I have nothing but sympathy for Jacqui Janes. I can’t begin to imagine what she’s going through. No parent should have to bury their child, but it must be near-unendurable to wonder whether more could have been done to save Jamie Janes’ life. I’d love to know if the Sun has passed money to Mrs [...]

The headline on the front page of the new, positive London Evening Standard reads 10 troops died and ‘only 150 Afghans voted’ Note the quotation marks. What’s inside them is never referenced to anyone. The ‘story’ is that only 150 people voted in Babaji. A second story is that ten British soldiers died in Operation [...]

“The Iraq war was a disaster” is a familiar refrain. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us very much. Do we mean the concept, the planning, the implementation, the strategy, the tactics, what? Or do we want an official stick with which to beat the government? Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on [...]

The UK’s commander in Helmand, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, has said that we shouldn’t expect a decisive military victory in Afghanistan; I wholeheartedly agree. He should have added that there was never going to be a military victory in Afghanistan. Setting up the Afghan government was never going to be enough, either. The international community needs [...]

According to the BBC, Corporal Tomos Stringer, of the Royal Logistics Corps, was refused a room in a hotel when, on leave to recover from an injury sustained in Afghanistan, he was visiting a fellow soldier who had been injured. The hotel in question, the Metro, apparently has had problems with rowdy soldiers in the [...]