The Embassy Press Section arranged an off-the-record session with the key British and American journalists in town, for me to get to know them, and for them to get to know me. I also made my first acquaintance with the Afghan written and electronic media, giving introductory interviews to radio and television. To my delight, I discovered that the most trusted, and popular, source of news for Afghans was the Dari/Pashtu stream of the BBC World Service: with more than thirty correspondents dotted round Afghanistan, its coverage was uniquely well informed, and balanced between sources and regions.
A large part of the fascination of working in and on Afghanistan is the astonishing range of international actors with an interest in the country, stretching far beyond the forty or so nations contributing to the NATO-led, American-dominated International Security Assistance Force, and including many non-governmental organisations (NGOs). One of the most effective of the latter is the group of charities run by the Aga Khan from his headquarters outside Paris. His Highness’s representative in Kabul, a British Ismaili Muslim, is one of the wisest and best-informed members of the international community, with excellent access to senior Afghans, from President Karzai downwards.
The Aga Khan Foundation’s development work covers the whole of Afghanistan. But it is also focused in part on the areas of Afghanistan where Ismaili Muslims – of whom the Aga Khan is the spiritual leader – are concentrated, notably in the vast province of Badakhshan in the mountains abutting the border with Tajikistan. The Aga Khan’s people also undertake remarkable work restoring and preserving Afghanistan’s cultural treasures, of which the sixteenth-century mausoleum and gardens in Kabul of the Moghul Emperor Babur are the most spectacular example. Almost equally impressive is the Foundation’s work to promote music from Central Asia. One of my happiest memories of Kabul will always be the evening concerts of traditional music in the Babur Gardens organised by the Aga Khan’s cultural foundation.
Alongside this development and cultural work, the Aga Khan is also a significant investor in Afghanistan. He is a major shareholder in the Roshan mobile telephone network – one of Afghanistan’s greatest success stories of the past few years. For the international community in Kabul, however, his biggest contribution to their welfare, and that of their visitors, is the spectacular Serena Hotel – Afghanistan’s only world-class international hotel. It was at the Serena that I was invited to a small private dinner with the Aga Khan shortly after my arrival. I was impressed by how well informed His Highness was, but also by his concern about what he and I saw as a deeply worrying outlook on both the security and political fronts: not for him the rosy platitudes of the NATO spokesmen.
Over my time in Kabul, as the conflict ramped up and the international military effort multiplied, several other countries followed Britain’s lead and appointed a senior diplomat to lead their civilian effort in Afghanistan. But Russia had no such need, for its Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, had been working in and on Afghanistan since 1979. He used to joke that he had been in Kabul so long that the city had been named after him. Uzbek by ethnicity but deeply Russian in outlook, Zamir became a good friend and a source of wise counsel. He had lived through much of Afghanistan’s recent history, including taking part in the evacuation under fire of his Embassy as the mujahideen bombarded the town. Since then the Embassy, on a huge compound in the west of the city, had been comprehensively trashed, and then restored. Just as the old British Embassy in Karte Parwan, now a smoke-blackened shell, symbolised one phase in Afghanistan’s history, so too the 1960s Soviet architecture of Zamir’s proconsular palace stood for another, more recent and even bloodier, era. One of Zamir’s first comments to me was as amusing as it was chilling. ‘I have a very varm feeling tovards you, Sheerard,’ he volunteered, in his thick Russian accent. ‘You are making all ze same mistakes as ve did.’
He and our American colleague, Bill Wood, kept their distance from each other during my first months in Kabul. But some time in the autumn of 2007 they met, for an exuberant exchange over dinner at the Chinese Embassy. A day or two later, Zamir commented to me: ‘I like zis Bill Vood of yours. ’E smokes and drinks like me. Meeting ’im vas like a Russian vedding: ve started by fighting, but ended up making love.’
Like his successor, Karl Eikenberry, Bill Wood made a practice of taking regular trips outside Kabul to see the situation in the real Afghanistan for himself. The American Ambassador was able to call on the vast resources of the US military for such trips, and Bill was kind enough to invite me to accompany him on several. Without such a wealth of resources, my own visits to parts of Afghanistan other than Helmand and Kandahar had to be planned weeks in advance, and were often cancelled at short notice, given the pressures on the RAF air transport fleet. Only when, late in 2007, the Embassy obtained an aircraft of its own were we able to make such trips without almost insuperable difficulty.
But early on in my time we did manage an Embassy expedition to the city which dominates the western approaches to Afghanistan and forms the junction between Iran and its eastern neighbour: Herat. Thanks to expert planning by John Windham, the Embassy’s Chief Security Officer, a distinguished former officer in the Irish Guards, we arranged to take our armoured Land Cruisers with us in the belly of a Hercules. John came along to help with the logistics for the trip, masquerading as my Agricultural Attaché (a role for which his farm in England just about qualified him).
In Herat, I called on the Governor, in his Soviet-era guesthouse occupying a small hill to the west. He had assembled most of the local dignitaries and offered a sumptuous lunch. Little real business was done, for Britain had little real business in that part of Afghanistan. The local ISAF troops were Italians, celebrated as much for the fine wine and pasta offered to visitors to their base at Herat airport as for their war-fighting abilities. But here, as almost everywhere in Afghanistan, the real war was being conducted by American Special Forces, whose shadowy presence was known but not much advertised – at least until the appalling massacre of civilians at Azizabad near Herat in August 2008 (of which more later).
Yet Herat did not feel as though it was really affected by war. The central bazaar was full and bustling. The streets were safe, and crowded. We visited the great Friday mosque. We saw and photographed the lofty minarets built in 1417 by Queen Gowhar Shah, who did more for Islamic art than almost any other woman. Now, only a lonely handful survived, thanks to dynamiting by British military engineers in 1885, earthquakes early in the twentieth century and then target practice by Soviet tank commanders. We ended the afternoon by climbing the citadel and surveying a city which showed what Afghanistan had been like before its present troubles, and could be once again.
Back in Kabul, a weekend or two later, I underwent one of the rites of passage for foreigners arriving in the city: an early-morning climb along the city walls, high above the western approaches of the metropolis. A small group of us assembled with our Close Protection Teams outside my house just after dawn on a Friday morning. We were taken to the disembarkation point, in a mostly Tajik shanty town on the upper slopes of one of the sharp ridges which surround the city. With our bodyguards fanning out through the houses, and chickens and children picking their way over the shoals of rubbish and streams of sewage which filled the alleys of the settlement, we started our ascent. Within minutes, I was rasping badly and feeling (or imagining) sharp pains in the left side of my chest: cardiac arrest seemed imminent. My CP Team looked alarmed. But somehow I staggered on. It was easy to forget that the Embassy was some 6,000 feet above sea level and that we were already another 1,000 feet higher than that. Moreover, Kabul’s air, while thin, was also full of what was delicately described as ‘solid matter’: dung particles in summer, and the smoke from tens of thousands of wood stoves in winter.
Once up on the wall itself, we were rewarded with spectacular views. North, over the city centre, we could see the Presidential Palace guarded by ancient cedars and an oversize Afghan flag, but still surrounded by broken turrets and pockmarked roofs. Then the more modern Wazir Akbar Khan quarter, with the British Embassy’s sprawling estate, and north and east of that the great fortress of the American Embassy. Further north still lay the vast and growing expanse of the airport, with an unending procession of civil and military aircraft dropping down over the mountains from the east, or climbing steeply up over the 18,000-foot