Simon Jenkins

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‘Tony Blair sent Clare Short to eliminate the poppy crop. Whatever she did, it increased production from six provinces to 28.’ Poppy growing in Helmand, 22 March 2021. Photograph: Ghulamullah Habibi/EPA

The longest, most pointless and unsuccessful war that Britain has fought in the past 70 years – its intervention in Afghanistan – is to end in September. I doubt anyone will notice. Nations celebrate victories, not defeats.

Twenty years ago the United States decided to relieve its 9/11 agony not just by blasting Osama bin Laden’s base in the Afghan mountains, but by toppling the entire Afghan regime. This was despite young Taliban moderates declaring Bin Laden an “unwelcome guest” and the regime demanding he leave. The US then decided not just to blast Kabul but invited Nato to launder its action as a matter of global security.…  Seguir leyendo »

An aid delivery to Ebola-stricken Liberia. 'Contrast this hesitant humanitarian intervention with the hysteria driving the next military intervention in Iraq.' Photograph: Mary's Meals/PA

The language is familiar. “A potential threat of a human catastrophe unparalleled in modern times.” More than 2,500 have died, and the same number are dying. Incidence of the disease is said to be doubling, even trebling, in some parts of Africa by the month. Hundreds of thousands now face death. Barack Obama declares a menace “spiralling out of control, getting worse … with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us”. The window of opportunity to contain the outbreak is apparently closing.

Africa is now six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in modern history. The director general of the World Health Organisation, Margaret Chan, calls the outbreak “the largest, most complex and most severe we’ve ever seen”.…  Seguir leyendo »

I write from America, where those who care about Europe ask one question only. What the hell is going on? What is this "euro crisis" that never seems to end? What has happened to Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Holland and now France? Have we all gone insane?

The economist Paul Krugman has one answer. He suggests that Europe is now replicating the 1930s "in ever more faithful detail". Governments, he says, are "committing economic suicide". When every economic tenet cries for treasuries to restore growth, spend, stimulate, inflate and rebuild confidence, they are advocating ever more austerity and balanced budgets, forcing their economies towards recession.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Monday the Modern Spies programme substantiated an extraordinary allegation that suggested how far the war on terror has descended into legal abyss. The claim was that MI6 rolled the pitch for Tony Blair's bizarre 2004 hug-in with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi by apparently arranging for the CIA to kidnap Gaddafi's opponent in exile, Abdel Hakim Belhaj. He was seized in Bangkok, where he and his wife were en route to Britain. It's been suggested they were "rendered" via the British colony of Diego Garcia to Tajoura jail in Tripoli. Belhaj spent six years, and his wife four and a half months, at the tender mercies of Gaddafi's security boss, Moussa Koussa.…  Seguir leyendo »

Sometimes they have to lie. As the British death toll in Afghanistan rises past 400, every news item tells of reverses, mistakes and a desperation to withdraw. Someone has to hold the line. Those whose job is to fight and possibly die for their country need to believe they do so for a purpose. A nation bidding them to die needs it too.

Hence the prime minister has to assert the six-year attempt to cleanse Taliban from Helmand province as "vital to our national security", when everyone knows that this is absurd. The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, has to say: "We owe it to the all too many who have sacrificed their lives to see this mission successfully concluded".…  Seguir leyendo »

The west's admiration for China's rush for wealth is becoming like the left's interwar praise for ­Stalin's Soviet Union. It is a triumph of materialism over ­humanity. If there is one place on earth I have long wanted to visit, it is old Kashgar, fulcrum of the silk road, Peter Fleming's "oasis of civilisation" hovering between the Pamir mountains and the Taklamakan desert. It was used for the Afghan movie The Kite Runner, Nato having rendered the real location, Kabul, too dangerous for filming. Now the old city is to be systematically demolished. The steamroller of destruction that is China's rush for wealth is claiming yet another casualty for world culture.…  Seguir leyendo »

We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. "This could really explode," intones a reporter for BBC News. "London warned: it's here," cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading "like a Mexican wave". It "could affect" three-quarters of a million Britons. It "could cost" three trillion dollars. The "danger", according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be "worried" (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.

Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst.…  Seguir leyendo »

South Africa is steeling itself for the most important election in the brief history of its democracy, taking place next month. With the euphoria of majority rule evaporating, will it go the dreary way towards formal one-party rule, or might it emerge as the one stable and truly constitutional big-state democracy in Africa? The question is wholly open.

As I basked in the epic view of Table Mountain, with the sun sinking gently across the world's most gloriously sited city, I could not resist the old Afrikaner cliche that this was God's own country. "Yes," replied a friend wearily, "and He is about to give us a criminal and a rapist as president.…  Seguir leyendo »

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day two centuries ago, thanks be to the false god of coincidence. But which, you cry, was the greater? Was it the man who transformed our understanding of the human race, or the man who made the mightiest nation on Earth also the custodian of liberty and democracy? Was it the scientist or the statesman?

Darwin claims the crown for the scale of his intellectual revolution, but was he no more than an observer, a describer, a cataloguer?

Did he not fail Marx's test, that any philosopher can interpret the world while "the point is to change it"?…  Seguir leyendo »

A Palestinian woman is standing in her kitchen when she hears a deafening bang. Rushing to her living room she sees her family in pieces, spread across floors, walls and ceiling. The horror is total and meaningless. Nobody meant it to happen, so what was its cause?

