Afghanistan

USO is not what it once was. The days of Bob Hope’s wisecracking have receded into the past, and ogled Playmates no longer sex their way across stages. The Pentagon has commissioned British theatrical talent to educate its troops about Afghanistan’s political culture and history. Performed by the Kilburn Tricycle Theatre, The Great Game is a 7 hour show about Afghanistan’s cycles of invasion, struggle and victory. Presumably if the grunts can withstand that, they can withstand anything. As Ben Macintyre notes in the Times (£), there is neither greatness nor beauty in the games that Western powers have played in Afghanistan. But, unencumbered by imperial guilt and hubristic in

Yesterday, Liam Fox vowed to install a tougher procurement system in the Ministry of Defence and appointed the bureaucracy-busting Bernard Grey as Chief of Defence Materiel. The Defence Secretary said that it is important to start from first principles if reform is to take place. The ministry, he said, “exists to provide the Armed Forces with what they need”. But is that right? The MoD exists, first, to maintain civilian and democratic control of the armed forces; and, second, to support effective operations. Supporting the military is a corollary of the second task, but not the same thing. In desiring to reform the MoD and cut costs, there is a

Today I joined number of leading Afghan experts, from Ahmed Rashid to Gilles Dorronsoro, in calling on President Obama to change the American strategy in Afghanistan. Based on our work in and on Afghanistan, we wanted to make a number of points just as the White House begins reviewing its strategy: First, that the cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone. This is unsustainable in the long run. Second, despite these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country. The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the

The leak that keeps on leaking has one or two embarrassing titbits about our domestic policymakers this morning. Yet far more noteworthy are the documents on Pakistan. While they don’t tell us too much that is surprising – being mostly about the duplicitous game that country is playing with the West – they do highlight some potentially worrying trends. Chief among them is the growing influence of General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the head of Pakistan’s army. His name is littered generously throughout the US briefings, and it is often connected with dangerous conspiracy and double-dealing. One document, for instance, suggests that Kiyani was prepared to overthrow the Pakistani President, Asif

Part of what makes the war in Afghanistan so complicated is how easily the Taliban can be supplied from over the border in Pakistan. Pakistan has been more cooperative recently but the Washington Post reports today that Pakistan has refused a US request to expand the areas in which its drones can operate. The Pakistanis are also resisting requests from the US to take a military grip on North Waziristan, a base for several of the groups fighting the US in Afghanistan. Worryingly, the Post quotes a senior Pakistani military official as saying, “You have timelines of November elections and July x’11 drawdowns – you’re looking for short-term gains,” the

General Sir David Richards does like thinking in decades, doesn’t he? A year or so ago, he was warning us that “the whole process [in Afghanistan] might take as long as 30 to 40 years.” Today, in interview with the Sunday Telegraph, he says that the wider battle against al-Qaeda could last around 30 years. In both cases, he deserves our attention. To hear the head of our military suggest that the West’s current conflicts will stretch across generations is sobering, to say the least. More noteworthy, though, is Richards’ claim that a “clear cut victory” over Islamist terror is “unnecessary and would never be achieved” – but that we

Number 43 is back. And judging by his interview (£) with the Times editor James Harding – and that paper’s serialisation (£) of his memoirs – he is standing defiant. As Bush himself puts it to his critics, “I ask those people to read the book. I understand that the filter can be harsh. But I think people will see someone who deliberated carefully on key issues, someone who did not sell his soul for politics, that he was willing to stand on principle and people can draw their own conclusions.” “The book” is out tomorrow, so we will be able to draw our own conclusions then. But, in the