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In a powerful film for Channel 4 News, photographer with The Guardian Sean Smith captured British forces fighting for Helmand province – witnessing frontline combat at first hand with the Black Watch.
We asked if they have a nickname for it: COP Keating, an American outpost trapped in the middle of a hostile valley in Nuristan province. They didn’t, they replied – didn’t need to. The word Keating (the surname of a first lieutenant who died near here) told them what it was about. Then Captain Porter…
Channel 4 News exposed the ‘crucible of conflict’ at US Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan – one of the most dangerous bases for US forces. Just weeks later it was closed.
The police chief sat on his swivel chair beneath a gold framed photograph of President Karzai, the national flag on one side and a giant plastic plant with red flowers the size of dinner plates on the other. “We have eradicated corruption in our police force!” said Colonel Asadullah Shirzaid, a small smile creeping across…
If there were an internet cafe at the gates of hell, it might sound a little like the MWR on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Bostick. There is a quiet panic that seeps out in the silence, between the clatter of keyboards and the occasional snippet over IP telephones. A military base’s entire emotional complex sent…
It is very hard today to read the foreign secretary’s new strategy for Afghanistan. The aims of Nato are laudable. They are invariably necessary and they are vital for the security of both Britons and Afghans alike. But, worringly, they are becoming more unattainable every day.
Jon Snow
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the retiring head of the British army, has done a remarkable thing. He appears, single handedly, to have seen off the opponents in the political classes to the Afghan war.
British troops feel an understandable hatred when you say this. They’re experiencing record casualties and have done a remarkable job in one of the worst provinces in Afghanistan for five years. But there’s no getting away from it: they simply can’t do what the Americans can, and they know it. Today 4,000 Marines are doing what…
Sometimes it happens this way at Channel 4 News – a cameraman or photographer calls us up and tells us he has been somewhere we have not, and asks if we want to see his footage. So it was that we had a chance to view new pictures from the village of Granai, in western…
I blame journalists. If we didn’t demand numbers, governments wouldn’t have to make them up. How many people have been displaced by the fighting in Pakistan? According to the government, 2,882,642.
MALAKAND, PAKISTAN – In Pakistan they have have a great sense of the continuity of history. These days, local government officials are called district coordination officers or DCOs rather than political agents, but when I visited Malakand yesterday I noted that the sign on the gate still read “Political Agent’s Residence” as it must have…
LAHORE, PAKISTAN – One of the joys of working in Pakistan is that people here love the media. There are dozens of Pakistani newspapers and TV channels and every other Pakistani, it seems, is – or thinks he is – a journalist. Of course the government – like most governments – wants to restrict or…
In quieter times, Taj Mahmad pulls a cart loaded with vegetables for a living. But today’s Washington Post quotes him as saying that he fled government shelling so quickly that he and his wife were forced to leave their son and three-year-old daughter behind. “My wife cried and said the rest of us would be…
It is hard to say which meeting is more important: Obama’s meeting with the president of Afghanistan or with the president of Pakistan. For it is becoming increasingly clear that Obama’s foreign policy reputation – indeed his presidency – will depend upon success in what US officials call the “Af-Pak” region, in much the same…
Gordon Brown has announced a mini-surge of British troops in Afghanistan to help police the August presidential election there. He’s also promised a big increase in aid to Pakistan, with half of the money going to the Afghan frontier region, which Mr Brown has branded “the crucible of global terrorism”. His 15-page strategy document (UK…