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Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign
Sherard Cowper-Coles


A frank and honest memoir by Britain’s former ambassador to Kabul which provides a unique, high-level insight into Western policy in Afghanistan.The West’s mission in Afghanistan has never been far from the headlines. For Sherard Cowper-Coles, our former Ambassador, Britain’s role in the conflict – the vast amount of money being spent and the huge number of lives being lost – was an everyday reality.In Cables from Kabul, Cowper-Coles takes the reader on a journey through the backstreets of Afghanistan’s capital to the corridors of power in London and Washington. He pays tribute to the tactical successes of our soldiers but asks whether these will be enough to secure stability. Nobody is better placed to tell this story of embassy life in one of the most dangerous places on earth. Powerful and astonishingly frank, Cables from Kabul explains how we got into the quagmire of Afghanistan, and how we can get out of it.









Sherard Cowper-Coles

Cables from Kabul










Dedication


In memory of

Richard Holbrooke,

who gave his life for peace










Contents


Title Page (#u622a12ee-460c-5c56-88e2-7063e8604bbc)

Dedication



List of Illustrations

Map of Afghanistan

Map of Kabul

Tribute to the Fallen

Preface

Part I: Beginnings

1 An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse

2 First Impressions

3 Helmandshire

4 ‘A Marathon Rather Than A Sprint’

5 Breather Break

Part II: Hope Over Experience

6 A King’s Funeral

7 The Spreading Virus

8 The Great Game – Round Four

9 Hooked on Drugs

10 Coping in Kabul

11 Highland Fling: Karzai in Scotland

12 Mr Brown Comes to Town

Part III: Against An Ebbing Tide

13 Reversal of Fortune

14 ‘We Are Winning – Only It Doesn’t Feel Like It’

15 The Karzai Conundrum

16 Cracking On in Helmand

17 Afghan Attitudes

18 Waiting for Obama

Part IV: Tactics Without Strategy: One Last Heave

19 Biden and Beyond

20 Au Revoir Afghanistan

21 Richard Holbrooke’s Flying Circus

22 Where’s Dick?

Part V: Recessional

23 Embassy Encore

24 Untying the Knot

25 Three Lessons Learned

26 Back to the Future

Photographic Insert

Endpapers (#ud688028b-807c-5867-b491-f95e861998b5)



Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher




List of Illustrations


‘Another day, another new Afghan strategy’ cartoon by Pugh © Jonathan Pugh/The Times/NI Syndication

‘Afghanistan – “It’s a marathon rather than a sprint”’ cartoon by JAS © JAS/The Telegraph



The British Residence in Kabul in 1968. Photograph by a member of the British Embassy staff

S C-C with the Grenadier Guards in Helmand. Photograph by 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards

S C-C and Lieutenant Colonel Carew Hatherley. Photograph by 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards



All other photographs are from the author’s private collection and were taken either by him or by friends, colleagues or family members.




Map of Afghanistan










Map of Kabul










Tribute to the Fallen


Text of Diplomatic Telegram of 24 February 2008 from HM Ambassador Kabul to the Foreign Secretary in London:



1 On 23 February, thanks to a fortunate delay in obtaining a helicopter flight from Camp Bastion to Lashkar Gah, I was able to join Lt Gen Jonathon Riley (Deputy Commanding General, ISAF) and several hundred other British and allied troops at the Service of Repatriation for Corporal Damian Stephen Lawrence of the 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment (The Green Howards). As this was the first British ‘ramp ceremony’ I had attended (I had once been to a much more elaborate Canadian ceremony at Kandahar), I cannot resist recording what I saw and heard, and felt.

2 Corporal Lawrence had died on 17 February, on operations with the Afghan National Army as part of an Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team. This difficult and dangerous work, performed with quiet distinction by the 2nd Yorks, is the keystone of our strategy in Afghanistan.

3 We gathered an hour before sunset. The troops – scores of Corporal Lawrence’s regimental comrades, men and women of all ranks and regiments of the British Army, 40 Commando Royal Marines, the Royal Navy, the Royal Guards Hussars of the Danish Army, Estonians and Americans, were formed into a great three-sided square, facing west towards the new runway at Bastion, and the empty spaces stretching to Iran beyond.

4 In the centre of the square stood the Padre, wearing battledress beneath his bands, and the ramrod column of the Regimental Sergeant Major, Mr Hind. Before us the sun was setting across the great southern desert, casting long shadows, illuminating the whole ceremony in shades of dusty gold. There was silence. The Chinooks and Sea Kings, Apaches and Lynxes, which usually buzz in and out of Bastion every few minutes from the helicopter lines behind us, had ceased flying, out of respect for the fallen.

5 And then, out of the sky to the north, appeared a single Hercules of the Royal Air Force. With a great roar it landed, perfectly, on the runway in front of us, and taxied out of sight, and sound.

6 Corporal Lawrence’s Commanding Officer, Lt Col Simon Downey, marched stiffly out into the middle of the parade ground. The RSM called us to attention. A bearer party, found by the Green Howards, brought Corporal Lawrence’s coffin, bound in the Union flag, out on to the centre of the square.

7 The service began, in the best traditions of lapidary Army Anglicanism. Plenty of dignity, not too much religion. The words of comfort for those who mourn from St Matthew; a few prayers, with responses; St John 14 (‘In my Father’s house there are many rooms’); Binyon’s lines (‘At the going down of the sun, And in the morning, We will remember them’), barked out, improbably, by the RSM; a lone bugler played Last Post, and Reveille; a well-judged eulogy, full of humanity and humour, by Colonel Downey; a deeply moving message of maternal pride, and affection for the regiment, from Corporal Lawrence’s Mum, on the North Yorkshire coast; and finally the Collect of the Yorkshire Regiment (‘Grant to the Yorkshire Regiment in its battalions and ranks, the strength that fears … no desperate endeavours and no foe bodily and spiritual; but advances in thy righteousness through all the rough places under the Captain of our salvation …’). The Lord’s Prayer, said together, the Blessing, and the Service itself was over.

8 By now the evening wind was up, and it was growing cold. And out of the silence we heard again the gradually growing growling of the C-130’s engines, as, with impeccable timing, it taxied back into sight. Then, in an extraordinary manoeuvre, it reversed thrust, and backed into the open side of the square, to take delivery of its sad cargo.

9 With the engines still turning, a loadmaster jumped down from the rear ramp, and stood to attention. A female RAF Corporal marched out, saluted smartly, and handed him the airwaybill. The Commanding Officer, and Mr Hind, formed up alongside the ramp. The bearer party shouldered the coffin, and, accompanied by the Padre, marched with perfect precision up into the hold of the Hercules. Colonel Downey mounted the ramp. Out of sight, he said his farewell to his fallen comrade. In short order, the bearers and accompanying party dismounted, the ramp closed, the Hercules taxied out, and took off. We stood in silence, listening to the fading murmur of its engines.

