Burning Ambitions

Owen Bennett Jones introduces dispatches from Afghanistan, Rwanda, Portugal and Mexico.

In Kabul, Justin Rowlatt meets the new generation of pilots at the centre of any strategy to defeat the Taleban. But how well - and for how long - is the USA prepared to fund an Afghan Air Force?

Margaret Bradley's lived in Portugal for decades, on and off, and heard many a conspiracy theory about forest fires there - about arson, corruption, or collusion. In the country's worst year for fire deaths and burnt forest in a decade, questions are now being asked about what's fuelling the flames.

Chris Haslam travelled across Rwanda to follow the campaigns leading up to next week's Presidential election - but what he saw convinced him that there's really only one candidate who is in with a chance.

And Antonia Quirke's in Comala, a small town in western Mexico now being chilled, like the rest of the country, by the knock-on effects of the war on drugs, as the state looks to root out narcotraffickers, as well as the drugs wars between the cartels.

Photo: view from the cockpit of one of the Afghan Air Force's planes over the terrain around Kabul. (c) BBC