July 2010
31 posts
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Free love in the time of Volkswagen lives on in... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Dressed in drab overalls with calloused hands that labour long into the night, Zia Hassan Faqiri is an unlikely bastion of Afghanistan’s hippy heyday.
Yet for 45 years the father of eight has fixed the hippy’s motor of choice: the once-ubiquitous Volkswagen Beetles and Combi vans that filled the overland routes from Europe to Kathmandu.
Today his mud-walled...
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Kipling’s words ring out as enemy sharpshooter... →
The Times Jerome Starkey
Winston Churchill knew the perils of Afghanistan’s snipers more than a century ago. Today, it seems, the Taleban sharpshooters are just as deadly. In his account of 1898 of a British excursion into the borderlands between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, he quoted Kipling’s Arithmetic on the Frontier: “A scrimmage in a Border Station/ A canter down some dark...
Coalition big guns split over Afghan exit... →
NATO leaders are divided over the speed with which they can start handing parts of Afghanistan back to Afghan forces, it emerged yesterday, as US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, acknowledged…
More than £26bn in aid — but the people of Bamiyan... →
THIRTEEN-year-old Sabri spends three and a half hours a day in a small village school for girls and more than five hours a day lugging water from a nearby river, up a steep mud track, to the caves in…
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WatchCheck out the state of Herb-i-Islami (my 1969 Beelte in Kabul) inside and out. She’s in dire need of a bit of love!
The improvised ignition is my favourite Afghan addition to the original Teutonic design. A floating button, normally kept behind the back seat, which looks remarkably like a detonator. Most of the wiring is on display as well, so peering in the window it looks a bit like how...
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Talk of withdrawal will only encourage the Taleban... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
In many ways Afghan soldiers are better suited to complex counter-insurgency operations than either the British, whom the Afghans remember as brutal 19th-century imperialists, or the Americans, whom they see as our modern-day equivalents.
Afghan forces understand tribal dynamics and the fluid nature of village influence and they can exploit them. When, as...
Afghanistan aid from UK to rise amid claim of... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Britain will spend an extra £200 million in Afghanistan between now and 2014 as part of a 40 per cent rise in aid to prepare for a military withdrawal.
Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, will today announce plans to increase assistance to Afghanistan from £500 million to £700 million, despite claims that billions of pounds have already...
Removing troops by 2014 means disaster, allies... →
The Times Jerome Starkey and Roland Watson
President Obama and David Cameron have been warned that their plan to bring troops home from Afghanistan before 2015 is too hasty and risks leaving behind an Afghan army that is ill equipped to fend off the Taleban. Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, said yesterday that combat troops would be home by 2014, although significant numbers are likely to...
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I acted alone, says man claiming to be rogue... →
A MAN claiming to be the renegade Afghan soldier who killed three British troops in Afghanistan has spoken about his motivation for the attack.
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Billions of pounds 'wasted' trying to help... →
BILLIONS of pounds blown on trying to rid Afghanistan of opium and most of the military’s cash-for-work projects have been a complete waste of time and money, Afghanistan’s finance minister said…
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Afghan betrayal should not derail mission - PM →
David Cameron insisted today that Britain’s strategy in Afghanistan must not be derailed by the actions of a “rogue” Afghan soldier who murdered three British troops inside a base in Helmand…
Renegade Afghan kills three British troops →
A MANHUNT is under way in southern Afghanistan after three British troops were murdered and several others were seriously wounded when a rogue Afghan soldier opened fire in their patrol base.
Three British soldiers killed by Afghan renegade →
Three British troops were murdered by an Afghan soldier inside their checkpoint in Helmand this morning.
UN to consider removing ten Taleban names from... →
At least ten senior Taleban officials who are on a terrorism blacklist are having their status reviewed in a UN effort to reach a settlement with Afghanistan’s insurgents.
Petraeus apologises over Afghan soldiers killed by... →
General David Petraeus, the new commander in Afghanistan, was forced to apologise to victims’ families yesterday after five Afghan soldiers were killed and two others seriously injured in a…
Watch
Afghanistan: $4.2 billion in mysterious cash flown... →
THE “blizzard of banknotes” leaving Kabul airport is worse than originally feared, The Scotsman has learned, with at least $4.2 billion (around £2.8 billion) exported in cash over the last…
Justice at last for Briton falsely held for... →
A FORMER British army officer wept in court yesterday as Afghan judges overturned a two-year prison sentence and cleared him of bribing government officials.
Former British soldier to be freed from Afghan... →
A former British army officer facing two years in an Afghan jail has had his bribery conviction overturned.
