Afghanistan

Nancy Hatch Dupree died in Kabul on Sunday, 10 September.  Nancy Hatch Dupree is sitting in the Gandamak Lodge, the Foreign Correspondents hang-out in Kabul. Most of the other diners, and almost all those propping up the bar, are shaven-headed, gym-going young men in their twenties and thirties: a scrum of adrenalin-surfing hacks and cameramen who grew up watching movies like Salvador and The Year of Living Dangerously and who now fill the bar room with their tales of derring-do in Helmand and close-shaves in Lashkar Gah. None of them, however, have half as good a seem of stories as this tiny, bird-like 86 year old woman, picking at her

On this week’s episode of The Spectator Podcast we look at the issue of ‘safe spaces’ on campuses and beyond. We also discuss Donald Trump’s military strategy, and look at Indian independence, 70 years on. First up: In this week’s Spectator cover piece, Brendan O’Neill slams British universities for what he sees as a burgeoning liberal conformism within their walls. Is he right to despair? Or is this just a grumpy older generation railing against change? He joins the podcast along with Justine Canady, Women’s Officer for UCLSU, and Madeleine Kearns, who writes about her experiences at NYU in the magazine. As Brendan says: “In the three years since The Spectator named these Stepford Students, the situation

Like it or not, and many in high places will loathe it, what we may now call The Blackman Affair is not going to go away. It will be recalled as a shambles and a glaring miscarriage of justice. Also remembered will be the ferocious, self-serving and vindictive role of the establishment in permitting this injustice to occur. Posterity will say that a Royal Marine sergeant on an exhausting assignment in Northern Helmand, Afghanistan, in the late summer of 2011, shot and killed a Taliban terrorist who, though undoubtedly dying and wholly unsaveable, was not yet quite dead. A more expanded account might add that a nearby corporal, secretly filming

There was a commotion by the back gate. I grabbed my rifle and headed over. The week beforehand I was shooting in through the hinges at insurgents trying to over-run the base that was now my home for another hot summer in the Afghan desert. The gate was covered by a sentry. I shouted up to him. He told me there was a man at the back gate seeking medical help for something in his arms.  I opened the gate cautiously. The young Afghan man started shouting at me in Pashtun. I caught the odd word, but was comforted by the presence of my translator who had appeared behind me,

Watch the videos of 1950s Iraq on YouTube and you glimpse something close to an idyll. It’s true that Pathé News was not big on gritty realism, but history relates that here it was not using a heavily rose-tinted lens; Hugh Trevor-Roper even went so far as to describe Iraq at the time as a Levantine Switzerland. Or you can go to Google Images, tap in ‘1960s Afghan women’ and be offered photographs of a mixed university biology class, and others of young women with short skirts, long hair and smiling faces. This was life under the kings, and knowing what followed is enough to make a grown man weep.

The following article is by an ex-serviceman who served in Afghanistan. They’re making a list, they’re checking it twice – and Number 10 will know whether you’ve been naughty or nice. And if you’ve been very naughty, you’d better watch out for a metallic glint in the sky. Britain doesn’t have anything called a ‘kill list’, but it does have something called ‘JPEL’ – whose existence the government will neither confirm nor deny. The ‘Joint Priority Effects List’ is not new, nor is the very use of such a list. As with Special Forces operations, the UK government – with good reason – will consistently refuse to comment on its existence. Intelligence work is

Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while working in Tokyo for UBS, then Citigroup, from 2006 until 2010, was jailed by Southwark Crown Court for 14 years for conspiracy to defraud. The government sold a 5.4 per cent stake in Royal Bank of Scotland, for 330p a share, against the 500p or so that it paid six or seven years ago to save the banking group; the government now owns 73 per cent of RBS. Monitor, the regulator for health services in England, sent out letters ‘challenging the plans of the 46 foundation trusts with the biggest

Home Parents would be able to have their children’s passports removed if they were suspected of planning to travel abroad to join a radical group, under provisions outlined by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to deal with Islamist extremism. It emerged that five British pilots embedded with allied forces had been taking part in air strikes over Syria, which Parliament had voted against in 2013. Julian Lewis, the Conservative chairman of the Defence Select Committee, accused Mr Cameron of making up policy ‘on the hoof’. Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, the former Chief of the Defence Staff, said that in order to defeat the Islamic State, ‘tanks would have to roll