A truly splendid work of erudition, storytelling and humanity

Two new histories of separate conflicts in Afghanistan show that both the Victorians and a young Churchill struggled at the North-Western Frontier

The US army's "catch and release programme" in Afghanistan puts allied troops in grave danger and is destabalising in the long term.

The West has turned to former Afghani drug traffickers to hunt insurgents. But these "covert armies" are producing unpredictable warlords as powerful as the ones they are tracking down.