Petraeus arrives after Afghanistan’s bloodiest... →
The new American commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, arrived in Kabul yesterday as widespread violence crowned a politically turbulent week that underlined the challenges he must…
Petraeus flies in as British aid worker dies in... →
The new American commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, arrived in Kabul yesterday as widespread violence crowned a politically turbulent week which underlined the manifold challenges he…
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Developers finally call time on Abdul the warzone... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Country club, soup kitchen and air raid shelter — Kabul’s oldest bar has been many things over half a century of strife. It survived two coups, a civil war, two invasions and Taleban rule, but the United Nations International Community Association (Unica) succumbed to the unstoppable march of the city’s new property developers last week as staff called last...
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WatchAbdul Hamid, a Soviet trained geologist and barman of 24 years at the United Nations International Community Association club, in Kabul, shared at least two decades passport photos which chart the changing fortunes of Afghanistan. His outfits change over the years to echo the prevailing powers in the war torn country.
The father-of-five grew up under King Zahir Shah in Ghazni province, and he...
Kandahar families offered a safe haven from the... →
AFGHAN officials in the besieged city of Kandahar are being moved into heavily fortified compounds - with their families - in a bid to stem a wave of Taleban assassinations threatening to undermine…
June 2010
27 posts
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Snipers and sharp shooters behind deadliest month... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Taleban snipers and small bands of sharp shooters are partly to blame for more than 100 Nato deaths this month, making it the deadliest by far of the nine-year war.
Although Nato said that it was still too early to confirm a definite change in Taleban tactics, US and British officials admitted that more soldiers were dying in “pinpointed” attacks and “small...
Taleban 'snipers' start to find range →
TALEBAN snipers and small bands of sharpshooters are partly to blame for more than 100 Nato deaths in June, making it by far the deadliest month of the nine-year war.
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Jerome Starkey: Afghanistan: Leaving dam danger... →
The Scotsman Jerome Starkey, in Kabul
ANOTHER sliver of Helmand was handed over to United States marines yesterday, as the British garrison guarding a dam prepared to reinforce their battle-weary comrades in the death-trap town of Sangin.
About 150 soldiers at Forward Operating Base Zeebrugge, near the banks of the Kajaki Dam, were in the final stages of withdrawing last night, a spokesman said....
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I thought General McChrystal was ‘unfireable’,... →
The Times Jerome Starkey, in Kabul
The man who, in effect, ended General Stanley McChrystal’s glittering military career said yesterday that he thought the top commander in Afghanistan was “unfireable”.
In a candid interview with The Times, the journalist Michael Hastings said he never imagined he would get as much access to the general and his inner circle as he did. He insisted he was simply...
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Get on with the job, says stoic Briton who is... →
The Times Jerome Starkey, in Kabul
Lieutenant-General Sir Nick Parker was on holiday when Harry, 26, was blown up in Afghanistan. The British Army’s third-most senior officer raced to Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, where his son had been evacuated from Helmand, last July.
By the time he arrived, Harry had lost his left leg. Less than two months later, when the General left for a 12-month...
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‘Betrayed’ troops mourn loss of charismatic leader →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Soldiers at the Nato headquarters in Afghanistan last night said the mood was funereal. With General McChrystal having been relieved of command, many were left wondering whether his vision of victory was dead as well.
“Deeply disappointed” was how one senior officer described the reaction in Kabul. Others fought back tears. Many of them have dedicated their...
Afghanistan: McChrystal summoned back to face the... →
GENERAL Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is fighting for his job after a damning magazine profile showed him mocking senior figures in the US administration and…
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General McChrystal recalled to Washington after... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, was recalled to Washington today after a damning magazine profile showed him mocking senior figures in the US administration and criticising President Obama.
The general is due to leave Kabul within hours, The Times has learnt, after a morning of tense discussions with the Robert...
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Baby back ribs and steak survive General... →
The Times Jerome Starkey, Kandahar
The war is going slower than planned, victory remains elusive and the Taleban are inflicting record casualties on coalition forces, but there is, it seems, a glimmer of good news for soldiers in southern Afghanistan: T.G.I. Friday’s is here to stay. The American-themed diner at Kandahar airfield has survived a cull of fast-food joints despite strict orders...
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'We're trying to fix this place - so we never have... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kandahar
No one realised Joe was dead. The soldiers walked on.
Lieutenant Joseph Theinert, 24, a star athlete and the king of his high school prom, had jumped over a chest-high mud wall between two fields and stepped on a homemade bomb. His body was hurled into a narrow ditch and was hidden where it lay by the grapevines that grow in steep, undulating rows along...
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Taleban hang 7-year-old boy to punish family →
Read The Times’s exclusive investigation into Britain’s war in Afghanistan at our new website: US warned Britain to send more troops to Helmand |
US troops killed as helicopter shot down aiding... →
FOUR American servicemen were killed when their helicopter was shot down in southern Afghanistan yesterday, during a daring operation to evacuate wounded British soldiers from a firefight in Sangin.