We’ve been seeing a steady flow of Click Airways (ICAO: CGK) and Click Airways International (ICAO: CKW) movements between the UAE, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Bagram, and some other war-on-terror locales like Djibouti and northern Somalia. Here’s something interesting; Click(CGK), one of the airlines banned by the EU in April last year, is registering a lot…
Read More push the button, click the switchJohn Reid. Thank God we managed to avoid the nightmare; Prime Minister Reid. That really worried me in 2006-2007; Chris Lightfoot and I were planning to start a dedicated anti-Reid website at one point. Anyway, Reid has been personally fingered by the coroner’s inquest into the death of RHA Captain James Philippson, as the Grauniad…
Read More UOR: Unimaginably Orphul ReidSo Gates has been doing the rounds of EU capitals, looking for more troops (and money) for Afghanistan. He didn’t get very far; although Germany did agree to find half a battalion of light infantry as a quick-reaction force for the northern zone, this just relieves a Norwegian force that is currently doing the job.…
Read More Why Your Allies Won’t Have War With YouNonbarking dog of the year, 2007 was the fact that the increasingly heavyweight NATO force in Afghanistan’s logistics are dependent on the road from Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi, that is to say through Taliban and Baluch rebel country to Pakistan’s most politically unstable and violent city. As you’ll see at the link, someone finally attacked trucks on it…
Read More The Flashman OptionI think TalkingPointsMemo has badly missed the point of this AP newsfart. Says Josh: You know things aren’t good when you see a headline about Pakistani refugees fleeing to Afghanistan. But they’re not fleeing into Afghanistan because they expect civil war any moment as a result of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination; for a start, we’re up…
Read More Missed!It is quite possible to simultaneously believe that Benazir Bhutto’s career was considerably less perfect than her public image, and also that her assassination is likely to have nothing but bad consequences for Pakistan and quite a few other places. I say this because you’d be surprised; opinion has already broken between uncritical Diana-isation by…
Read More Tell me more about this “accepting ambiguity” trick, it sounds strangely fascinatingThe XV230 Board of Inquiry has travailed, and brought forth many PDFs. And some appalling numpty discposter has printed out the clearly wordprocessed documents, tippexed classified information, and scanned them chunk by chunk as huge uncompressed graphics files, before pdf-ing them into a round dozen fat-arse documents. Still, anything to keep google out, right –…
Read More XV230 Accident Report is OutWhilst we’re on the Pakistan blogging, immense respect is due to the Pakistan Policy Blog. It looks like Nawaz Sharif is coming home – like football, remember that? – apparently because the Saudis insisted that he be released from exile in Jeddah. The PPB makes the very good point that Musharraf has been gradually mutating…
Read More Pair of Pakistan Politics Posts!What to blog about? In the face of work like this or this? Why not Pakistan? The fix is in, as they say – Musharraf safely re-elected by crook more than by hook, pesky corruption charges disposed of, Nawaz Sharif shouldered out of the way, time for the great heroine’s return. The enemy, of course,…
Read More Trimming to the TalibanI don’t think this means what Thomas Barnett thinks it does. He argues that the demand for armoured patrol vehicles in Iraq is an example of conflict between the objectives of his “SysAdmin” force, and the Washington-cented, tech-heavy “Leviathan”. Of course, it’s an example of conflict between the centre and the front line, but that’s…
Read More Built-In Stupidity