10 And then, in one of the most striking moments of the whole ceremony, from out of the setting sun came the roar of the Hercules, flying in fast and low. As the aircraft passed over, and started to climb, the starboard wing dipped, in impossibly eloquent tribute from the Royal Air Force to Corporal Lawrence and all those who had fallen here. As we watched, the aeroplane climbed in a great wheeling turn, up into a still blue north-eastern sky, taking Corporal Lawrence on back home, via Kandahar and Brize Norton, to North Yorkshire.

11 The RSM dismissed the parade. The obsequies were over. It was now dusk. A great crush of men and vehicles pressed back into Britannia Lines, and the work of this war.


COWPER-COLES




Preface


Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’

Some 2,000 years ago, a Greek recorded a conflict which had convulsed the Hellenic lands for more than three decades. The writer wanted his work to be a possession for all time. He hoped that men would use it as a guide to avoid the mistakes that had precipitated the events through which he had lived. But he noted that human nature never really changed. Men probably would therefore ignore the lessons of his history, and repeat the errors he had reported. Nevertheless, he thought it worth setting down his account anyway, just in case expectation might for once be confounded by hope fulfilled.

The conflict in Afghanistan is no Peloponnesian War, although it has lasted even longer. And I am certainly no Thucydides. But for three and a half years, from May 2007, I experienced at first hand a struggle that was by the spring of 2011 swallowing each year some $125 billion of US taxpayers’ money and getting on for £6 billion a year from the British Exchequer. This was a real war that had by then taken the lives of more than 2,000 coalition soldiers and of some 350 British servicemen and women, as well as those of tens of thousands of Afghans in and out of uniform. More than 10,000 American soldiers had been wounded in Afghanistan.

As British ambassador in Kabul from 2007 to 2009, and then as the Foreign Secretary’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from February 2009 until September 2010, I saw politicians, generals, diplomats and officials struggling with successive strategies which never seemed to deliver what we wanted, and with military tactics which – we all knew – could not, without a credible political strategy, resolve Afghanistan’s underlying problems.

In London, in the English shires, and in the border areas of Scotland and Wales which supply so many of our fighting men and women, as well as in Washington and the fifty states beyond, there was an uneasy sense that this war was misconceived. Many people shared the sentiment attributed to one of the wisest of British prime ministers, Harold Macmillan, that the first rule of politics is ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ For Britons especially, the unhappy history of earlier military expeditions into Afghanistan weighed heavily. Most press commentators were sceptical.

And yet we carried on, as part of a great US-led coalition, with a mainly military, and hugely expensive, campaign to stabilise a faraway country of which we truly knew little. We stuck at it because Britain couldn’t and wouldn’t let down its coalition partners, especially the Americans. We kept going because we wanted to support our troops. We stuck at it because we wanted to believe our generals. Each year they assured us that, at last, they had the strategy and the resources they needed to do the job. This year at last, they said every year, we were going to turn the corner. The Americans had a new plan, a new general, a fresh surge. ‘Astronomical progress’ was being made. The momentum of the insurgency was being reversed. There was reason for cautious optimism. Finally, it was safe to stroll (in body armour) in the bazaar of some fly-blown village in the Helmand Valley. Nobody, especially not politicians seeking votes in Middle England, wanted to be accused of not backing our boys.

But Middle England took a more nuanced view. The same people who were so fiercely loyal to the regiments woven into the fabric of British society had doubts about why those regiments were in Afghanistan at all, and about what lasting good they were doing there. Middle England, and Scotland and Wales and Ireland as well, had folk memories of what had happened to British battalions which had ventured too far, or stayed too long, west of the Indus. Among some of the armed forces’ most loyal civilian supporters there was a consciousness about Afghanistan that combined Carry On up the Khyber and Flashman with ancestral memories of forebears who had fought and died on India’s North West Frontier.

Most other books on the present conflict in Afghanistan have fallen into one of two categories. On the one hand, there have been dozens of breathlessly whizz-bang accounts of the fighting by journalists embedded with the troops. Each of those books is a potent and richly deserved tribute to the sacrifice and courage of our fighting men and women. But, precisely because such war stories focus so closely on combat, they sometimes miss the broader perspective of the war. Moreover, when a journalist has put his life, literally, in the hands of the men and women about whom he writes, it seems like bad manners or worse to ask what wider purpose is served by one’s hosts’ superhuman sacrifice. On the other hand, there have been some outstanding semi-academic descriptions of the conflict and of the lands, not just Afghanistan, in which it is taking place. But, by their nature, neither set of books has offered the picture of the strategic direction of this war which I hope here to provide. Thus this book tries, through the prism of my small part in the enterprise, to illuminate some of the political and diplomatic aspects of Britain’s and America’s mainly military engagement in Afghanistan.

I try to address some fundamental questions about the nature of the West’s Afghanistan project. I explain how the doubts I had, even before I had left London, about the strategy we were supposed to be pursuing were confirmed by experience on the ground. I describe my growing admiration for the extraordinary courage and professionalism of our fighting men and women in Helmand. But I also explain how I came gradually to understand that the problems we faced went far beyond ‘merely’ countering the Taliban insurgency in the south and east. I tell how I came to see that the Taliban had never been defeated in 2001–2; that the Bonn settlement that had followed had been a victors’ peace, from which the vanquished had been excluded; and that the constitution resulting from that settlement could last only as long as the West was prepared to stay in Afghanistan to prop up the present disposition.

More specifically, the book pays tribute to the tactical success our soldiers are undoubtedly having. But it also illustrates the deficiencies of a strategy focused on pacifying and garrisoning with Western troops selected areas of the country where the insurgency is strongest, in order to hand those areas over to the civil and military agencies of a half-formed central Afghan state. It suggests that, even if our military achieve local, tactical and temporary success in Helmand or Kandahar, that will be far from enough to achieve within three years our wider strategic goal of stabilising Afghanistan to the point where the Afghan authorities can secure and govern the country with only money and advice from outside. It points out that the ‘Government’ to which we plan gradually to transfer security responsibility, province by province, is far from being either able or willing to secure, let alone govern, such a legacy. And it shows how my then boss, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and I became convinced that the only sensible strategic approach had to be a political one, drawing in all the internal and regional parties to a conflict with roots far deeper than the Western intervention of October 2001.

