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

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