, Klein concludes his piece with this sweeping pronouncement: The first step toward resolving the war in Afghanistan is to lay down the law in both Islamabad and Kabul. The message should be the same in both cases: The unsupervised splurge of American aid is over. The Pakistanis will have to stop giving tacit support and protection to terrorists, especially the Afghan Taliban. The Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade. There are plenty of