The pressure was mounting over who should be eligible for refuge in the UK. A group of UK broadcasters and newspaper editors wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary appealing for an urgent special visa programme for Afghan journalists, translators and support staff who had worked with British media organizations over…

I wrote to London that we should now base our planning for the summer on the assumption that the republic would lose one or more major cities in August, maybe Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, and that this was looking increasingly likely to happen within the next seven days….The republic would be unlikely to recover if…

I reported to London that we were facing a new reality in Afghanistan. Unless there was a major turnaround on the battlefield, it was likely that the Taliban would soon control at least one major population centre, with maybe more to follow. If that happened the impact on the Republic’s already fragile political unity, military…