Afghanistan
The Land Where History Repeats Itself As Tragedy
As Nato forces leave and Isis gains ground, Afghanistan continues to fascinate, inspire and dismay the West. We ignore it at our peril
New Poetry
Three new poems.
Underrated: Hamid Karzai
The retiring Afghan President who, for all his faults, has defended freedom and democracy
1,001 nights on the Tigris
A truly splendid work of erudition, storytelling and humanity
Hard Lessons of Afghan History
Two new histories of separate conflicts in Afghanistan show that both the Victorians and a young Churchill struggled at the North-Western Frontier
Taliban Tourists
The US army’s “catch and release programme” in Afghanistan puts allied troops in grave danger and is destabalising in the long term.
ONLINE ONLY: We’ve Created A Monster
The West has turned to former Afghani drug traffickers to hunt insurgents. But these “covert armies” are producing unpredictable warlords as powerful as the ones they are tracking down.
The Man who Drew the Fatal Durand Line
The British official who fixed the frontier that now divides Afghanistan and Pakistan unwittingly unleashed a century of war
The Surge is Working — So Far
Official voices are unwilling to claim victory, but Nato forces in southern Afghanistan are defeating the Taliban
Playing the Great Game
A new National Theatre play avoids cliché to portray US involvement in Afghanistan
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?