Finally, the book sets out my conviction that the Afghanistan project can be brought to a successful conclusion, but only once America is prepared to talk direct to its enemies, and then to devote unprecedented political and diplomatic resources to leading an international effort to devise and deliver an internal and regional political process. Whether the American Republic is confident enough to do that remains an open question. There must be doubts too about whether America will be willing properly to finish the job, now that the demon who first drew us into Afghanistan – Osama bin Laden – has finally been exorcised. And it may well be that the moment for negotiating a well-ordered exit from Afghanistan for NATO forces has passed, as the political pressure mounts for having our troops leave the battlefield by the end of 2014 more or less regardless of conditions on the ground.

None of this is to say that military success won’t be achieved or proclaimed. Nor that a political framework for withdrawal won’t in the end be negotiated, in something of a rush, to meet Western not Eastern timelines. But, without the West taking the initiative, it risks being suboptimal and, in the great sweep of Afghan history, short lived. In time historians may point to the parallels with earlier imperial scuttles, with the baneful consequences of which the world is still living.

Inevitably, the book is written from the perspective of a diplomat, based in Kabul, and then in London, over three years from 2007. It does not cover the tragic diversion of attention and then resources from Afghanistan to Iraq from 2002, or the British Government’s fateful decision to take on Helmand in 2006. It is not about the ground war in Helmand. It focuses on the means diplomats and their political bosses use to understand and influence. It describes the work of an embassy and an envoy, in circumstances that were highly unusual in many respects, but typical in many others. What made the Embassy in Kabul different was that we were operating in a war zone, alongside and in support of a massive military effort. But the work of reporting and analysis, of entertaining and influencing contacts, of international consultation and co-ordination, resembled normal diplomacy in other capitals around the world. In Kabul, however, it mattered more than it did in most places.

In putting this story into print, I have had no access to the extensive records I lodged in London of almost every significant official interaction I had over more than three years. Instead, I have relied on memory, and on four daily lines of scribble in a rough and ready diary, telling me where I was, but not what I was really doing or thinking. The book does not therefore pretend to be a full or authoritative account of what happened: rather it is a reflection of my evolving understanding of what we were doing in and to Afghanistan, and of what Afghanistan was doing to us.

As a former official, I asked myself whether publishing an account of my experiences so soon after I had left the public service was consistent with my obligations to my former employer. But Diplomatic Service Regulations state that ‘The FCO welcomes debate on foreign policy … The FCO recognises that there is a public interest in allowing former officials to write accounts of their time in government. These contributions can help public understanding and debate … there is no ban on former members of the Diplomatic Service writing their memoirs … but obligations of confidentiality remain …’

What is at stake in Afghanistan is not trivial. It is not an issue of ideology. Nor is it a question of political allegiance. It goes deeper than diplomatic nicety, and beyond the pride of individuals or institutions. Few aspects of this story are truly confidential. It is a war in which the West has invested vast quantities of blood and treasure – and reputation. After nearly a decade of conflict, getting it as right as is now possible is a major national interest, for us, for America, for our allies and, above all, for millions of wretched Afghans who have suffered too much and for too long.

So if, in its small way, this book helps us correct some of the mistakes, of both strategy and tactics, that we may be making, it may do some good.




PART I

BEGINNINGS


If the task is arduous, the mission is noble.

President de Gaulle’s sole instruction to the new Government Delegate in Algiers, November 1960




Chapter 1

An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse


Monday 30 October 2006 – the Ambassador’s Office, British Embassy, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: I was sitting sleepily at my desk after lunch, catching up on reading. I had returned only the night before from a family holiday in Egypt. My secretary came in: could I have an urgent word on the secure phone with a senior official in London?

Of course I could, I said, wondering with the usual mixture of excitement and dread what this could be about. The silky tones of the senior official soon cut to the chase. ‘Ministers’ had decided to upgrade Britain’s civilian effort in Afghanistan, to try to keep pace with the huge increase in military resources being pumped into Helmand. They thought that I was the right person to take charge of what would become one of the largest and most unusual British diplomatic missions in the world. There had been pressure from the British military for a ‘heavy hitter’ to be sent as ambassador. I would be working on the standard terms of six weeks on, two weeks off. I would see more of my family than if I remained in Saudi Arabia to complete my tour there. I would go to Kabul for a year or so to start with, but, naturally, it was hoped I would stay for longer. The whole thing was still very secret (hence the secure line), not least because the incumbent in Kabul had not been told. Was I interested? Like the fool I am when flattered, I said of course I was interested. I would need to talk this over with my wife, but I knew this was just the sort of challenge I relished. The senior official sounded relieved. London would be back in touch in due course. In the meantime, not a word to anyone – apart of course from my immediate family.

Weeks, and then months, passed without my hearing anything more. I wondered if I had been dreaming, or if the senior official had changed his mind – as he was prone to do on personnel matters. I managed to persuade a worried family that this early move made professional sense. I had already completed three of the four years I had been due to spend in Saudi Arabia. Privately, I thought, without being too pompous, that much of my career had helped prepare me for this. I had been opposed to the invasion of Iraq. But I had believed that we had had little alternative to joining the Americans in toppling the Taliban from power in Kabul in October 2001, when in the wake of 9/11 they had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Like President Obama and many others, I had an instinctive sense that Afghanistan was the good campaign (in 2006 it was not yet evident that it was a full-scale war), in which much had been achieved for the long-suffering people of Afghanistan.

Moreover, I knew the job would involve working with the military. Ever since as a small boy I had manoeuvred my battalions of Britain’s toy soldiers around the sandpit at home, I had been interested in matters military. I enjoyed dealing with soldiers. I knew their jargon, and admired their can-do style. I was in awe of their confidence and efficiency. And, at least since I had followed the great counter-insurgency campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s (Malaya, Algeria, Aden, Northern Ireland, Vietnam above all) through the pages of the Illustrated London News my grandmother had sent me each week, I had been interested in strategy and tactics. I had read widely about counter-insurgency. At Oxford, my best subject had been Roman military history. My favourite historians were those great chroniclers of ancient wars, Tacitus and Thucydides.

At least as important, my years in different parts of Arabia, and my fluent but flawed Arabic, had given me a sense of what mattered in the Muslim world and made it move. Working in a part of the Islamic world where people prayed in Arabic, but spoke or thought in other languages, had enormous attractions – especially one with as much history and geography as Afghanistan and the North West Frontier of Imperial India.

But what really decided me was a sense that, unlike so many British ambassadorships, this would be a real job. Success, or failure, in Kabul would matter to Ministers. It was a job for which I would be given the resources – both human and financial – I needed. Less flummery, more serious work. Vanity and ambition urged me on. I dismissed an American friend’s earlier warning: Afghanistan was a morass; and there could be no good outcome to the present half-baked Western intervention, however well intentioned it had originally been.

