And how has this money been spent? Certainly not on social projects or rebuilding initiatives. Rather, the reporting indicates, the money has been funnelled to Karzai's cronies as bribes in a corrupt attempt to buy influence in the country.

Callous though it may sound, the needle on the horror-meter has not yet gone high enough.

A couple of days ago I was invited onto RT Arabic TV to do an interview about the ongoing clusterfuck that is Syria, with a particular focus on the is...

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will commit at least £300, 000 of the £16.8m allocated for the Greater London Authority's (GLA) rough sleeping budget for 2013-15, to support London's homeless veterans.

A new report from Save the Children has revealed another dimension to this silent crisis, showing that children are bearing the brunt of sexual violence in war. It says that in current and former warzones from Sierra Leone to Liberia, Congo to Colombia, more than half of the victims of sexual violence are children.

North Korea is not as irrationally troublesome as some sections of the media would lead you to believe. It's often entirely pragmatic and if anything is consistently attention-seeking rather than reckless and erratic.

In August last year, I wrote an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune calling for Western powers to arm the Syrian insurgents. Over six months later, the case is even more compelling than before.

In Iraq everyone privately knew the WMD thing was a pretext, and this assumption underpinned all our political work. No-one was 100% certain of the real aims. Still today. So we made it up.

These papers offer a valuable lesson for any student of leadership. Perhaps the biggest lesson one can learn is that making the right decision is not necessarily the same as making the most popular decision. Leadership is not a popularity contest. Leadership is about selflessly acting in the best interests of those that you lead.

The Iraq War was the culmination of a process that started in 1994 with the rise of New Labour and reflected its heady psychological brew of arrogance and self-loathing. The arrogance came from a quasi-Leninist belief in Labour as the agent of some great historical mission on behalf of the masses - a traditional conceit of Labourism, admittedly.

The government has infuriated MPs by appearing to block a Commons debate on the anniversary of the Iraq War. The group has written a strongly-worde...

It's so easy to become desensitised to the true horrors of armed violence when we hear immense numbers like millions and thousands. It becomes possible to overlook the grief and pain of the family members left behind, to ignore the unthinkable pain of death and torture experienced by children, women and men, inflicted by the barrel, or bullet, of a gun.

When Bushra, a 19 year old mother of two crossed from Syria to Tripoli she became the one millionth refugee. That's a worrying figure for Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Like smoke drifting across no man's land as the sound of the guns and the mortar finally fell quiet, the Christmas truce of 1914 has been shrouded by the mists of time. A historical event which occurred early in the First World War and one many of us are familiar with; yet it has the feel and texture of legend as much as fact.