Behind The Lines with Arthur Snell

When I worked at the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Helmand Province, I was largely based at the Forward Operating Base in Lashkar Gah - the main city of Helmand. There, amid the dust and noise of an active military campaign, there was a small, beautifully tended garden inside the base. I’m going to be honest and say that I was too preoccupied with my own job ever to ask myself who was responsible for its upkeep- even as I enjoyed that little slice of tranquility and beauty almost every day. Had I stopped to find out, I would have learned that the gardener was Shaista Gul, a local Afghan citizen whose hard work created a beautiful garden in the most unlikely place. By talking on this job, Shaista, and the thousands of Afghans, many of them interpreters, that served Britain during its involvement in the NATO mission, became enemies of the Taliban, facing constant threats, and worse, including murder. After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, some lucky Afghans were able to escape on evacuation flights from Kabul. But most were left behind and thousands made their way to Pakistan, including many that had been assured of resettlement in the UK. This month, the government of Pakistan has decided to expel all undocumented Afghans in the country believed to be around 1.5 million people. Of these, around 2,000 have been accepted as eligible to come to Britain in recognition of their past service with our forces. But thanks to a cost-saving policy made by Rishi Sunak last year, these people were kept in Pakistan in preference to bringing them to the UK where the migration system is under acute strain. Now these people, who risked their lives serving our country, find themselves threatened with being returned to Afghanistan by the Pakistani government. The story of Britain’s treatment of those Afghans that worked with us during our involvement in that country is the subject of Larisa Brown’s book, the Gardener of Lashkar Gah. Larisa is a defence correspondent, currently with The Times and previously working for the Daily Mail. She joined me, just as Pakistan was preparing to start its campaign of expulsions, to talk about Shaista Gul and the wider history of Britain’s betrayal of its Afghan friends.You can find Larisa’s book here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/gardener-of-lashkar-gah-9781399411028/ I am on https://arthursnell.substack.com/Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we’re covering arguably the most important question in British foreign policy: our relationship with Europe and, specifically - what the circumstances and process might be for Britain to rejoin the EU.Nobody thinks this is an easy issue, or something that can be achieved quickly. But it’s something that everyone with any sense of a European identity must see as a fundamental priority that Britain needs to get started with. And it’s something that almost no mainstream national politician wants to talk about. How would the Long March back into the EU be achieved? What would be the steps, the obstacles, the challenges? These are all questions that I want to examine in a series of episodes of Behind the Lines - RejoiniacsFor The first of these, who better to speak to than the leader of the European Movement itself, Dr Mike Galsworthy - a scientist, campaigner and passionate European. We cover a lot of ground and we started with the impact of Brexit on science - Mike’s professional calling, before moving on to discuss the future and how Britain might think about reversing Brexit and rejoining the EU.You can follow Mike on Twitter https://twitter.com/mikegalsworthy and BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/mikegalsworthy.bsky.socialThe European Movement can be found here: https://www.europeanmovement.co.uk/I'm on https://twitter.com/SnellArthur and https://bsky.app/profile/snellarthur.bsky.social as well as https://arthursnell.substack.com/ Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Military expert Dr Mike Martin discusses Israel and Hamas's warfare. They explore the risk of conflicts merging and escalating into global ones. Topics include Russia's involvement, challenges in fighting Hamas in Gaza, the political crisis in Israel, and the psychological aspects of managing geopolitical conflicts.

Understanding the risks of a regional war between Israel and its antagonists feels like the most important issue at the present time. I was able to speak to Michael Stephens, former head of the Middle East programme at RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, about the complex diplomatic and strategic relations that exist across the region. We covered Iran and its proxies, the Arab Gulf states and Egypt, as well as discussing Israel's own policy choices.Michael is on Twitter here MikeRStephens You can find me @snellarthur on Twitter and Bluesky. Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode I wanted to go back to something that Paul Mason said in an earlier episode which struck a chord. He identified that the weakest link in International democratic politics is the world’s greatest democracy, the United States.Here’s Paul’s line “the key to the international situation is America. we could wake up in November 2024 with Trump as president that is a legitimation of insurrectionary politics.” (Have a listen to that episode - number 7 - if you’ve not yet had the chance)That challenge led me to this week’s interview. Greg Olear, whose name sounds Irish but is in fact Slovakian in origin is an American novelist, podcaster and commentator on political affairs. He has a substack and his podcast, Prevail, can be found in all the usual places.Greg has focused heavily on the current crisis in American politics, as well as the complicated history of President Trump’s links to Russia and the degree to which that still matters. I hope you get as much from the discussion as I did.Arthur Snell (@snellarthur.bsky.social)bsky.appArthur Snell (@SnellArthur) / Xtwitter.comNot all doom | Arthur Snell | Substackarthursnell.substack.comCheck out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following Hamas’s horrific assault on Israel, attention turns to Israel’s reaction. Gaza is under siege and Israel has mobilised over 300,000 reservists. Israel claims that it plans to destroy Hamas. What does that mean in practice? And what does it mean for the civilians that live in Gaza? This sits in a wider context of regional relationships, Israel’s support in the West and the impact on the conflict in Ukraine.To cover such a wide-ranging set of challenges and issues it was a huge privilege to be joined by The Economist’s Defence Editor Shashank Joshi, who is one of the best-informed journalists working in the defence space today. He is a visiting fellow at the department of War Studies at King’s College London and a familiar figure to those that follow the conflict in Ukraine. You can find Shashank on Twitter @shashj and his work is in the Economist www.economist.comI Tweet @snellarthur and am increasingly on BlueSky @snellarthur.bsky.socialYou can find my susbstack here https://arthursnell.substack.com/Thanks for listening to Behind the Lines. If you find these episodes useful please spread the word.Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