Three weeks to the day after that call from London, personal tragedy struck, in the form of another wholly unexpected phone call from England. Out of the blue, my sister-in-law rang at nearly midnight Saudi time. My beloved middle brother, Philip, had been taken seriously ill. Every Monday evening in winter he and his friends in the Honourable Artillery Company Saddle Club used to exercise the gun-carriage horses of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. Philip had just taken a particularly difficult horse over the jumps in the covered school at the St John’s Wood cavalry barracks and had collapsed. He was now at the Middlesex Hospital: could I ring and find out what was happening?

With a heavy heart, I got through eventually to the A&E department. A nurse answered. I told her who I was, and whom I was trying to track down. Trying to sound calm, she put her hand over the mouthpiece, but not well enough. I could hear her calling to a doctor. ‘It’s his brother,’ she half whispered. ‘Shall I tell him?’ In a ghastly flash, I knew that my brother had suffered the same fate – sudden death by massive, unannounced heart attack – as our father had, on another Monday night, thirty-eight years earlier.

The weeks that followed passed like a rushing nightmare – working at long distance with my surviving brother to deal with all the awful consequences of sudden death, especially for a young family, all the while going through the motions of continuing with my work in Riyadh. Somehow, I summoned up the strength to preside and speak at a glittering Taranto Night dinner in the Residence Garden organised by my Naval Attaché. His enthusiasm for the Fleet Air Arm of which he was a member extended to inviting the Italian Ambassador to attend a celebration of the greatest defeat in the brief and inglorious history of Mussolini’s Navy (luckily, the Ambassador had refused). And then, returning to England for a desperately sad funeral in Devon, I found myself summoned to London the next day for a meeting on policy towards Saudi Arabia.

And, through all of this, no one got back to me, as promised, on the Afghan job. A tentative enquiry to one senior official provoked surprise that I had even asked: it had all been agreed (even though I had heard nothing, still less any formal proposal, since the phone call out of the blue). My appointment would be a ‘managed move’, with no selection board or any of the usual procedures: it awaited only sorting out at the Kabul end, which I took to mean breaking the news to my predecessor. Alarm bells should have rung. The casual desperation with which the Foreign Office was moving to fill the post meant that the terms and conditions of the appointment were never put down in black and white, as a less credulous or ambitious officer might have insisted.

But, as I started to read and talk about Afghanistan, my enthusiasm grew. To those not in the know about my next job, I revealed only that one day I might be interested in working in and on that fascinating country. Rashly, I decided to try to learn Pashtu, the language of the great tribal confederation to which Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, belonged. It was a choice between that and Dari, the Persian dialect spoken by the Afghans in the north, and the language of Afghan business and government. For an Arabist, the Pashtu alphabet was easy. But I soon discovered that neither the grammar nor the vocabulary was, especially when delivered to me in Riyadh down a video link of extreme fragility and fuzziness from the Diplomatic Service Language Centre in London.

By March 2007, my posting to Kabul was official, and I returned finally from Riyadh for eight weeks of unremitting preparations for the new job, from which the only relief was a ten-day family holiday in Syria. The pace and intensity of work were a foretaste of things to come.

What struck me most forcefully was the towering scale of British ambition in the troubled Afghan province for which Britain had assumed responsibility, Helmand, and across Afghanistan more generally. Then Lieutenant General David Richards had returned from Kabul only in February 2007, after nine months commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan. During a triumphant tour, he had displayed the charm and charisma, and aptitude for leading from the front, which would later take him right to the top of the military tree. Under David Richards, NATO had pushed into Helmand, the neighbouring province of Kandahar and across the south. When I visited the newly returned General and his staff at the headquarters of the NATO Rapid Reaction Corps at Rheindahlen in Germany, they briefed me, with PowerPoint displays, on Operation Medusa. This, they said, had been a significant victory over the Taliban before Kandahar, in which British and American troops had shored up underpowered Canadian forces in cleansing an area of the Taliban.

Back in London, I was given a stack of British plans and papers, including a ‘United Kingdom’ strategy for Afghanistan, and a ‘United Kingdom’ joint strategic plan for Helmand. In their enthusiasm no one seemed to notice the hubris of Britain drawing up, at great length and in extraordinary detail, its own semi-independent plans for stabilising a vast and violent province of Afghanistan, let alone the whole country.

Paddling furiously in the wake of this bow wave of military enthusiasm were Whitehall’s civilians, notably the Foreign Office (FCO) and the much put-upon Department for International Development (DFID). My appointment was one of the main ways in which the FCO sought to show its support for the enterprise. But so was an elaborate and expensive (in FCO terms) plan to uplift both our Embassy in Kabul and our Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand. Occasional plaintive bleats from the Treasury about how much all this was costing were brushed aside. Our soldiers had to be supported with a proper civilian effort.

But it was not only those in government who spoke so persuasively of imminent success. Within days of my return from Saudi Arabia I was down at the Foreign Office’s Wilton Park conference centre, in the lush downlands of Sussex, at a conference taking stock of progress on the ‘Afghanistan Compact’, between Afghanistan and the international community, signed at a great gathering in London in early February 2006. That Compact was a remarkably ambitious prospectus of commitments the Afghan Government had promised the international community it would fulfil over the following few years, covering almost every area of its national life. At Wilton Park, speaker after speaker took a line that was to become all too familiar in the months and years ahead: ‘progress has been made, but challenges remain’.

Among the most persuasive of the optimists, and in many ways the golden boy of the international effort in Afghanistan, was Canada’s former Ambassador to Afghanistan, and later Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, Chris Alexander. No Dr Pangloss, he was smart enough to acknowledge the warts on his vision of a slowly rising tide of security, governance and development. But, like so many other able and ambitious Westerners involved in the project, he saw no point in being anything other than optimistic.

In Wilton Park’s ancient halls, and again several weeks later, at yet another conference, this time in the even more hallowed precincts of All Souls College, Oxford, my first doubts crept in. I was sure that progress had been made, and was being made. But I wondered how we would ever complete the enormous task we had set ourselves – of rebuilding the Afghan nation as well as the Afghan state – when none of the three main tools essential for success was yet fit for purpose: neither the Afghan Government in all its different manifestations, at national, provincial or district level; nor the international community, whether organised through the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, or through the UN, let alone the European Union; nor Afghanistan’s neighbours, each of which needed to be committed to working in sustained and co-ordinated fashion towards the greater common good of a gradually stabilising Afghanistan, but all of whom were still competing in what amounted to another round of the Great Game.


