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

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 259th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (29 January – 4 February, 2012), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed. Don’t forget: you

The Coalition is fraught with tension and is unlikely to last beyond 2013, argues Iain Martin.

The anti-piracy ACTA agreement goes far beyond what is acceptable in the defence of intellectual property, threatening to internet users' privacy and allowing even legitimate websites to be blocked, says Ivaylo Kalfin. More »

Any CoffeeHousers with a taste for schadenfreude should read David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman. We have to move beyond big government, he declares. We need a growth strategy. I’m not sure if any Labour leader has ever argued otherwise: maybe, as Miliband implies, it has found one now. But, as I ask in my Daily Telegraph column today, what’s worse: a party that’s...

Jim Sinclair on a Greece default, the pending ISDA decision and the insolvency of the five largest U.S. banks! So who is Jim Sinclair, what is the ISDA and what do either one have to do with the Greece sovereign debt crisis or the solvency of banks in the U.S.? Because the way that the Greece sovereign debt crisis will ultimately be handled by the EU has implications far beyond either Greece or th...

How about this for a claim by Nicolas Sarkozy, made in a TV appearance yesterday? ‘Europe is no longer at the edge of the cliff.’ It's quite some statement, so let's hear it again: ‘Europe is no longer at the edge of the cliff.’ Of course, Sarkozy has reasons for saying it beyond mere pre-electoral braggadocio: the rates paid on Italian and Spanish 10-year bonds h...

I'm not encouraged by the results last night. There's absolutely nothing more President Obama and the Democrats want than a prolonged, drawn out primary campaign that spews bad blood and wastes resources..while the president continues to consolidate his re-election campaign unopposed on all fronts. Obviously a part of Saturday's result had to do with the despicable way the dinosaur ...

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 257th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (15-21 January, 2012), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed. Don’t forget: you can sign up

Did Barack Obama's decision to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline project with TransCanada make any sense beyond pandering to environmentalists and to his Hollywood base for campaign support and money? The Keystone XL Pipeline was to be a 1,700 mile long 36 inch pipeline that would bring 800,000 barrels of oil a day into the United States. So did the decision to kill it actually have a sound found...