Con Coughlin's Blog, page 12

Britain's 'army on the cheap' will require major sacrifices from employers

Philip Hammond today gave a statement to the House of Commons on the White Paper setting out proposals for the radical expansion of reservists in the Armed Forces. It confirmed what many experts have been saying since the Government took the regrettable decision to cut the strength of the Army by one fifth and make [...]

Egypt's pro-democracy protesters will get nowhere without a leader

Ever since Egyptian demonstrators first took to the streets two years ago to demand the removal of President Hosni Mubarak, they have suffered from one glaring handicap: they do not have a leader. In a country that gave the world iconic statesmen such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat, you would have thought that [...]

Spying on the EU is an exercise in futility

Loath as I am to give deluded whistleblowers like Edward Snowden the oxygen of publicity, it is hard not smile at the suggestion that the United States is wasting its precious intelligence-gathering resources on the bureaucratic shambles that is the EU. The EU may be many things, but the suggestion that it presents a threat [...]

The Taliban must prove they are serious about peace

Yesterday's surprise announcement by President Barack Obama that America is to engage in direct talks with the Taliban is a welcome and long overdue development in the decade-long Afghan conflict. As I and others have argued for many years, there is no military solution to the Afghan conflict, even if the sustained military effort – [...]

There will be no victory parade for British troops in Afghanistan

No change in Iran's defiance of the West over its nuclear programme

Well, that didn't take long. As I predicted at the weekend following Hassan Rowhani's surprise victory in the presidential election contest, there is unlikely to be any substantial change in Iran's negotiating position over its controversial nuclear programme. Mr Rowhani may have positioned himself as a moderate during the election campaign, promising to improve relations with [...]

Obama's support for the Syrian rebels is far too little, far too late

If any issue has exposed the Obama administration's weakess on the world stage, it is the Syrian crisis. From the moment the first anti-government protestors took to the streets two years ago, President Barack Obama has appeared like a startled rabbit caught in the glare of a major international crisis. Rather than seeing the explosion of political [...]

Iran sets up secret prisons to crush dissent ahead of elections

As million of Iranians prepare to undertake the futile task of voting in tomorrow's presidential election contest, hardliner supporters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime's Supreme Leader, are taking no chances in their efforts to secure the election of one of his preferred candidates. During the last presidential election contest in June 2009, when Mahmoud [...]

David Petraeus is back with a warning: the war on terror is far from over

On a day when Britain's chattering classes are obsessing about the latest revelations that Britain and America may share sensitive intelligence information (should we really be so alarmed about this?) General David Petraeus, one of America's most renowned warriors and the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will later today provide a far more [...]

Britain is losing the military capability to fight alongside the Americans

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has won some welcome support from the other side of the Atlantic in his battle to protect the defence budget from the Treasury's avaricious clutches. Mr Hammond, who has already had to oversee the most dramatic cuts to our military spending for a generation, is manfully resisting Chancellor George Osborne's attempts [...]