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It was at Wilton Park too that I made my first acquaintance with a phenomenon of which I was to see much more in the years ahead: the Afghan conference industry. As with Ireland, or Palestine, or Sri Lanka, or most other conflicts, so Afghanistan’s travails attract what can at times seem like a stage army of caring and committed local and international actors. They travel from conference to conference, endlessly re-examining the entrails of the problem. Such consultations, among governments, and between governments and non-governmental actors, can be valuable, in pooling knowledge and sharing best practice. But when the issues under debate are as intractable as those we face in Afghanistan, such meetings risk becoming ends in themselves, rather than means to the end of solving the problem. And, just occasionally, I have had a sneaking suspicion that some of those taking part – myself included – would feel a bit lost if the problem were actually solved and the conference circus ceased to rotate.

Not everyone to whom I spoke in London that spring was quite as upbeat as the British officers who briefed me. To his credit, one of the more senior Foreign Office officials responsible for South Asia told me, quietly, that he suspected that the Western military intervention in southern Afghanistan had provoked more violence than it had suppressed. His instinct was that the only approach capable of treating the problem would be a political one, involving both the internal and regional participants in the conflict. His quietly owlish demeanour belied a persuasive radicalism far removed from the conventional wisdom of the time.

Similarly worried were some of the more academic analysts in government, especially those more removed by temperament or geography from the pressure and pace of daily military and diplomatic activity in London. They warned me that, gradually, the insurgency in the Pashtun areas of the south and east of Afghanistan was spreading and deepening, and that NATO and its Afghan accomplices were not succeeding in creating stability that was either sustainable or replicable in the insurgency-infected areas where Western forces were not, or no longer, present.

Such gloomy thoughts were, however, far from my mind as I made my final preparations for a posting to which I was greatly looking forward. My team of three Pashtu teachers gradually brought me up to what the Foreign Office language experts call ‘survival level’. They took enormous trouble to equip me as best they could for the linguistic and cultural challenges that lay ahead. One kindly invited me to stay with his family in north-west London for immersion training. All spoke of Afghanistan’s recent history: the overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973 by his cousin, Daoud Khan, who established a republic; the Communist coup of April 1978, followed by the Soviet invasion in December 1979; the nationalist regime of the former Communist Dr Najibullah, which was established by the Russians and which survived their departure in February 1989 by three years; the appalling struggle between the warlords from 1992 until 1996; and, finally, the Taliban’s beginnings as a movement of resistance to the depredations of the warlords, and their rule from 1996 until the Western intervention in October 2001. But my teachers played down the horrors which they and their families had experienced, in and out of prison. Each was a talent that would have been better employed back in his homeland rather than, for example, doing dry-cleaning in Shepherd’s Bush.

My final week before departure was spent in the surreal surroundings of a former prep school in the Surrey heathlands, undergoing what is euphemistically called Hostile Environment Training. Overenthusiastic ex-Special Forces instructors took a thinly disguised relish in putting us namby-pamby civilians through the meat grinder. They taught us how to wear a helmet and body armour; how to board helicopters and leave them in a hurry and in a dust storm; how to navigate across country with a compass; how to ‘cross-deck’ or, rather, be violently ‘cross-decked’ from a disabled vehicle to a rescue vehicle; how to apply a tourniquet and staunch a gaping chest wound; and, most terrifying of all, how to cope with kidnap and torture. My efforts to build a relationship in what I assumed was his native language with a very convincing-looking Al Qaeda operative were rudely rebuffed in unmistakable Geordie: ‘Shut the fuck up, willya?’

And then it was time for my final calls in Whitehall before departure. The Permanent Secretaries of the three Whitehall departments directly engaged in the conflict had just returned from the first of several joint visits to Afghanistan. Their report to Ministers had struck an upbeat note. ‘Overall, we are encouraged,’ it had begun, before going on to celebrate the way in which all elements of the British presence in Afghanistan were working together, while noting that, of course, ‘challenges remain’.

This was only the first of scores of reports back to Whitehall by visitors from London that I was to see over the next three years, only a few of which would address head on the scale of the mountain the allied effort in Afghanistan had to climb. Like the ‘Three Tenors’ (as the Permanent Secretaries had been dubbed, with that precious wit beloved of Whitehall), most such reports chose to accentuate the positive. Cautious optimism was the dominant theme. The civilian and military sides of the British effort in Helmand and Kabul were more ‘joined up’ than ever. We were at or approaching the turning point. There were no awkward questions about the credibility (or even existence) of a wider strategy for stabilising the whole country. Such was the pressure not to sound defeatist that all of us indulged from time to time in such self-congratulatory vacuities, as if the fact that most members of the UK team were facing in roughly the same direction, and talking to each other, was a matter for celebration.

At my last meeting in the Foreign Office before leaving for Heathrow, I mentioned to a senior official that my instinct was that we had made a strategic mistake in piling into Helmand the previous summer. He brushed my worry aside, assuring me: ‘Well, we are there anyway, and there is nothing we can do about it now, so there is no point in worrying about it.’






(#ulink_dc342808-17c6-5100-be14-f153a824ac05) The nineteenth-century struggle between Britain’s Indian Empire and the expanding Russian Empire for control over the lands which separated them, especially Afghanistan.




Chapter 2

First Impressions


In 2007, the Foreign Office still felt it could afford to give VIP treatment to a new British ambassador travelling out from London to take up his or her appointment. An expensively hired limousine would convey him from home to Heathrow, he would use the VIP lounge once there, and the flight out would be in first class. And soon after he arrived he would send a telegram of First Impressions back to the Foreign Secretary in London.

Thus it was that on a May evening in 2007 I found myself climbing self-consciously into a large black Jaguar outside my home in Balham to begin the long journey to Kabul. As the chauffeur in an oddly anachronistic peaked cap negotiated the late rush-hour traffic, I reflected that the challenges in Kabul would be much greater, and much more real for Britain, than those I had faced in my two previous Embassies, Tel Aviv and Riyadh, each tough in its own way. How right that was to prove. I confess that I also wondered how, or whether, I would survive – literally. My posting had resulted in a huge leap in my life insurance premium, to which the Foreign Office was properly contributing.

An easy overnight ride to Dubai on Emirates, whose aircraft I would come to know so well over the next three years, brought my first surprise. Flights onward from Dubai to Kabul left not from the main terminal, but from one across the airfield, with decidedly inferior facilities. From here – dubbed the ‘Axis of Evil’ Terminal – the departures board announced flights to Baghdad, Tehran, Harare and a host of other exotic destinations.

