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
China has a strategy and Britain doesn’t
A roadmap to better relations requires realism. Beijing’s interests and goals are openly stated—if you know where to look
The plague
Standpoint goes to press as the pandemic rages. So too does the search for blame and the political fall-out
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left
The censorious culture of the liberal Left is hostile to freedom of expression. The fate of the trans-rights movement evinces this pointless politics