Here in France, among the British expatriates living in the Riviera, the speech Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain gave this past Wednesday was, even if somewhat expected, a little of a shock. Read the rest of this entry »

For once the United States are not at the front of a military strike against al-Qaeda backed Islamists. This time it is France which is fighting against Islamists rebels in Mali which has emerged as the latest front in a global battle against Islamic militants. Read the rest of this entry »

While the US president is running into trouble in his own country for not having consulted Congress before getting involved in the military campaign over Libya and his lack of explanations to the American people about what that military intervention implies, the British Prime Minister David Cameron has made a direct appeal to Parliament and outlined the reasons why Britain intervened in Libya and why he is putting the British army in harm’s way. Read the rest of this entry »

Does anybody know what really is going on in Afghanistan? If it was not for the tragedy of the loss of life -coalition troops and Afghans- it could makes us laugh. Weeks ago we were reading in the New York Times and other papers about the peace talks that supposedly were going on in Kabul between Hamid Karzai and a Taliban leader. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the agreements taken at the NATO summit in Lisbon was that after the coalition would start turning the security control to the Afghans this spring, the transition would be completed by the year 2014. Even if the NATO leaders approved this, Western experts have indicated that the majority of Afghanistan’s police are untrained and do not know the law. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend we received once more distressing news from Afghanistan. There had been a tragic and failed attempt to rescue Linda Norgrove, the 36 year-old British aid worker who had been kidnapped last month by armed men wearing the uniform of the Afghan army.<!–more–> It would appear that a decision to launch the rescue operation was agreed by the Nato forces as it was feared that Linda Norgrove was in danger of being taken by his captors to the al-Qaeda in Pakistan. While that decision is debatable and impossible to judge now when it is too late to be sorry due to the tragic developments that finally took place. Unaware of the decision being made and in most cases even of the abduction of the aid worker, most of us heard the news when the British Foreign Office released a statement explaining that Linda had been killed by the explosion of a bomb one of her captors had detonated during the attempt by her American would be rescuers to liberate her. It was only later on, when the Americans reviewed the video of the operation that they changed the story. Apparently, it was one of the American troops that threw a grenade which ended up killing Linda. Thus Monday British Prime Minister, David Cameron said that he had to announce the “deeply regrettable” news that Linda Norgrove was not after all killed when one of her captors detonated a suicide vest but probably by an American grenade.Many of us are now wondering what really happened as it seems that we had already been there before. The case of Pat Tillman is the most documented one that comes to mind. Has this been another attempt at a cover up? That the Americans were the ones involved in the so called rescue it is understandable as Linda was hold in an area of Afghanistan the American troops are in charge. The main questions are the almost sudden decision for the rescue at that time, why the American troops threw grenades in such an attemp and why they went to such length to explain the alledge cause of Linda’s death when the reality was bound to come out? A reality which has made President Obama phone Prime Minister Cameron to promise to “get to the bottom” of last Friday failed rescue attempt.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, in power since last May, arrives Tuesday to the US for his first official visit. In the UK there is a lot of expectation about the treatment he will receive by the Obama administration. The British have not forgotten the shoddy treatment the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown got last year during his White House visit. Read the rest of this entry »