And it was here that I first came across the civilian flotsam of the international conflict industry: Men In Beards, mostly, exotically tattooed, wearing sand-coloured cargo pants, military backpacks hoisted over their shoulders. Most looked like, and probably were, former soldiers, now making money as private security guards. Others were aid workers, journalists, spies or Special Forces types in thin disguise, or, just occasionally, diplomats trying to look more macho than they really were. Scattered along the line of male mercenaries checking in for the UN flight to Kabul were only a few women, of the confidently eccentric beauty which danger zones seem to attract.

The flight was terrifying. Service, from the South African crew of the ancient UN charter plane, was elementary. Apart from my fellow passengers, the landscape – the Straits of Hormuz, the mountains of southern Iran, then the dusty plains of Pakistani Baluchistan, followed by the great southern deserts of Afghanistan, divided by the grey-green valleys of the Helmand River and its tributaries – was the only entertainment. We moved north and east, and mountain ridges and then ranges rose out of the desert. As the ancient plane climbed laboriously up and over them towards Kabul, we ran into a series of violent summer storms. Circling around the great basin in the mountains in which the Afghan capital lies, we pitched and yawed for at least an hour, before the pilot told his relieved passengers that we would wait in Islamabad for the dust to settle, literally.

Three hours later than planned, we touched down in Kabul. From the window I could see a curious cocktail of aircraft. Ancient Antonovs and Ilyushins, and recently refurbished Mil helicopters, seemed to symbolise Afghanistan’s past and perhaps its future. But the foreground – the present – was filled with Western military airframes: everywhere the C-130 Hercules, the utility truck of modern expeditionary warfare, bearing US, British, Canadian, Dutch, Danish and even Australian markings. Swarms of helicopters – American Black Hawks and Chinooks, a brace of French Eurocopters – covered the apron, plus a motley collection of civil aeroplanes: small propeller-driven aircraft in UN white; larger and older Boeings on charter, disgorging troops; and a rag-bag assortment of airliners of varying vintages, painted in the colours of airlines I had never heard of: Ariana, Kam Air, Pamir, Safi, among others.

My Deputy, Michael Ryder, an old Foreign Office friend and colleague, with the quizzical air of the Cambridge historian he once was, greeted me at the foot of the steps, along with my Royal Military Police Close Protection Team. I was hustled into a heavily armoured Land Cruiser and quickly briefed by the Team Leader: ‘Never open the door yourself. If there’s an incident, Sir, get down, and do exactly as we say. If we are incapacitated, this is the radio, and this our call sign. We are all medically trained, and there is a full first-aid kit in the back.’

We took the long, and supposedly safer, route to the Embassy. Only later did I learn that the direct route – Route White – was known as suicide alley. We wended our way through Kabul’s north-western suburbs. I saw for the first time just how poor the place was, how squalid the conditions were in which most of the population somehow survived, how far the city had been wrecked, mostly in the savage intra-Afghan fighting which had followed the collapse of the Najibullah regime in 1992. That had been before the Taliban had ridden into town and restored order in 1996.

In my three years living in or visiting Afghanistan I would never tire of the rich panorama of Kabul street life: donkey carts, flocks of sheep and goats, bazaars for everything from printer cartridges to garden hoses, and low-tech engineering of the most creative kind, producing anything from axes to air compressors. Scattered around were the wrecked remnants of what had once been the garden city of South-west Asia, a city of tree-lined avenues and lush parks, to which the citizens of neighbouring countries had repaired for the 1960s equivalent of a mini-break. Now it was all laid waste. There was virtually nothing to show for five and a half years of Western engagement, apart from the narco-tecture of the drug lords’ palaces on stolen land, and an encroaching tide of checkpoints, sandbags and earth-filled barriers of hessian and wire mesh. For me, the most poignant symbol of Kabul’s desolation will always be the catenary poles for the Czech-made trolleybuses which once crisscrossed the city, now standing splayed against the sky, their torn wires flapping in the wind.

And then we reached the Residence. Smartly saluting Gurkha guards swung open two black metal gates in a nondescript side-street. We were in the garden of a neat suburban villa, an Afghan version of a Barratt home, with a narrow lawn, a small swimming pool, a terrace, three guest bedrooms, a one-bedroom flat for me, with an armoured keep – in fact my bathroom – in which I could (and would) take refuge, all hurriedly furnished by the Foreign Office estates team in a much mocked blend of IKEA and the Land of Leather. The only clues that this was the British Ambassador’s Residence were the Royal Coat of Arms affixed, with a brass plate, to the wall by the front door; an idiosyncratic selection of gloomy British landscape paintings which my predecessor had persuaded the Government Art Collection in London to send out; and, hidden on the shelves of a pine-veneer sideboard, a small collection of battered silver rescued from Britain’s grand old Embassy in Kabul.

In 1920, when the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon ordered the construction of what was then known as the British Legation in Kabul, he decreed that the British Minister in Kabul should be the best-housed man in Asia. Ninety years later, Her Britannic Majesty’s Representative in Kabul was not exactly the best-housed man in Kabul, let alone in Afghanistan, still less in Asia. Nevertheless, the Residence was warm in winter and cool in summer. A loyal and conscientious team of Afghans made it all work. The ability to offer British, international and Afghan guests food, drink and even a bed at almost any hour, with little or no notice, proved to be a powerful tool for the job – the kind of ‘corporate entertainment facility’ which every good ambassador’s residence should be.

On that May evening, Michael Ryder had assembled well over a hundred members of the Embassy staff for a barbecue to meet the new Ambassador. It was only then, as I moved from group to group gathered in the dusk, that I realised just how diverse my new team would be. At least a third were women. There were people of many different ethnic backgrounds, and with disabilities (courageously, in Kabul).

But what was really striking was the range of institutional cultures represented on that Residence lawn. Only a small minority were ‘straight’ diplomats. Of course, there were spies, and members of the home civil service, from departments as different as HM Revenue and Customs (advising the Afghans on raising their tax take), the Ministry of Justice (which had sent out six prison officers), the Crown Prosecution Service (including a Rumpole-esque representative of the English Bar), the Cabinet Office (a fast-streamer in search of excitement) and of course the Department for International Development (scores of enthusiastic development experts, known affectionately to the military as tree-huggers). But there were soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen in desert uniform too, and British policemen, from the Met and the Northumbria Police, and customs men and women, and officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, technicians of every kind, and even builders from Britain, refurbishing the Embassy’s secure zone. And, everywhere, the ubiquitous Men In Beards – some genuine Special Forces operatives, but mostly just pretending. Few of the home civil servants had ever worked in an embassy or dealt with the Diplomatic Service, let alone operated in an environment as difficult and dangerous as Afghanistan.

