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

west. Beside and below them the helicopters: American Black Hawks, mostly, but Chinooks and Eurocopters too, and plenty of recycled Russian Mi-17s.

      To the east we could see the long thin road to Jalalabad, and thence the Khyber, beyond which lay the Indus valley and the plains of the Punjab. The highway was always crowded with trucks carrying containers of supplies to feed the NATO beast, and cheap Chinese imports for an Afghan economy growing rapidly on a flood of foreign money. But it was also to become the setting for more suicide attacks than any other, as the terrorists made their way in from the sanctuaries across the other side of the border with Pakistan. To the west were the areas which had been laid waste in the fighting between the mujahideen factions in the mid-1990s: the parks of the university, and the polytechnic, the Soviet cultural centre, and then the Darul Aman Palace. The ill-fated President Hafizullah Amin had moved his office there, on Soviet advice, ‘for his own safety’, in 1979, just before the Spetsnaz, or Soviet Special Forces, had stormed the Tajbeg Palace next door (and killed Amin) on 27 December that year. The Palace still stood, a hollow-eyed shell, a reminder of past vanities and tragedies. To the south were the muddy marshlands and winter lakes abutting Highway One, leading to the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east and eventually to Kandahar.

      After coffee and sandwiches in a derelict turret at the summit, and the obligatory photograph of a group looking as though they had just scaled Everest, we descended through another Tajik settlement on the western slope of the ridge. Waiting for us halfway down was our fleet of armoured Land Cruisers, surrounded by crowds of noisy Friday-morning children, flying kites, kicking footballs and hauling water. We met them on the stone terrace, recently restored by the Aga Khan, on which lay the two barrels of the cannon from which the noonday gun had fired its daily salute across Kabul until at least the early 1970s.

      Within weeks of my arrival in Kabul we decided to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday. We would do so in a style as close as possible to the traditional way in which Embassies in less exotic or dangerous locations mark Her Britannic Majesty’s Official Birthday. As the Embassy did not have a garden large enough to take all our guests, the British Council representative kindly offered his grassy compound for the occasion. Behind high walls, in a district close to the abandoned former British Embassy, the lawns and rosebeds of the Council premises offered an ideal setting in which to relaunch the British presence in Kabul. The Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards kindly sent up from Helmand a bugler and a drummer in bearskin and ceremonial dress.

      We started with a minute’s silence, for the fallen of all nations. The Irish Guards provided a piper, whom I asked to play the traditional plangent lament, ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. As the sun went down behind the western hills, we held a flag-lowering ceremony. There were speeches by our guest of honour, the Afghan Foreign Minister, Dr Rangin Spanta, and by me. But best of all we had a wonderful turnout of guests, from the diplomatic corps and the international community, of course, but also Afghans from every walk of the local life with which our vast Embassy engaged: tribal chiefs in traditional dress, mullahs and men of religion more generally, Army and Police officers, administrators and academics, Members of both Houses of Parliament, and Afghan women as well as men. The home team wore roses in their lapels and worked hard to look after all our guests. It was one of the more optimistic and uplifting occasions of my first year in Kabul. The message was clear: Britain was Back, and meant Business.

      As part of the mood of cautious optimism, the BBC announced it was planning an Afghan week, of coverage on radio and television, from Kabul as well as Helmand. Their veteran World Affairs Editor, John Simpson, had long experience of Afghanistan. His walk back into Kabul as the Taliban left in November 2001 had become part of television history. His judgements counted. In 2005, he had been able to proclaim that Afghanistan was ‘a nation of shopkeepers once again’. Now he came back to Kabul, to chronicle the latest chapter in the never-ending story. He interviewed me on a Friday afternoon, walking round the gardens of the Emperor Babur. In the course of that extended conversation I said two things that attracted comment.

      First, I described the work of rebuilding Afghanistan after decades of conflict as a thirty-year marathon rather than a sprint. Inevitably, the British media interpreted that as meaning that I expected British forces to remain in combat for three decades: something I believed to be neither possible nor desirable. More seriously, however, on the eve of my departure for my first breather break back in Britain, President Karzai took offence at my suggestion that the insurgency was largely a Pashtun insurgency. No one else had paid much attention to this statement of the obvious. But we received messages from the Palace reporting the President’s distress: I decided that I could not leave for London without having first reassured Karzai. So I postponed my departure and managed eventually to see him. I explained that, while I believed almost all Taliban were Pashtuns, I did not believe that all Pashtuns were either Taliban or insurgents. Karzai seemed mollified.

      By then, however, it would have been impossible for me to reach London on commercial flights via Dubai in time for my son’s graduation ceremony at Edinburgh University. My excellent Defence Attaché, and the RAF Movements Officer assigned to the Embassy, managed to secure me a place in one of the Royal Air Force’s giant Boeing C-17 transport aircraft, flying from Kandahar to Odiham in Hampshire, with a Chinook in the back.

      It was a flight to remember. The view from the cockpit of the C-17, with its larger than usual windows, is spectacular: I was able to enjoy extraordinary panoramas of the mountains of Afghanistan and eastern Turkey, including Mount Ararat, before we changed crews at the vast American base at Inçirlik – a modern military caravanserai for troops and freight moving east to Iraq and Afghanistan.

      Putting the giant transporter down on the tiny runway in the green fields of rural Hampshire was a feat which both I and the personnel of the RAF Station could only admire. An excited Station Commander kindly came driving out to greet us in a car flying the RAF pennant from its bonnet. He brought me not only a note from my old prep school friend Vice Admiral Tim Laurence, who had just been visiting the base in his capacity as head of defence estates, but also the offer of an RAF car and driver to hurry me to Heathrow to catch a flight to Edinburgh in time for a celebratory dinner that evening. We duly raced off the airfield and up the M3, only to discover that all flights out of Heathrow had been delayed because of, improbably, a gas leak beside one of the runways.

      I missed my son’s graduation ceremony entirely: a trivial sacrifice by comparison with those our soldiers and their families were making, but this was not the first or smallest price my family were to pay for my service in Afghanistan.

      Chapter 5

      Breather Break

      When I was originally approached about going to Afghanistan, I was told that the breather-break system – of six weeks on and two weeks off – would be one of the attractions of the job. But, in my experience, we never achieved the right balance between operational efficiency and giving individuals the time off they needed during tough postings such as Kabul or, even more so, Lashkar Gah and the outstations across Helmand. And, at least as far as the Foreign Office was concerned, we ended up with an expensive and inefficient system that gave us the worst of all worlds.

      As with Iraq, so British diplomats and civil servants working in Afghanistan go there unaccompanied by their partners and families. Initially this was at least as much because of the shortage of accommodation as for security reasons. But, as the security situation steadily deteriorated, so security considerations became paramount. In my first eighteen months in Kabul, friends and family members were allowed to pay short visits to Kabul. But that privilege too was withdrawn.

      No one seems to know where the ‘six weeks on, two weeks off’ rule originated: some British Government agencies in Kabul operated stricter regimes (eight weeks on, two weeks off, for example), whereas others were even more liberal, expecting their staff to spend only a month in theatre between breaks. And some departments, notably DFID, treated their staff even more generously, in terms of allowances and air fares. In part, this was the market at work: in general, diplomats were keener to serve in Kabul or Helmand than were home civil servants.

      As a manager,