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

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