Turning such a mixed bag of officers, officials and civilian experts into a real team would be a never-ending challenge, especially as the working pattern for most civilian staff of six weeks on, two weeks off, with six-or twelve-month tours, meant that the turnover was unending. Every Thursday night (Friday was our only full day off) somebody would be holding leaving drinks of one kind or another, even if only to celebrate surviving another six weeks ‘in theatre’. Sometimes, in despair, learning that some member of the team had just disappeared ‘on breather’, I would feel I was running a railway station rather than an embassy.

Mostly, however, it was more like being the headmaster of a run-down but generally happy and successful prep school, or the governor of an open prison whose inmates were repaying their debt to society handsomely and many times over. None of us doubted that, compared with our rivals – the overlarge and persistently unhappy American Embassy, the Canadians, the French, the Germans, the Danes and the Dutch, plus a UN mission almost always at war with itself – we were by far the most effective diplomatic operation in town. We knew more, did more, worked harder and had more fun than any of the other Embassies.

But, in May 2007, all that was still before me. In the gathering gloom, and with a distinct nip in the air encouraging brevity (Kabul is nearly 6,000 feet above sea level), Michael chinked on his glass, welcomed the new ‘HMA’ and asked me to ‘say a few words’. I can’t remember now exactly what I said then, or at meetings the next day for the British staff and then at a town-hall meeting for all the several hundred Embassy employees, of many nationalities. But I know that the messages I wanted to get across were as follows. First, and most important, we needed to be honest in our assessments of what was happening, and of what would and wouldn’t work. Both the intervention in Iraq and the Afghan project had in my view been bedevilled by too much wishful thinking, an excess of over-eager-to-please officers and officials telling their masters, locally and back in capitals, what they thought those bosses wanted to hear. Second, I wanted us to work to high standards, everyone delivering to the best of his or her ability. Sloppy drafting, for example, meant sloppy thinking. Third, I wanted people to behave as though they were professionals: I had no objection, for instance, to casual dress, but visitors to the British Embassy needed to come away thinking we were an operation they could trust. ‘More Goldman Sachs on dress-down Friday than Glastonbury’ was the message I tried to convey. And, finally, I wanted us to have fun. We were in a tough place, doing a tough job. We needed to be able to chill out – within the proper boundaries.

How all this went down I don’t know. But I do know that, in general, and despite the inevitable ups and downs, we were able over the next couple of years to build a team that really was a team, in the best sense of the term. It was much more than just the comradeship of adversity. It was because we all believed we had a real and important job to do, and we wanted to give it our best shot.

The next morning I started to get to grips with the Embassy’s physical and human geography. The main offices were in a squat block of flats leased from the Bulgarian Embassy. The building was supposedly earthquake-proof, festooned with satellite dishes and wireless aerials, and still infested with builders brought out from London to upgrade it to match the Afghan ambitions of Her Majesty’s Government (HMG). Most staff lived in converted cargo containers, or ‘pods’, in an area of the compound known, inevitably, as Poddington. But a growing proportion, including most of the DFID team, were transferring to a range of expensively leased and refurbished villas. Staff there lived student-style, sharing sitting rooms and kitchens. There was a canteen, serving subsidised food of varying quality from seven till seven, a small shop, a bar (of which more later), a gym and an asphalt sports pitch. A swimming pool was to come later, and in fits and starts. Almost all travel off this compound had to be authorised and, depending on the security situation, protected in varying degrees. About a hundred private guards from Britain, almost all ex-forces, plus over 300 Gurkhas, secured our operations, at a cost of tens of millions of pounds each year.

I took my first morning meeting, and my first weekly town-hall meeting. I ate my first canteen lunch – I would try always to lunch there when I did not have an official engagement – and drank my first drink at the bar. The officer in charge of my eight-man team of bodyguards from the Royal Military Police briefed me on the daily routine. And then it was down to business. At one of my first briefings, I told the Embassy’s senior intelligence representative that my top priority would be building a relationship with President Karzai. ‘Oh no it won’t,’ he retorted in the blunt northern fashion that I was to come to value. ‘Your key relationship will be with the American Ambassador. He matters most to us.’ In this he was not implying that my job wasn’t to influence President Karzai and his Government, but that I would have a much better chance of doing so if I worked with the Ambassador of the predominant foreign power in Afghanistan.

So it was that on my second night in Kabul I found myself in the heavily fortified American Embassy compound, riding the lift up to the penthouse apartment of my new US colleague, William Wood. Bill was to become a valued colleague and a good friend. A highly intelligent and very senior member of the US Foreign Service, he had been personally selected by the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, for this key job, having pleased the Bush Administration with his performance as ambassador in Bogotá. In effect, he was being transferred from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror. Bill was utterly professional and unfailingly loyal, despite often being saddled with impossible instructions from Washington. He never did more than hint at the doubts I suspected he had about some aspects of the Bush Administration’s approach to Afghanistan. Behind a larger-than-life exterior, firing off one-liners and enjoying the occasional cigarette and Scotch on the rocks, lay a man of culture and discrimination, whose real loves were history and English literature, especially P. G. Wodehouse.

Bill, who had arrived only a few weeks before me, would often refer, somewhat nostalgically, to his Colombian experience, particularly of aerial spraying of the coca crop, which he believed to have been a huge success there. This had already led the Kabul diplomatic corps to christen him ‘Chemical Bill’.

Little of that was obvious to me as we got to know each other over dinner and drinks on the vast terrace of the Ambassadorial apartment. As we looked over the parapet through the dust-filled night at the uncertain flickering of Kabul’s lights, Bill revealed what was on his mind. He spoke of bringing over US Drug Enforcement Administration crop duster aircraft and helicopter gunships, and spraying the whole of the Helmand Valley with the weedkiller Roundup. C-130 transport aircraft could fly behind, dropping seed and shovels to the population. If it were done soon enough, there would be time for a second harvest in 2007.

As mildly as I dared at this first encounter with a key contact, I expressed doubts about whether this approach was practical. I wondered whether other green crops might be killed too. I asked what President Karzai and his Government (who were known to be strongly opposed to aerial spraying) would think, and how a population deprived overnight of much of their livelihood would react. I worried that such action might risk turning an insurgency into an insurrection. But Bill stuck to his guns. Aerial spraying had worked in Colombia. With British support, it could be made to work in Helmand. Bill would put US thinking down on paper and send it to me. He looked to me to swing HMG behind such an approach. I promised to think about it.

