Simon Diggins served as defence attaché in Kabul from 2008 to 2010.
What happens when you boil a frog? It doesn’t notice the warming water until it is too late. According to Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, Russia is boiling Nato like a frog. He fears that Vladimir Putin’s provocations of Nato (none of which on their own would necessitate a military response) will become increasingly and
The massive military parade in Beijing today definitively marks the end of the post-World War Two era. Nominally, the 80th Anniversary of China’s victory in ‘The War against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’, it has been used by China’s president Xi to, in the words of Reuters, ‘…demonstrate Xi’s influence over nations intent on
The Afghan data leak has generated a mass of lurid headlines and, no doubt, there is still much analysis, pointing of fingers and assigning of blame to come. But how did it happen that the UK ended up with such an obligation to so many thousands of Afghans and their families? I support the evacuation,
We lost. Whatever hope we had that we could help Afghanistan crawl out of its misery has been shattered. The dreams of the 14 million women in Afghanistan or the tens of thousands of Kabul university graduates, who had grown-up after the expulsion of the Taliban, are now in ruins. Afghanistan has been broken again,
In July 2010, near the end of my two-year tour as defence attaché in Kabul, I was phoned by the commander of our field hospital in Camp Bastion. ‘Simon’, he said. ‘We’ve an interpreter here, a triple amputee, and we can’t do anything more for him – we’re a field hospital, and don’t do definitive
