Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign

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.*

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.’

* 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.