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

come to know in my three and a half years working in and on Afghanistan. A calm quiet Parachute Regiment officer, with experience in Ireland and Iraq, he briefed the Minister on the progress the Brigade was making – but challenges remained. He spoke of the theory of ‘Clear, Hold and Build’. British and NATO forces would clear an area of insurgents. They would then establish Forward Operating Bases and Patrol Bases and Combat Outposts across and around the cleared area. They would fill those islands of order with a judicious mixture of NATO and of Afghan forces, both Army and Police. And then they would start to build: security, governance, development – the three pillars of the new order in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Set out in PowerPoint, explained with enthusiasm, in neat counterpoint between civilian and military members of the British-led Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, the brief was utterly confident: to question it would have seemed ill-mannered.

      We were shown around the compound. The military headquarters, with its cavernous operations room full of banks of computer screens on row after row of trestle tables, maps and charts and secure telephones everywhere, live feeds from Kabul, or London, or a drone circling over an operation under way somewhere up or down the Valley. The Field lay incongruously on the Brigadier’s table. A young military assistant offered coffee and tea, and more coffee and tea. The base chapel, known as the Church of St Martin, Lashkar Gah, was in a tent to which the Padre had affixed his rather optimistic invitations to Sunday Eucharist and daily Bible study. Inside were stacks of the Armed Forces Operational Service and Prayer Book, bound in covers of desert camouflage. The book’s last section contains, in case of need, Field Burial Services for Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, and, most improbably, Buddhists (‘there are no special ritual requirements regarding Buddhists and, since helping others is fundamental to Buddhism, there are no objections to transplant surgery’).

      The breezeblock and concrete offices of the Provincial Reconstruction Team were under a rocket-proof roof. In them, eager civil servants and contractors in jeans and tee-shirts pushed on with the business of stabilisation. The vehicle park was full of armoured personnel carriers of every kind, on wheels and tracks, each sprouting aerials and, usually, a machine gun or two. And then, most important, there was the canteen, producing some of the best food in Afghanistan, thanks, at that time, to the Royal Logistic Corps, but to contractors now: bacon and porridge for breakfast, bangers and mash for lunch, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for supper – and a salad bar for those who don’t have to lug 40 kilos of equipment on patrol along the lanes of Lashkar Gah.

      We learned the liturgies, large and small, of the campaign: the commander’s morning brief, the commander’s evening brief, the ritual cleansing with Army-issue antiseptic gel before and after meals; the quick coffee under the pergola in the cottage garden cultivated by successive brigades in the centre of the compound; and the surreptitious evening cigarette with a senior officer whose thoughts too easily turn to a beloved family so far away, to a land of Volvos and Labradors and prep school playing fields.

      And then, helmets and body armour back on, we were bundled into armoured Land Cruisers for the dash downtown, to meet real Afghans: the Governor, the leader of the Provincial Council, the Chief of Police and the head of the intelligence and security service. All are polite, and optimistic, appreciative of what Britain is doing for them, offering hot sweet tea in small glasses and trays of nuts.

      A day in Helmand flashes by, in a whirlwind of briefings and inspections and high-speed moves by helicopter or protected vehicle. And then we are back on the Hercules to Kabul, for another round of calls on senior Afghans and internationals. We see President Karzai, Vice President Khalili, we brief the Minister over breakfast with the senior British General in Kabul. And, at the end of a very long day, we take a tired and thirsty Minister to the Embassy bar for a late-night encounter with the home team.

      Two weeks later I am back in Helmand, for a proper visit in my own right: longer briefings, franker talking. I fly out to my first Forward Operating Base. I am struck by the contrast between the crude conditions there and those back in the headquarters compound in Lashkar Gah or in the several square miles of the great and growing British main base at Camp Bastion in the desert east of the Helmand Valley. The fighting soldiers spend six solid months – minus only a ten-day R&R break back in Britain – in the front line, crammed six or eight to a tent, or a mud hut, or a shelter built of giant sandbags and corrugated iron. In summer, the heat and flies are unremitting, in winter the cold is bone chilling. While the Grenadier Guards are whitewashing the stones (they really are) at the camp abutting Bastion where the Guards train the Afghan Army, an officer in the rather less refined (and newly named) Mercian Regiment tells me that he likes his squaddies’ accommodation rough, because it makes them want to get up and get out on patrol. And, if the housing is rough, so can be the food in some outlying bases. Everything is airlifted in by helicopter, as, for security and sanitary reasons, locally bought food is not considered safe. The cooks perform wonders with the ten-man ration packs, coming up with scores of ways to present the modern equivalent of tinned spam and sweet corn swimming in brine. But I am not surprised, a year later, to hear rumours of scurvy in one of the outlying Patrol Bases.

      The whole experience – of meeting troops engaged in combat in a real war, risking life and limb out on patrol every day – is utterly humbling. Kabul isn’t comfortable, but compared with the FOBs on the front line it is close to paradise. I realise how lucky we civilians are; and how we should never forget the sacrifice our soldiers, most of them less than half my age, are making.

      This time, Governor Wafa is in town, and I have my first meeting with an unlikely Afghan administrator who, with his long white beard, looks a bit like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and Father Christmas. He is of course all charm, especially when I greet him in rudimentary Pashtu. He speaks of the progress being made, of the good work being done by Task Force Helmand and the PRT, of his brotherly affection for the Brigadier and the PRT Head. I am reassured: even if Wafa means only 10 per cent of what he tells me, we must be doing some good.

      I am shown around Camp Bastion, laid out in the western desert like a great legionary fortress. As with the Roman Army in Caledonia or Cambria, so it is with the British Army in Afghanistan: a great ditch around the rectangular perimeter, to keep the natives out; a grid pattern of roads within the limes (as the Romans called their imperial boundary paths), at the centre of which is the headquarters, with the Union flag hanging limply in the hot desert air. Alongside, in tribute to the fallen, stands an eloquently simple memorial, of local stone, and brass from Britain. Its tablets listing the British dead are steadily filling up.

      Accompanied by the Brigadier, I take a dusty ride across a short stretch of desert to the neighbouring Camp Shorabak, where the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards are mentoring and training units of the Afghan National Army’s 205 (Hero) Corps. I meet, for the first time, the exuberant General Mohayeddin, a brave and professional Tajik with a moustache to match. As one would expect with the Foot Guards, the camp is lickspittle tidy, the Guardsmen and officers bracketing every spoken sentence with a ‘Sir’ or two. Their account of the progress the Afghan Army is making is resolutely upbeat, and I come away encouraged.

      Less encouraging is an event I attend later, at Kandahar Air Field, while waiting for the nightly Hercules back to Kabul. The Canadians are holding a ‘ramp ceremony’ to salute a fallen Canadian soldier, on his way back to a small town out on the prairie. Under a starry southern sky, hundreds of troops from all the different nations form up on the vast concrete apron. In what some might see as a typically Canadian touch, they are joined by scores of civilians working with Canadian forces. In pseudo-military fashion, an improbable army of cooks and clerks, of all shapes and many sizes, is marched out on the apron, arms and legs irretrievably out of step. Flags are paraded stiffly before us, a piper plays a haunting lament for the fallen, prayers are said and speeches made, at what seems like inordinate length. I feel strangely deflated as I climb up into the belly of the Hercules for the flight back north.

      Chapter 4

      ‘A Marathon Rather Than A Sprint’

      Back in Kabul I got down to laying the foundations for all successful bilateral diplomacy: knowing your clients. At my request, my über-efficient Private Secretary, Alex Hill, had filled my first days as ambassador with calls on Afghanistan’s two Vice Presidents, virtually