I was reading a book about the war in Afghanistan recently. It made me wonder if even some of the professional soldiers sometimes fail to understand what’s going on there. One was quoted as showing contempt for Taliban because of battlefield evidence that they were hopped up on drugs for the fight. I don’t doubt it. But these are the $10-a-day Taliban hired from the ranks of the boisterous under-employed teenagers to be seen in nearly every Afghan village. The Taliban are led by highly professional and experienced guerrilla fighters who have handed Brits, Americans and Canadians some very bloody noses over the years – much as they once did to the Soviets with training and equipment supplied by the West. I pick those three because outside of the various special forces units from around the world, they are the only ones who have really been fighting. The hard core of the Taliban fighters are Al Qaida fanatics from Pakistan, the Middle East, and the Muslim diaspora of Europe and North America. 
Sometimes it’s not clear who has been firing at western troops. There are drug gangs and even Afghan police taking shots. Some Afghan police may be professionals dedicated to law enforcement but they are sadly appear to be in the minority. The Afghan National Army seems to be more reliable in many ways. But the vast majority are from the minority groups and not the majority Pashtun population. Just what’s going to happen when NATO and the Americans pull out and civil war ensues is far from clear.  Many Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan have already worked out which side their bread is buttered on. 

It seems nowadays that television and radio presenters are encouraged to banter on-air with other members of the program team. The theory is that this makes them appear more human and accessible. What it actually often does is demonstrate that there are a lot of people involved in television and radio who should not be encouraged to go off-script. They reveal themselves as vacuous and even rather stupid. Frankly, I don’t care if the news-reader has a cat or what the weather guy thinks about the latest sports result. It’s boring!
Another aspect of North American news broadcasting which I hope doesn’t spread is the cult of personality when it comes to the programme anchors. Stand-in presenters are forced to announce that they are covering for so-and-so, the usual presenter. It’s almost as though the presenters are bigger than the programme. Quite frankly, I don’t care who is presenting the show, as long as they do a good job. No more silly people who use the "assumption of ignorance" introduction. I hate listening to people who think if they didn’t know something, then no-one will know it. I once listed to two or three minutes of some daft woman telling me what Diego Garcia wasn’t – ie. a liqueur or a Mexican movie star. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d told us in the programme  trailer before the news on the hour that it was an island.
It’s a cliché that TV anchors are pretty-boy and pretty-girl airheads. I know of several who are highly professional and astute journalists. But I also recall one of the stupidest people I’ve come across in my entire life being made an anchor on the television news. Isn’t it interesting how often stupidity and arrogance are wedded?

This is embarrassing. Anyone who reads Book Brief regularly will know how often I bring up how I used to tell trainee newspaper reporters that one silly mistake in their copy destroyed the credibility of the whole story and they’d pretty wasted their time.
Well, it turns out there’s a mistake in Scottish Military Disasters. Perhaps luckily, it isn’t something many people are going to spot and lose faith in the book. I said that the Battle of Gully Ravine in 1915 left my great-grandmother in Glasgow a widow with two young children. Well, it turns out my grandfather had a sister he never mentioned to me. Robina, or Ruby as she was known, died in 1925 at the age of 14 from TB, a disease which claimed the life of her step-sister Mary.
Fortunately, I’ve been given the chance to put the record straight: Scottish Military Disasters has just been released as an e-book. The error probably wouldn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the book but it’s been bugging me since I learned about it three or four months ago.

I’ve promised to use my powers for good. So, here’s a plug for the most excellent King’s Own Scottish Borderers museum in Berwick upon Tweed. The museum is now closed on weekends, which isn’t going to help visitor figures. Military museums have come a long way since I was kid when all they were were a couple of glass cases with moth-eaten uniforms, some medals, and the obligatory bible/whisky flask which stopped a bullet – and the KOSB is no exception to that trend.
The decision to close old barracks, which is home to the KOSB museum and the Berwick museum, was made by English Heritage. To my mind the KOSB museum faces some challenges the other Scottish regimental museums don’t. The first is that English Heritage has big plans for the old barracks complex that don’t include a regimental museum – or the town museum. But the regimental museum has a perpetual lease. I suspect Death by a Thousand Cuts may be seen as an option by English Heritage. The KOSB museum relies heavily on visitors from the nearby caravan park, which usually gets a new batch of occupants on Friday/Saturday. This means that Sunday is usually the first day the caravan park folk get a chance to look the museum over. Odd that English Heritage is closing the barracks, and therefore denying access to the museums, on Sundays.
The other challenge is that the creation of the Royal Regiment of Scotland saw the KOSB being merged with the Edinburgh-based Royal Scots. The fear is some Whitehall pencil pusher is going to decide that regimental museums at both the barracks in Berwick and Edinburgh Castle is an extravagance. The Royal Scots museum is excellent but the knowledge of the staff there about the KOSB is naturally limited. Regimental pride has always been a corner-stone of the British Army and the various museums help foster that, with a pay-off in terms of recruiting. There’s been an upsurge in interest in family history and the various regiments, thanks to Scottish enthusiasm for things military and conscription, have played a major role in the lives of many Scots. It would be criminal to allow some bureaucrats, some Whitehall Warriors, to consign the torch-bearers for Scotland’s proud military heritage, the regimental museums, to the dustbin.  In fact, it’s an insult to the memory of those who died fighting.

A former Canadian soldier has launched a lawsuit against the Department of National Defence because he alleges he's been kicked out of the Army due to the fact that he's not fit for active service. Ryan Elrick had both legs blown off in Afghanistan by a Taliban bomb. He retrained as intelligence analyst, a job that doesn't require running up any mountains. .

But the Department says there's no room in the military for anyone who can't go on active service due to a physical disability. Some observers note that the Department's own headquarters has many military members who while not missing a limb are, due to a gross lack of physical fitness, unable to put on a rucksack and hike up an Afghan mountain clutching a General Purpose Machine Gun. And yet none of them is being kicked out.

Yes, there are things that Elrick can't do any more. I used to know another guy who was seriously injured in Afghanistan but was allowed to continue serving with his regiment. This other guy, I won't name him just in case, in his disabled state was actually an asset to that regiment. Not only was he an inspiration to others when it came to showing pluck and determination but his continued employment boosted morale by demonstrating that the Army looks after it's injured heroes - rather than throwing them on the scrap heap.