Umm...I know we're meant to be 'protecting the people' and living with them etc, but last time I checked it wasn't a very good idea to leave your bibles lying around in the office of the District Chief of Arghandab... ......more

I read in Friday's Independent that:"Three judges of the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal ruled on Wednesday that the level of "indiscriminate violence" was not enough to permit Afghans to claim general humanitarian protection in the United Kingdom. Hundreds of asylum-seekers......more

It was perhaps twenty minutes after the call to prayer had sounded and we were breaking the fast, sitting on the floor around a plastic sheet with plates of rice and meat, when I was knocked sideways to the ground.It......more

Please see the previous blogpost for more on this story, but here is Felix Kuehn (my friend and colleague in Kandahar) on CBC Radio talking an hour or two after tonight's bombing:   Just press play on the Houndbite bar......more

I'm sitting in Dubai at the moment so can't claim to be the man on the ground for tonight's bombing in Kandahar City.  That dubious honour goes to Felix Kuehn (@felixkuehn on Twitter and www.felixkuehn.com for his blog).  I just......more

It’s the middle of summer down here in Kandahar, with temperatures peeking around 50 degree celsius by noon.  In the run up to Afghanistan’s second presidential and provincial council elections foreign troops stepped up their efforts, launching multiple operations to......more

So it finally happened.  The election that we've been waiting for and looking forward to at least since last winter took place today all over the country.  I'll refrain from writing anything about the rest of the country.  There......more

With only four days to go before the elections, I thought it might be useful to comment on how the opposition candidates' rallies went this past week.  Myself and my colleague were graced with the presence of a good......more

For outsiders, Kandahar was never really somewhere you could fall in love with.  You know the kind of thing I mean: places people went to honeymoon, places with a certain ineluctable quality to them... Back in the seventies, when Kandahar......more

I'm reading Kaplan's Soldiers of God at the moment, and came across this nice little gem:"In the January 20, 1980, issue of the Village Voice, the left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn employed such a rationale to justify the Soviet invasion of......more