By Steve Hynd
The BBC reports on the property bubble in Kabul.
According to local estate agents, prices in some parts of Kabul have risen by 75% in the past year.
Part of this increase is due to the prices that international agencies are willing to pay to acquire properties in [...]
By Steve Hynd
The scariest domestic political story of the day is this one: "Matters of faith, politics on table as Palin visits Graham"
"He's followed her career and likes her strong stand on faith," said son Franklin Graham, who was present for the 2 1/2-hour get-together. "Daddy feels God was using her" [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, my good friend Derrick Crowe posted a quote from a recent piece on just wars by the Center for American Progress. It struck me as perfectly encapsulating the pitfalls of the kind of "we didn't mean to aquire one" notion of benevolent empire Americans seem to' [...]
By Steve Hynd
David Milliband, the British Foreign Secretary, is a typical Blairite. If his lips are moving, he's spinning something - nothing gets said without it serving a domestic political purpose. Yesterday he had this to say about Afghanistan:
In an interview with the Guardian at the end of a visit [...]
By Steve Hynd
Last December I wrote: "it is already an accepted fact among the Very Serious Person set that Obama's idea of negotiation without preconditions will get exactly one shot, will fail, and then the bombs will begin to fall." Well, that looks to be the way events [...]
By Steve Hynd
Dan Froomkin asks today what I asked yesterday: what's taking so long with Obama's AfPak decision? And he comes to the same answer: fear of the Wuss Factor.
according to Paul R. Pillar, a Georgetown University professor who formerly served as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst for [...]
By Steve Hynd
Hamid Karzai has survived his inauguration for a second term as Afghanitan's president, and has spoken like a King: he has promised to end' [...]
By Steve Hynd
It's become fairly conventional wisdom that the regional winner of the Iraq war was Iran, which now has its pensioners in control of the Iraqi central government and - theoretically - all that oil. Kurds and Sunnis may have something to say about that, however, especially [...]
An Afghan policeman auditions for the role of Estragon
By Steve Hynd
Even those of us who oppose any kind of McChrystal Plan for troop escalation in Afghanistan are getting a bit antsy waiting for Godot Obama to make his mind up. I realise that its a complex set of issues [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen told reporters that the Army isn't at a "tipping point" yet, even though the stress of repeated combat deployments has driven Army and Marine Corps suicides up to a record rate alongside cases of post-traumatic stress.
Today, Spencer Ackerman' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Wonderful news: our protoges have learned their lessons well and outstripped us:
Lawless Somalia and war-torn Afghanistan topped a blacklist on Tuesday of the world's most corrupt countries drawn up by the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International.
TI's annual corruption index showed how countries devastated by conflict have become overrun by [...]
By Steve Hynd
Did the U.S. and allies just put Karzai on the "dead pool" list?
The establishment of a new investigations unit with the backing of Scotland Yard's Serious Organised Crimes Agency and the FBI was announced in Kabul by senior officials flanked by the US and British ambassadors following' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Faced with cratering support for the occupation in Afghanistan, Britain's Gordon Brown is trying to thread the needle by claiming that the UK's presence there is justified while looking for the fastest possible exit strategy- preferably a strategy that shows tangible progress before next year's general election. In what' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post ran a short piece claiming that:
Iran has completely rejected a UN-brokered nuclear deal, but US President Barack Obama has postponed the official announcement on Teheran's refusal due to internal political reasons...The official reportedly told journalists in Paris that Iran has also refused to [...]
By Steve Hynd
There's been a substantial change in Obama administration rhetoric in the last week or two, which has only accelerated after Gen. Eikenberry put his spanner in the escalationists' works. Hillary Clinton, talking to ABC News this Sunday, gives the clearest indication yet that the administration is looking' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Support for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan is cratering in Britain, according to a new poll for the Independent on Sunday.
In a ComRes poll for the IoS this weekend, an overwhelming proportion – 71 per cent – supported this newspaper's call for a phased withdrawal of British [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Pakistani press has noticed a letter by Sir Nicholas Barrington, former British envoy to Pakistan, in the London Times:
“Massive foreign bases encourage ideas that the Americans and NATO want to stay in, and dominate, Afghanistan . Many think that the West is motivated by a [...]
By Steve Hynd
A shockingly insensitive U.S. Army has arrested a single mother and soldier who couldn't find a carer for her child while she was on deployment to Afghanistan. The Army also handed the child over to Child Protective Services and now plans to fly the soldier to Afghanistan for' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Stories like this encourage my view that diplomatic ranks tend to be drawn from over-privileged frat boys with only a tenuous hold on reality.
The interior ministry said an 'unidentified object' found recently in the vehicle of Danish embassy security advisor Chris John turned out to be a fake bomb, the [...]
By Steve Hynd
The news that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other detainees accused of helping orchestrate the 9/11 attacks are headed to New York for federal trial has all the wingnut pantswetters beside themselves in horror. You'd think KSM was Magneto from the way they carry on.
The perfect' [...]
By Steve Hynd
According to the Financial Times:
As US President Barack Obama prepares to make a final decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, his visit to Beijing next week will be an opportunity to press China to [...]
By Steve Hynd
Peter Galbraith, who was recently in the news in a good way for slamming UN complicity in Afghan election corruption, is back in the news in a bad way. Galbraith, who was a signator of the PNAC letter calling for the invasion of Iraq and a major influence [...]
By Steve Hynd
Today's must-read is by Aram Roston over at The Nation as he gets in-depth about a major part of the Taliban's funding: "the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes" in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors and' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Spencer Ackerman has a great piece today based around a leaking staffer inside the National Security Council's deliberations on Afghnaistan strategy. The staffer noted that everyone at the NSC is annoyed with Ambassador Eikenberry for apparently leaking his own cables to Obama and confirms that the NSC' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Just as it seemed that all was hunky for the escalationists, US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry has stuck his oar in the works. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post have the leaked story of secret cables from Eikenberry to the White House:
expressing deep [...]
By Steve Hynd
Reuters has an interesting report today from diplomats at the IAEA in Vienna:
Iran has effectively stopped expanding active uranium enrichment since September, diplomats said, while considering a big power offer to fuel a medical reactor if it turns over enriched material seen [...]
By Steve Hynd
I have to admit that, as a European - a Scotsman - in a foreign land I don't really get America's Veterans Day. Reading blogposts and tweets by American writers today, I've seen countless expressions of support for those who serve because they "defend our freedom". I managed' [...]
By Steve Hynd
I'm loathe to link uber-dork Jake Tapper but he does have the story of the day:
Senior administration officials tell ABC News that President Obama at his war council meeting tomorrow will assess four different specific strategies for Afghanistan and Pakistan, including two different options put forward by Gen. Stanley' [...]
By Steve Hynd
With British public opinion now overwhelmingly against the occupation of Afghanistan following the deaths of five UK soldiers at the hands of an Afghan policeman last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken only seven days to do his own strategic review. Unsurprisingly, he's come up [...]
By Steve Hynd
It was inevitable that Remembrance Sunday would mean a lot of British soul-searching over continued military involvement in Afghanistan. That introspection was evident in national newspapers today, including in the London Times, where foreign correspondent Christina Lamb had a long and thoughtful article about the ongoing [...]