EMERGENCY PODCASTWe’re only 4 days after the stunning horror of Hamas’s attack on Israel. Much remains unclear, but we now know that a major Hamas operation completely blindsided Israel’s defences and nearly 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians are dead, with several hundred taken as hostages to Gaza. Israel has regained control of the towns that were seized by Hamas fighters, but there remain gunmen at large in what is obviously a chaotic situation.Israel has responded with a huge mobilisation of forces against Hamas, with 600 killed in Gaza, according to the BBC. Gaza is officially under siege with no access to supplies of water, electricity or food and Hamas are threatening to kill a hostage every time Israel carries out an air strike without warning Palestinian civilians.To help us come to terms with these extraordinary events, I was joined by Jason Pack. Some of you may have heard him speak on Libya and the disordered world in episode 6 of this podcast. But Jason is very much a Middle East specialist: he lived 7 years in the Middle East, speaks Arabic and Hebrew and lived 3 years in East Jerusalem, 2 years in Syria, and 1 in Egypt... He is of course presenter of the Disorder podcast and Founder & Director, NATO & the Global Enduring Disorder Project. Some of you might have been surprised to hear Jason say that Israel had a hand in Hamas origins. There are various articles that describe this background, this in The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/ and particularly this detailed account in the Wall Street Journal (archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20090926212507/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html). The important point to make here is that Israel encouraged an Islamist charitable entity that was there to act as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of FATAH, also known as the PLO. The Israelis were not trying to create a militant terror group (this is a conspiracy theory that has flourished online), although one of the retired Israeli officers interviewed in the WSJ article acknowledges that he "had no illusions about [Hamas founder] Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam”. This is, as ever, a complex story.Thanks for listening to Behind the Lines - please spread the word and give us a positive review if you find these episodes useful.Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2021, Paul Mason, a veteran journalist familiar to viewers of Newsnight and Channel 4 News, published a book called How to stop Fascism, History Ideology, Resistance. His book came in the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC and the spectre of rising authoritarian nationalism across the world. A year later, Paul found himself in Kyiv just 24 hours before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, as 21st century fascism began to more literally imitate its 20th century forbear.Since then, Paul has become an urgent advocate of the need to take this conflict seriously - for what it is - an existential threat to the post-Westphalian world order. I spoke to Paul about Fascism in its modern forms, about the need for Western countries to support Ukraine more forcefully and about the failure of some on the left to understand the threat. to Ukraine. It was a fascinating discussion, particularly as Paul is such a well-informed reader of history. His discussion takes a truly global vision and incredibly insightful, from Europe, to North America, to India. Paul Tweets at https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews. He mentioned a fascinating New York Times investigation which can be found here https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html You can find me here on Twitter and BlueSky as well as https://arthursnell.substack.com/.Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re living in an age of the self-confident autocrat: China is rising, President Erdogan coasted to a managed re-election and in the Gulf, the Arab monarchies are riding high on oil prices boosted by Putin’s war in Ukraine. And what do the autocrats do with their money? They use it to buy influence. And one of the ways that they can do this is through football, the most popular sport on the planet.In 2003 Roman Abramovich, the now-sanctioned Russian billionaire, bought Chelsea football club, setting into a motion a process of flooding the English game with colossal amounts of money. As we know now, and as many suspected for years, Abramovitrch owed his wealth directly to President Putin - so the money that infused English football from this point was effectively looted from the coffers of the Russian state. Russia would not be alone in seeking to use football to burnish its image - in 2008 Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City and Qatar bought Paris Saint Germain three years later. In both cases these small Gulf emirates successfully used football to increase their global reputation and influence. This process appears to have continued, with Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup and the purchase by Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund of Newcastle United as well as the establishment of a new Saudi Pro League, drawing in top players from all over the world. As part of the Newcastle deal, the Premier League appeared to have been given assurances that the Saudi Public Inverstment Fund was separate to the Saudi state, which is patently untrue. What this appears to show is that the English football authorities will believe what they want if it brings in the cash, with little thought for the consequences.To discuss the geopolitical and sporting implications of these changes I was honoured to be joined by Miguel Delaney, chief football writer at the Independent, who has been researching and writing about the geopolitics of football for several years.You find Miguel on Twitter @MiguelDelaney and at the Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/author/miguel-delaneyThank you for listening to this podcast - please subscribe if you haven’t already and give us a positive review if you enjoyed it.Vyner Street Productions Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Storm Daniel passed through the Mediterranean in early September,  one of a bewildering number of extreme weather events in recent months. When it hit Libya on 10 September, torrential rainfall led to catastrophic floods in the Town of Derna. At the time of recording as many as 20,000 people are missing, feared dead. It was an example of the terrifying new reality of the climate crisis where entire cities can be wiped out by wildfires or floods, literally in a matter of hours.But everything has a context, and the context in Derna is a city that is located in one of the most chaotic countries on earth, where government services barely function and the concept of government itself is contested between different rulers in rival areas of the territory. To get a fuller understanding of the situation in Derna and Libya, I was delighted to be able to speak to Jason Pack, Libya expert and author of the book Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder. As we covered in our discussion, what happens in Libya is in some respects a microcosm of a much bigger global crisis, which is also the subject of a new podcast that Jason is bringing out, called Disorder.You can find Jason’s book here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/libya-and-the-global-enduring-disorder/His new podcast is here: https://linktr.ee/disorderpodAnd his website is here: https://www.jasonpack.org/Thanks for listening to Behind the Lines. We are at https://behindthelineswitharthursnell.buzzsprout.com/I tweet @snellarthur and am now on BlueSky @snellarthur.bsky.social And you can read my thoughts on geopolitics at arthursnell.substack.com Vyner Street Productions Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices