The Independent - Robert Fisk RSS Feed

The Independent - Robert Fisk RSS Feed http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/?service=Rss Robert Fisk's World: The British should not forget the massive debt they owe the Irish http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-the-british-should-not-forget-the-massive-debt-they-owe-the-irish-1040273.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-the-british-should-not-forget-the-massive-debt-they-owe-the-irish-1040273.html I had almost forgotten what a shit Yeats could be. I don't mean his flirtation with Italian fascism, which Conor Cruise O'Brien first publicised; after all, Churchill was a bit enamoured of the younger Mussolini. And Yeats remains one of my favourite poets. No, what I am recalling – thanks to a wonderful book just published in Dublin – is his outrageous decision to expel the poetry of Wilfred Owen from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Robert Fisk Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000 Robert Fisk: 'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government' http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-nobody-supports-the-taliban-but-people-hate-the-government-1036905.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-nobody-supports-the-taliban-but-people-hate-the-government-1036905.html ]]> The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country. Robert Fisk Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000 Kabul 30 years ago, and Kabul today. Have we learned nothing? http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/kabul-30-years-ago-and-kabul-today-have-we-learned-nothing-1029920.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/kabul-30-years-ago-and-kabul-today-have-we-learned-nothing-1029920.html ]]> I sit on the rooftop of the old Central Hotel – pharaonic-decorated elevator, unspeakable apple juice, sublime green tea, and armed Tajik guards at the front door – and look out across the smoky red of the Kabul evening. The Bala Hissar fort glows in the dusk, massive portals, the great keep to which the British army should have moved its men in 1841. Instead, they felt the king should live there and humbly built a cantonment on the undefended plain, thus leading to a "signal catastrophe". Robert Fisk Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000 Robert Fisk: Making movies the Afghan way http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-making-movies-the-afghan-way-1027758.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-making-movies-the-afghan-way-1027758.html ]]> Drive north of Kabul for an hour, turn left into a grey desert and head east for fifteen minutes, the sand shawling up the side of the windows until an armed man in the uniform of the Iranian police stops you before a forbidding compound of watchtowers, mud walls and razor wire. For a brief moment, that willing suspension of disbelief - I can see the inmates sitting on the sand beyond the iron gate – I forget that this is an Afghan movie set, and that Daoud Wahab, the producer of 'The White Rock' is sitting in front of me. "Looks real, huh?" he asks over his shoulder. It does. Robert Fisk Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:08:26 +0000 Robert Fisk: Once more fear stalks the streets of Kandahar http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-once-more-fear-stalks-the-streets-of-kandahar-1026330.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-once-more-fear-stalks-the-streets-of-kandahar-1026330.html ]]> There is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. Then there is another girl, a beautiful child, Khorea Horay, grimacing in pain, her leg amputated, her life destroyed after her foot was torn to pieces. In another ward, two girls lie on their backs, a tent above their limbs. One has lost an arm, another – a 16-year-old – a leg. Robert Fisk Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000 Robert Fisk's World: There is no end to the centuries of savagery in Afghanistan http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-there-is-no-end-to-the-centuries-of-savagery-in-afghanistan-1019534.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-there-is-no-end-to-the-centuries-of-savagery-in-afghanistan-1019534.html Back in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave. The torture and killing of prisoners in this pitiful place – the American variety in Bagram and the Taliban variety in Helmand – is a kind of routine of history. Even execution has to be made more painful. A knife is more terrible than a bullet. The cult of the suicide bomber in the Middle East began its life in Lebanon, moved to "Palestine", arrived in Iraq, leached over the border here to Afghanistan and passed effortlessly through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. And New York. And Washington. And London... Robert Fisk Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000 Robert Fisk: Double agents, car bombs and antics worthy of James Bond http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-double-agents-car-bombs-and-antics-worthy-of-james-bond-1015858.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-double-agents-car-bombs-and-antics-worthy-of-james-bond-1015858.html ]]> When it comes to spy stories, Ian Fleming couldn't match Lebanon – and Sister Syria – for the kind of head-spinning espionage and murder mystery now engulfing the Levant. The contents page must include the murder of a prominent pro-Iranian kidnapper and guerrilla leader in Damascus, Israeli Mossad spies, bomb explosions in both Lebanon and Syria, claims that the pro-American son of an assassinated ex-prime minister in Beirut funds an Islamist killer group – not to mention an intriguing connection to the Lebanese hijacker of United Flight 93 on 11 September 2001. If the tale is even half-true – and I've had a visitation from a Syrian suggesting his countrymen believe quite a lot of it – there has to be a bid for the film rights. Robert Fisk Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000 Robert Fisk: Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush's delusions http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-obama-has-to-pay-for-eight-years-of-bushs-delusions-1001092.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-obama-has-to-pay-for-eight-years-of-bushs-delusions-1001092.html ]]> American lawyers defending six Algerians before a habeas corpus hearing in Washington this week learned some very odd things about US intelligence after 9/11. From among the millions of "raw" reports from American spies and their "assets" around the world came a CIA Middle East warning about a possible kamikaze-style air attack on a US navy base at a south Pacific island location. The only problem was that no such navy base existed on the island and no US Seventh Fleet warship had ever been there. In all seriousness, a US military investigation earlier reported that Osama bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post office on a US military base in east Asia. Robert Fisk Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:01 +0000