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

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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