When I woke the next morning, I wondered if I had been dreaming. Or if Bill had been exaggerating for effect. But I realised how serious he was, and what difficulties we would face with the Bush Administration over poppy eradication, when an email from Bill popped into my home inbox, covering a one-page Word document in which was set down, in black and white, the US drug-eradication plan for Helmand.

Other first encounters were more straightforward. A week or so after arriving I was summoned to the old Palace in the centre of Kabul to present my credentials to President Karzai. Over the next three years I was to come to know well that Palace, in which so much of Afghanistan’s bloody recent history had been played out. But for now my mind was on making a good impression on the man who was key to our whole strategy. I had met him only once before, at an economic conference in Jeddah. Like most of Hamid Karzai’s foreign interlocutors encountering him for the first time, I had been immediately taken by his easy charm and obvious charisma, enhanced by perfect English and the stylish combination of Persian lamb cap and green and silver striped Afghan cloak.

As I was led by the Chief of Protocol through the dark hall and up the great stairs of the Arg Palace, I knew I was passing the spot where President Daoud and many other members of the royal family, including a dozen women and young children, had been gunned down in the Communist coup of April 1978. After a short delay, President Karzai came bustling in from a door in the corner of the audience chamber on the first floor. With my Deputy and Defence Attaché beside me, I marched up to the President, bowed and spluttered out a speech in broken Pashtu, which I had learned by heart. Karzai broke into a broad grin. The Ministers and courtiers ranged on the sofas at either side giggled. But I had made my point: my appointment signalled a step change in the relationship, and an effort by Britain to give Afghanistan in general, and President Karzai in particular, the political support and attention they deserved, given the scale of our military commitment.

We then retired immediately to the President’s study just off the audience chamber. In a ritual we were to repeat scores of times over the next three years, Karzai took his seat in the chair on the right side of the fireplace, with his team ranged on the sofa to his left. I took mine in the chair to the left, with my team ranged on the sofa to my right, stretching back to the door. On the table between us were placed tea and coffee and cakes. I conveyed greetings from the Queen and from the Prime Minister (still Tony Blair). Karzai launched into rhapsodies about our royal family, about Blair and about a somewhat idealised vision of the British way of life. I spoke of my determination to work with the President, and to give him and his Ministers the support they needed. I handed over the toy wooden railway I had brought out for Karzai’s adored and long-awaited son, Mirwais.

All this sweetness and light was clouded by only one subject: narrowing his eyes, the President asked me what I thought of Pakistan. I confessed that, apart from my airport stopover, I had never been there and had no particular personal views. Karzai did not look convinced, but we moved on to other subjects. Here was a hint of trouble ahead.

In the days that followed, I paid my respects to all the other big players in Kabul. First and foremost was the Commanding General of ISAF, General Dan McNeill. A veteran of the fabled United States 82nd Airborne Division, Dan had served twice before in Afghanistan, and was proud never to have had a home tour north of the Mason–Dixon Line. He was a much wiser and more accomplished operator than those who criticised him from afar as too ‘kinetic’ ever really understood. His quiet, kindly manner concealed a depth of understanding and judgement we failed properly to appreciate or exploit.

Quite different from General McNeill was the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, Tom Königs. As head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), Königs was nominally in charge of all UN operations in Afghanistan, with well over a dozen different agencies represented. This was in theory only, however, as different baronies competed for turf and resources. Königs wasn’t helped by his character or background: a gentle German public servant, with distinctly Greenish sympathies, he was said to have given most of his family fortune to the Sandinistas, the left-wing political party in Nicaragua. Following successful tours with the UN in the Balkans and elsewhere, he had been chosen to wind down the UN political presence in Afghanistan, in the belief, prevalent in 2005, that the mission was all but accomplished. Instead, he found himself facing a steadily worsening security and political situation, although still far less serious than that which confronted his successors. Königs’s Deputy was the able Canadian diplomat Chris Alexander, whom I had met at Wilton Park; he was a formidable operator, who never let much check his unquenchable optimism.

The veteran European Union Special Representative in Kabul, Francesc Vendrell, had an even longer Afghan pedigree, having served variously as UN and EU representative for Afghan affairs since January 2000. Vendrell, who is Spanish by birth but British by upbringing, had forgotten more about Afghanistan than most of us would ever know. His family had sent him to England as a boy out of distaste for General Franco. He had ended up reading law at Cambridge and being called to the English Bar, before pursuing a long career as a UN diplomat. His wise understanding of the realities of Afghanistan was a refreshing contrast to the Panglossian pieties mouthed by others in the international community. Vendrell became a real soulmate. His one weakness was a passion for trams (or, more delicately, ‘light rail’), to which most of his vacations seemed to be devoted. Sadly, his tram-spotting tendency was contagious, as I was to discover.

Vendrell’s sceptical view of the Bush Administration’s ‘strategy’ for Afghanistan was informed by the expertise he had built up in his office, starting with his remarkable Deputy, Michael Semple, a genial Irishman with twinkling eyes and a straggling beard, who spoke both Dari and Pashtu. Semple had an unrivalled understanding of the situation in the tribal areas on both sides of the Durand Line which separated Afghanistan from Pakistan. His eventual undoing was the fact that he knew too much about Afghanistan, even to the extent of dressing as an Afghan.

Michael was to become a good friend, and the source of much wise advice on what was really happening in Afghanistan. He represented the very best of Western commitment to Afghanistan, as did another remarkable Irishman (albeit from another part of the island), Mervyn Patterson. Mervyn was the chief political analyst at the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and was celebrated among Westerners in Kabul for the remarkable range of interesting Afghans he managed to assemble at his house. I was to have more to do with both men than I could possibly have imagined when I first met them.

On my first weekend in Kabul, Michael Ryder made sure that I became acquainted with three other key parts of the Kabul landscape: the old British Cemetery, dating back to 1840; the old British Embassy, an empty ruin which we were in 2007 planning to buy back and restore; and, next door to the old Embassy, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, whose head, Rory Stewart, was in 2007 one of the leading lights of Kabul expatriate society. As ambassador to Saudi Arabia, I had already come across the TMF, when the Prince of Wales (who, along with President Karzai, was a patron of the Foundation) had asked me to help persuade Saudis to donate to it. Seeing for myself the excellent work they were doing in gradually restoring the ancient Murad Khane quarter in the teeming heart of old Kabul, and the dedication with which they were promoting traditional crafts, such as calligraphy, ceramics, wood-carving and jewellery-making, at their base in the old fort alongside the former Embassy, I was filled with admiration. Nor could I fail to be won over by Rory’s combination of courtesy, learning and intelligent ambition for his Foundation.

And they were only some of the characters with whom I would be working. Living and working in Kabul was indeed going to be interesting.




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