Spin Zhira

Deadly car bomb targets Afghan Bank – BBC News

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The BBC reports that at least 29 people have been killed and 60 wounded in a car bomb blast outside a bank in the southern Afghan province of Helmand.

The bomb was detonated at the gate of the New Kabul Bank branch in Lashkar Gah as people queued to receive their salaries.

Lashkar Gah was once the headquarters of Task Force Helmand but is now a city under siege. What has happened to all the “cautious optimism for the future” expressed by the international community back in 2014?

The Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team’s grandiose pronouncement that it “achieved its aim of building a strong platform for future governance and development in Helmand” sounded ridiculously overblown at the time.

Three years later it sounds inexcusably incompetent.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘Absolutely fantastic. Vivid. Tragic. True. This is the book to read on service in Afghanistan.’
Dr Mike Martin, bestselling author of  An Intimate War

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

Is something hateful happening to Facebook?

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I joined Facebook on 19th August 2009 when I posted this picture of Harry and the sunflower he’d grown from seed in the back garden of our south London home.

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I posted some more photos of a family holiday to the Balearic Islands on 6th September.

That was it for 2009. 11 holiday snaps, no text.

The truth is, I didn’t really know what Facebook was all about. Obviously, as the Marketing Director of a global company with over 10,000 employees worldwide I was not about to reveal this gap in my communications skills.

Then, in 2012, the penny finally dropped:

‘Being a man of upper middle age, I hadn’t really got the point of Facebook before Afghanistan. Now it had become a lifeline to a world without Hesco. A world where people, in the normal course of events, were not routinely and painstakingly planning to kill each other.

Instead they were posting pictures of the places they’d visited at the weekend, of their kids winning prizes at school, or even of the maddening commute to work they’d endured on Monday morning.

Sitting down at one of the battered and bruised keyboards in the welfare cabin I enjoyed my allotted 30 minutes of internet time, living vicariously through the delicious morsels of normality that my friends and family served up from all over the globe. With a like, comment or share, I was able to join them in that moment, and in doing so let them know I was alive and well.

Facebook now made perfect sense.’

But something unpleasant appears to have happened to Facebook since then. My news feed has fewer and fewer photos of sunny days out at the seaside, bike rides in the rain or other happy trivia of a life well lived. They’ve been replaced by more and more vitriolic pronouncements about BREXIT, Presidents, Islam and elections.

It doesn’t seem to matter which side of the political divide they emanate from, For or Against, Pro or Ante they are all personal and unpleasant attacks full of invective and hatefulness. Unfortunate photos of Theresa May appear alongside pictures mocking Jeremy Corbyn. It’s all getting a bit much.  If you ask me, Facebook is beginning to feel more like Hatebook. There was a time when I wondered why anyone would post a photo of last night’s dinner, now I long for their return.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘Absolutely fantastic. Vivid. Tragic. True. This is the book to read on service in Afghanistan.’
Dr Mike Martin, bestselling author of  An Intimate War

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

WAR MACHINE

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So I watched War Machine last night, Brad Pitt’s straight to Netflix movie based on journalist Michael Hastings’ book The Operators, itself an expansion of his infamous Rolling Stone magazine article which cost General Stanley McChrystal his job as Commander ISAF in 2010.

It’s interesting that Brad’s character is a fictional General McMahon, clearly masquerading as McChrystal, while Presidents Karzai (wonderfully impersonated by Ben Kingsley) and Obama (mostly played by himself courtesy of TV news clips) are not similarly disguised.

I never met General McChrystal but unfortunately Brad’s characterisation doesn’t remind me of any of the American Generals I have met (Schwarzkopf and Gurganus) and, for me at least, his performance falls flat.

Despite this, War Machine contains scenes that will be familiar to anyone who served with ISAF in Afghanistan, most notably the request of a local man to US marines who have just liberated his village from Taliban oppression to “please leave now”.

It also makes some pertinent points about the futility of counter-insurgency warfare. “The thing about counter-insurgency is that it doesn’t work. We tried it in Vietnam. That went well.” 

Ultimately, War Machine is not consistently funny enough to be a satire or exciting enough to be a war movie but it is worth a watch.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘Absolutely fantastic. Vivid. Tragic. True. This is the book to read on service in Afghanistan.’
Dr Mike Martin, bestselling author of  An Intimate War

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

THERE ARE NO EASY ANSWERS

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I have proudly borne arms in the service of my country on five separate occasions and would do so again if called upon. From the merciless annihilation of the Iraqi Army retreating from Kuwait to the Srebrenica genocide of 8,000 Muslim Bosniacs and countless lesser known but equally horrific incidents to which I have borne witness, I know firsthand the terrible consequences of war; and the equally terrible consequences of standing by and doing nothing. I know with utter and resolute conviction that there are no easy choices as Edmund Burke and others would have us believe.

Like every other sane person on the planet, I’m shocked, outraged and appalled by the Manchester Arena bombing and my heart hardens towards despicable men who preach hate and perpetrate crimes against innocents. Sadly, I also know that the feelings of impotence, anger and rage that we are currently feeling in the aftermath of the bombing are the exact same feelings we induce in others every time a drone strike, launched in the name of freedom and democracy, causes ‘collateral damage’, whenever we sell arms to governments with dubious human rights records and when we stand idly by and do nothing at all.

