A Thug Worse Than the Taliban

I was being ushered out of the office of a senior Nato officer in Kandahar when he turned to me and said: "If I was a young man, I'd be fighting with the Taliban."

As they prepared their Kandahar offensive last summer, a British-led command group came to the conclusion the real trouble in Kandahar was not the Taliban but what became known as "malign actors". The actor in chief was the man universally referred to as AWK – Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, who was killed yesterday.