Paddy Ashdown has an opinion piece on Afghanistan in The Times today (£) in which he says: We have repeatedly deluded ourselves about “successes” that never existed and thus took so long recognising that a victor’s peace was beyond our reach that we wasted the best opportunities for a negotiated one. We failed to understand

Little has been achieved to ensure stability in a country still beset with corruption and lawlessness

Afghanistan wants Barack Obama to stick to an agreed timetable after the US said it would switch to a training role in 2013

Afghan forces will take over lead security responsibility in all parts of Afghanistan by the end of next year, Downing Street says.

Douglas Alexander MP, Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary, commenting on the Government's announcement on Afghanistan today, said:

Today’s leaked NATO report on ‘the state of the Taliban’ has generated the predictable responses: excessive attempts by the media to hype it up, and excessive attempts by NATO and the Pakistani government to play it down. What is its true significance? It’s a good scoop, but there is little or nothing in it which really counts as ‘news’ to anyone who has been fo...

David Cameron and President Hamid Karzai are to sign an agreement setting out how their two countries will work together after British troops withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014.

President Nicolas Sarkozy met the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, in Paris yesterday and said that France would join in asking Nato to hand over all combat missions in Afghanistan to Afghan troops in 2013 – a year earlier than planned.

General David Richards says military move into southern Afghanistan was "amateurish" and "verging on the complacent".

From the latest Radio Times: 9.00 Wonderland: My Child the Rioter Last August's riots provoked a legal backlash that has seen often lengthy prison sentences handed down to those involved. This documentary enters the homes of the some of the families affected, including that of Eileen and Alan Bretherton whose son Liam recently served in Afghanistan but got caught up in the unrest while home o...