There are no easy answers, only hard choices.

 

 

 

Spin Zhira, Uncategorized

“ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC”

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“Absolutely fantastic. Vivid. Tragic. True. This is the book to read on service in Afghanistan.”
So says Dr Mike Martin of SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand. A true story of love, service and incompetence.
His own book, An Intimate War, described as ‘the first serious effort to make sense of the war in Helmand’ by Tom Coghlan of The Times caused a media furore when the Ministry of Defence tried to block its publication because it criticised the British military. It has subsequently received widespread national and international recognition as ‘the book on Helmand’.
Mike has travelled and lived all over the world in order to try and understand conflict. He is a War Studies Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. His other books include Crossing the Congo: Over Land and Water in a Hard Place and Why We Fight.
Mike Martin books

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

Spanner or the whole toolbox?

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So Jeremy Corbyn thinks that Britain has not fought a ‘just war’ since 1945.

Meanwhile, since 1985, Jeremy has been consorting with terrorists, vicious anti-semites, racists and despots including (but not limited to) the IRA, Hamas, the Mahdi Army, Islamic State and Kim Jong-Un.

The Urban Dictionary describes a toolbox as ‘a person of little social value’.  A spanner on the other hand is defined as ‘a complete fucking muppet’.

Both seem apt, you decide.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

MoD top brass blow £120,000 on £800/night luxury hotels

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I’m not entirely surprised to learn that the MoD’s top brass have blown £120,000 on luxury hotels costing up to £800 a night. After all, the ministry’s austerity chief, Sir Bernard Grey, ran up an eye-watering £23,000 expenses bill all on his own.

It is always a fairly safe bet that, given the slightest opportunity, an MoD spokesperson will say something cringingly stupid and inflammatory and this case is no exception. Apparently ‘hotel stays such as these are only approved when they are the most cost-effective solution and there are no suitable alternatives.’ Of course, it would be insulting to put the top brass up in Travelodge.

Meanwhile, soldiers endure cold showers and the sergeant and his family live in near derelict housing because the defence estate is managed in the most appalling and despicable fashion by CarillionAmey.  A company the MoD recently saw fit to recognise with an Armed Forces Covenant Bronze award.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

UK to send more troops to Afghanistan

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The BBC reports that NATO wants the UK to send more troops to Afghanistan. Is this really such a good idea?

Sending a few more troops may win favour in Washington, the original source of the request, but will it make a difference on the ground?

Not without a change of strategy and mindset. Current political and military thinking is based on minimums. The minimum number of troops committed for the minimum amount of time. This is less about winning and more about not losing. Isn’t it time we stopped doing the same thing over and over again expecting something different to happen?

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

 

 

 

Spin Zhira

Sergeant Alexander Blackman released

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Sergeant Alexander Blackman, the Royal Marine jailed for shooting dead a wounded Taliban fighter has been released from prison.

Sgt Blackman received a life term in 2013 for murder, but his conviction was reduced to manslaughter at a second trial when it emerged that crucial evidence had been deliberately with-held by his chain of command.

Sergeant Blackman, who admits doing wrong, has been released after serving half of a seven year sentence and has been dismissed from the Royal Marines.

But what has happened to those officers who deliberately deceived the court at his original trial? It might be reasonable to assume that they too have been dismissed from service for their duplicity and lack of moral courage.

The Commandant General of the Royal Marines, Major General Robert Magowan, has said it is time to ‘move forward from the Blackman episode’ but continues to employ and promote the men who abandoned Sgt Blackman to his fate.  The one officer willing to speak up for him and who provided the crucial evidence at his second trial has been dismissed.

It is another sad example of how the military top brass continue to  fail the men and women under their command, eroding the values and standards on which our Armed Forces are founded.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Spin Zhira

Slow news day

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It must be a slow news day when The Times, a newspaper dedicated to keeping its readers abreast of important public affairs with an eye to the best interests of Britain, runs a story about drunken wedding misdemeanours on its front page under the lame headline: SHOWER AT THE TOWER.

Lieutenant Phil Roberts managed to ruin his friends’ wedding day as well as a 19th Century oil painting before punching another guest in the face and being arrested by the Metropolitan Police – what a muppet.

A tragedy for the happy couple, no doubt, but it’s hard to see how The Times editors judged this to be a story in the national interest.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

‘Brims with authenticity and dark humour.’
Patrick Hennessey, bestselling author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

‘First class’
Doug Beattie MC, bestselling author of An Ordinary Soldier

‘A must read.’
Richard Dorney, bestselling author of The Killing Zone

‘The best book by a soldier concerning the Afghan War that I have read’
Frank Ledwidge, bestselling author of Losing Small Wars

‘Five stars’
SOLDIER The official magazine of the British Army

‘Not just for soldiers’
William Reeve, BBC World Service and Afghanistan Correspondent

Ten reasons to read SPIN ZHIRA.

What others are saying about SPIN ZHIRA.

Old Man in Helmand