The tragedy in Gaza surely marks the time when the world declares air-launched bombs and long-distance shells to be illegal under the 1983 Geneva convention. They should be on a par with chemical munitions, white phosphorous, cluster bombs and delayed-action land mines. They pose a threat to non-combatants that should be intolerable even in the miserable context of war.…  Seguir leyendo »

The massacre in Mumbai has stirred the ghost of war between India and Pakistan, just when relations were supposedly improving. That is what the terrorists wanted. That is the lesson that came from the west after 9/11. If belligerence and thumping retaliation are the lodestars of counter-terrorism, India is now entitled to assault Pakistan.

Until Washington went to war on Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, virtually every nation in the region sympathised with the US over 9/11. The widespread view was that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida had gone too far, much too far. It might take time to curb him, but even Iran and Egypt sent condolences, and Yasser Arafat gave blood for the people of New York.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Guardian headline on Monday was clear as mud. It read "Stop killing in Congo or else, leaders warned". Everything was left hanging. Which leaders? Warned by whom? Or else what? The story was that western spokesmen had warned various African leaders, albeit via the press, that they would be "held to account, or else" if they did not do what they were told. This clearly implied military intervention and there were briefings to that effect, though only a few hundred soldiers were mentioned.

The threats were from the new prophet of Blairite interventionism - David Miliband, the foreign secretary - and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner.…  Seguir leyendo »

Will the war on credit outspend the war on terror? Or will one crash bring an end to another? Washington, London, Baghdad and Kabul last week saw concerted moves by the West to disengage from its seven-year war on militant Islam. When it comes to stupefying public spending, even super-policemen cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars still far outstrips that of the credit crunch rescues of the past fortnight. Joseph Stiglitz, the economist, has put the cost of Iraq alone at $3 trillion, although he did impute the value of lives lost and other investment opportunities forgone.…  Seguir leyendo »

I knew God was a Trotskyite. Cern's absurdly oversold answer to the who-is-God question was snuffed out in Switzerland last week by a celestial helium leak. Don't dabble with the big bang: the curse will get you.

Meanwhile, who-are-we questions are being answered as never before - and at a fraction of the cost. Archaeologists excavating at Stonehenge, for the first time in half a century, are rewriting the map of British prehistory. Once again it is our old friend, Preseli bluestone, that is hero of the hour. Its glories shall not go unsung.

Wainwright and Darvill might sound like a pair of Yorkshire undertakers, but the two professors have long been testing their thesis that the secret of this great monument lies in its most sensational feature: the inner circle of bluestones from the bleak Preseli mountains in Pembrokeshire.…  Seguir leyendo »

La OTAN es inútil. No ha logrado llevar la estabilidad a Afganistán, como tampoco consiguió hacerlo con Serbia. La OTAN ha demostrado ser una pésima fuerza de combate y tampoco es mejor en el aspecto diplomático: vean si no su torpe gestión en Europa del Este. Como custodio de la resistencia occidental de posguerra frente a la amenaza nuclear de la Unión Soviética tenía una utilidad. Ahora se ha convertido en una Olimpiada de diplomáticos, irrelevantes pero con brotes de extravagante petulancia.

La última reunión ministerial de la OTAN en Bruselas fue una hoja de parra para tapar el fiasco de la intervención rusa en Georgia.…  Seguir leyendo »

The world will not end on Wednesday. It was all a joke, say the experts. There will be no greatest explosion on Earth somewhere beneath the Alps. The planet will not become a black hole and the only floating remnant of a collapsing supernova lives in Downing Street.

What is going on? The answer, as to all great questions in politics, is public relations. After Big Olympics we have Big Science. It takes the form of hysterical press releases and over-the-top BBC specials. Pundits brandish strings, strangelets, neutralinos, proton-smashers and facility trips.

The brief history of time has been reduced to a millionth, or perhaps a trillionth, of a second and somehow this must be turned into news.…  Seguir leyendo »

Is the world drifting towards a new global war? From this week the dominant super-power, America, will for three months pass through the valley of the shadow of democracy, a presidential election. This is always a moment of self-absorption and paranoia. Barack Obama and John McCain will not act as statesmen but as politicians. They will grandstand and look over their shoulders. Their eye will stray from the ball.

Meanwhile, along history’s fault line of conflict from Russia’s European border to the Caucasus and on to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, diplomats are shifting uneasily in their seats, drums are sounding and harsh words are spoken.…  Seguir leyendo »

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west's postwar resistance to the Soviet Union's nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats' Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday's Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia.…  Seguir leyendo »

One thing is for sure. This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags.

Georgia, a supposed western ally and applicant to Nato, has been treated by Russia to a brutal lesson in power politics. The west has lost all leverage and can do nothing.…  Seguir leyendo »

When China won the contract to host the Olympics, the official Xinhua press agency declared it “another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation”. Nobody watching Friday’s start to $40 billion of public expenditure, in what is still one of the world’s poorest nations, could be in any doubt of that. Let us hear no more about the Olympics being about sport.

Ever since their refounding at the end of the 19th century the Olympics have been about politics, whether they were Hitler’s chauvinist parade of 1936 or the current International Olympic Committee’s wishy-washy vacuities about harmony and peace.…  Seguir leyendo »