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

weeks off’ pattern hugely disruptive, with roughly a quarter of the Embassy away at any one time, and another quarter either just having returned from breather break or preparing to go on one. That, coupled with the standard tour length of only eighteen months, meant that generating a sense of sustained commitment was extremely difficult. But I think our practice was better than that of the US State Department, which rotated virtually the whole civilian staff of its Embassy more or less simultaneously every summer, while allowing those staff only a couple of breaks out of country during their year’s tour.

      In my first year in Kabul, I discussed with senior managers in London moving to a standard breather-break pattern for all staff of eight weeks on and two weeks off; but once again the sense that security was gradually deteriorating, with new restrictions on staff going out and about in and around Kabul for recreational purposes, meant that we could not move ahead. And it would have been difficult to deal with the sense of entitlement, on somewhat spurious health and safety grounds, that everyone developed. Nor was it obvious how we could have aligned all the different departments and agencies behind a single regime, without disproportionate effort.

      This addiction to high allowances, and plenty of leave, has helped create a kind of post-conflict stabilisation industry. We would find the same staff, and contractors, who had served in Baghdad or Basra, turning up in Kabul and Lashkar Gah. Working in such an environment is adrenalin-inducing; and, especially for single people, or individuals with unhappy family situations, the rewards in terms of money and free time can also become dependency-inducing. In terms of productivity and operational creativity, this is not healthy: the constant recycling of staff from a limited pool risks promoting a mindset in which the problems staff are dealing with are contained or managed, rather than solved.

      But such thoughts were far from my mind in June 2007, as I lugged home to Balham the helmet and body armour the RAF had insisted I take with me on the C-17 flight. What was on my mind were the meetings I was due to have with new Ministers, including a new foreign secretary, following Gordon Brown’s appointment as prime minister.

      My professional relationship with David Miliband began as it ended. In so many ways he was the ideal political boss: irrepressibly enthusiastic, insatiably curious, highly intelligent and open minded. He always encouraged my team and me to report honestly and to give him the best advice we could, however awkward it might be, if necessary on private channels. As was to happen time and again over the next three years, I was summoned in from my leave for a meeting with him, in the Foreign Secretary’s magnificent office overlooking St James’s Park and Horse Guards Parade. At that first briefing meeting, David made clear that Afghanistan and Pakistan would be his top priority as foreign secretary. His first overseas visit in that office, apart from day trips to Berlin and Paris, would be to Afghanistan and Pakistan the following month.

      In an augury of how my whole posting was to turn out, many official demands on my time crowded in on that first breather break: a call on the Prime Minister, who listened carefully to my first impressions, and gave me a copy of his newly published book, Courage: Eight Portraits. He too would want to pay an early visit. I also met the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, and paid a brief courtesy call on the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron. All would become familiar visitors to Afghanistan in the weeks and months ahead.

      I also attended a debate on Afghanistan in the House of Lords during which the newly ennobled Mark Malloch Brown made his maiden speech as a minister. Mark knew Afghanistan from his time as a senior UN official: as head of the UN Development Programme, he told me how he had met the Afghan leader, Dr Najibullah, in his palace in Kabul while it was under fire. Mark’s quiet scepticism about the whole Afghan project was founded on long experience: in the end, he was more right than David Miliband or I had been about the chances of persuading the US Administration to adopt the more political approach essential for stabilising the situation in a sustainable way. But he did not allow that to deter us from making the effort, especially once Barack Obama took office in January 2009.

      That summer I saw another group of individuals with long experience of Afghanistan who were also worried about how things were going: over lunch Lord Salisbury (who had travelled regularly to Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad) and his fellow peers expressed their concerns. Allowing hope to triumph over my still-limited experience, I was determined to be optimistic and to accentuate the positive in our current approach.

      But it was difficult to be genuinely upbeat about the results of a conference in Rome in early July that year, at which, in the absence of a minister, I led the British delegation. This conference, on Justice and the Rule of Law in Afghanistan, was the fruit of a decision, at a G8 Donors’ meeting, to split five ways the responsibility for Security Sector Reform (the phrase used by post-conflict reconstruction experts to cover the army, police, justice and the rule of law): thus Germany was to lead on police reform, Japan on demobilisation and disarmament, Britain on counter-narcotics, the United States on developing the Afghan National Army, and, somewhat improbably, Italy on reforming justice and the rule of law.

      The Rome conference that summer was impeccably organised, with generous entertainment at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. Almost all the significant participants made solemn pledges to do, and give, more. In the margins of the meeting, the FCO South Asia Director and I sought a meeting with the US Assistant Secretary for Central and South Asia, Richard Boucher. I had known Richard from my time as head of the Foreign Office’s Hong Kong Department: he had been a very successful and supportive US Consul General in Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover in June 1997. Later he had shown his consummate diplomatic skills as the State Department spokesman. I briefed Richard on my first impressions, including my worry that, without corrective action led by the United States, both the political and security situations in Afghanistan were on a gradual downward slope. To my consternation, Boucher took a different view – one he was to hold consistently through the rest of his time in office, under the Bush Administration. He was convinced, he said, that the reality was that progress was being made in Afghanistan: it just wasn’t always obvious. There were no real grounds for concern.

      Like almost every other international conference on Afghanistan I was to attend over the next three years, the Rome extravaganza produced a high-sounding declaration, and a work plan to be implemented by the Afghan Government and its international partners on the ground in Afghanistan. Most such pledges were honoured more in the breach than in the observance. But that did not stop us celebrating with a magnificent reception in the Villa Madama high on one of the hills overlooking Rome and the Tiber. Nor did it diminish my childish pleasure in the escort of Carabinieri on motorbikes and in patrol cars who accompanied me, as delegation leader, with much flashing of lights and screeching of sirens, on every move through Rome during the conference. There was after all something to be said for cutting a dash, Italian style.

      PART II

      HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE

      The main cause of Britain’s defeat in the first Anglo-Afghan War [of 1839–42] was that junior officers were afraid to tell their superiors just how bad the situation was.

      British Brigadier, speaking at a dinner in Kabul in February 2010 to commemorate that defeat

      Chapter 6

      A King’s Funeral

      On returning to Kabul, my first priority was David Miliband’s visit. This was his first significant overseas visit as foreign secretary, and the first of six he was to make to Afghanistan in three years in the job. It would be important in every way.

      Visits to Afghanistan by a Cabinet minister need plenty of hard preparation, running down to the wire and beyond: fixing calls on senior Afghans and key members of the international community; drawing up guest lists for working breakfasts, lunches and dinners; liaising with the visits team back in London, and with the Embassy’s own security people, as well as with the large Metropolitan Police Close Protection Team which always accompanied Ministers travelling to danger zones; and working with the RAF on flights into and out of Afghanistan, and around the country. Nothing was ever fixed until everything was fixed. Nor was anything fixed until the very last minute. Even then everything was subject to the security threat warnings which could derail the whole visit. But the overall shape of