The final touch was always for me to draft a scene-setting telegram. I would send this just in time to go on top of the briefing pack the Minister would read on the way out, but not so far in advance that it would simply be plagiarised by the Department for the briefing they had had to prepare. I aimed in these telegrams to give the visitor a right-up-to-date feel for the mood in the capital and the country more widely, plus a sense of the issues likely to be at the forefront of his hosts’ minds. In my view, and in my experience as Robin Cook’s principal private secretary, a well-judged scene-setter carried more weight than the rest of the briefing put together. The latter would have been pulled together by a team of relatively junior officials in London, without a real feel for either the country or the visiting Minister. Moreover, senior officials in London had become lazy or diffident about editing work by more junior staff, and about making sure that it was in a state that Ministers would expect. The old Foreign Office culture of mentoring one’s juniors had died away, though I tried in Kabul to do my best to teach and train the outstandingly talented, and committed, young diplomats in the Embassy. Both David Miliband and William Hague were to complain about the shoddy standard of the written briefing they received in London.
True to Afghan form, shortly before the Foreign Secretary and his party left London in late July 2007 a completely unexpected development threatened the whole visit. The news broke that Afghanistan’s last King, Zahir Shah, had died. Zahir Shah had been deposed in 1973 by his cousin, Mohammed Daoud. He had been out of the country, in Italy, recuperating from eye surgery at the time. Daoud had established a republic, and had in turn been overthrown, and murdered, by the Communists in the Saur Revolution of April 1978. Zahir Shah and his court had stayed on in Rome, and the aged King had returned to his beloved country only in 2002. At the Loya Jirga (grand assembly) considering the Afghan constitution in December 2003, most of the Afghans present had wanted to restore the monarchy. But the Americans, led by the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad, had overruled them: Afghanistan was to be a republic, with a highly centralised constitution focused on an elected executive president. Nevertheless, Zahir Shah had already come back home. He was granted the honorific title of ‘Father of the Nation’ (Baba-e-Millat). At President Karzai’s request and invitation, Zahir Shah and several close members of the royal family had returned to their old apartments in the Arg Palace in central Kabul, where Karzai also lived (in a house in the grounds) and worked. The new President would call on the King every day, seeking the kindly old man’s blessing for what he was trying to do.
Zahir Shah’s main interest had been farming. As king, he had spent much time on his estates in various parts of Afghanistan. He had presided over what many Afghans had come to see as the trente glorieuses of their country’s recent history. He had ruled with a light touch over what had been essentially a loose federation of Afghanistan’s regions. His policies of gradual reform and democratisation had slowly brought Afghanistan into the modern era. It was Zahir Shah who had introduced the country’s first democratic constitution, in 1964. And it was he who had allowed Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and Eisenhower’s America to compete in helping Afghanistan develop. The Russians had focused their efforts on the north, for example developing the gas fields there, and building the Salang Tunnel through the Hindu Kush.
The Americans meanwhile had concentrated on the south, particularly the Helmand Valley. It was there, in the 1950s, that American irrigation engineers had tried to replicate the success of the Depression-era Tennessee Valley Authority, with a vast system of canals and barrages intended to make the southern desert bloom. The present state of Helmand owed much to the civil and social engineering of the 1950s. Its fertility was due to the network of American-built waterways. The province had then been fertile enough to support dairy farming and the cultivation of cotton, and it was later to produce some of the world’s bumper opium crops. But there had been problems too: the water table had risen, producing high salinity and areas of barren land that had previously been rich in crops. And the Afghan Government’s efforts to settle groups from other parts of Afghanistan had produced a tribal mosaic of unmatched complexity – another source of future trouble. The neat US-style grid pattern of the streets of Lashkar Gah – itself a new creation – belied the darker realities underneath. Half a century later, British forces were to discover this to their cost.
In celebration of Afghan–American friendship, President Eisenhower had paid a state visit to Afghanistan in 1959, touring Kabul in a vast open American sedan – something unimaginable fifty years later. On his unannounced Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan in December 2010, for example, President Obama did not even leave Bagram Air Base in northern Afghanistan: his only contact with the Afghan Government was a fifteen-minute phone call to President Karzai.
But the balmy days of Zahir Shah’s reign were a distant memory when the world learned that Afghanistan’s last King had died, on 23 July 2007. He had been sick for some time. I knew that, in line with Muslim tradition, the funeral would take place almost immediately, probably on the first day of the Foreign Secretary’s first visit to Kabul. After a brief discussion with London, I recommended that the visit go ahead. My advice was that the interest, and prestige, of having the Foreign Secretary as the only senior foreigner present at the funeral would outweigh the disadvantages of the disruption to our carefully planned programme.
Thus it was that, after a briefing breakfast at my Residence, I found myself accompanying the Foreign Secretary to the ancient Arg Palace for the obsequies of Afghanistan’s last monarch. Under the branches of the great plane tree beside the small mosque in the Palace quadrangle, we joined a throng of tribal leaders in turbans of all shapes and sizes. Ranged on one side were the Afghan royal family and the old royal court: princesses who knew the boulevards of Paris or Rome better than Kabul’s mean streets; eccentric princes of various branches of the family, many of whom seemed to have been educated at Harrow School and still to live in north-west London; and courtiers, including several cousins, who had been brought back by President Karzai to senior jobs in his government. It was another world, another age, and one for which Karzai showed great deference and respect. He knew what most of his countrymen knew: that, compared with their country’s present wretched state, Zahir Shah’s Afghanistan had been a kind of Asian Arcadia, an obligatory staging post for young Westerners on gap-year voyages of self-discovery, at a time when Kabul had been a garden city, welcoming visitors from the subcontinent refreshing themselves away from the dust and heat of the plains.
Setting aside such dreams, we joined the line of those queuing to offer condolences to the senior members of the family, and then sat, on some hastily assembled chairs, on what had started as the front row of the mourning crowd. After a while the low boom of the bass drum and the somewhat cacophonous caterwauling of the band of the Presidential Guard announced the imminent arrival of the President, and of the King’s coffin. With tasselled shakoes on their heads, high boots and red and black dress uniforms, the Guard goose-stepped out, in a surreal combination of comic opera and Soviet-style ceremonial.
Draped in the red, green and black Afghan flag, the King’s coffin was lowered slowly on to the catafalque in front of us. The Koran was read, prayers said. And then the band started up again. The coffin was swung up high on the shoulders of the bearer party. The mourners, led by President Karzai, followed the band and the body on foot towards the city’s vast parade ground. We formed a great rambling crowd, filling the street beside the rubbish-strewn dry bed of the Kabul River, walking in a silence punctuated only by the blowing and wailing and booming of the band.
After what seemed like an interminable wait on the parade ground, while further prayers were said, and lines of soldiers formed and re-formed, and marched and re-marched, in a rather ramshackle echo of Horse Guards, at last we moved up to the top of the low hill where Afghanistan’s earlier kings had been interred. There, under the shell-punctured azure dome of his father King Nadir Shah’s tomb, King Zahir Shah was finally laid to rest. In the July heat we milled around, as the Afghan Defence Minister, obviously feeling the heat, obeyed peremptory instructions from his President, personally shifting chairs and unrolling carpets to accommodate the swelling crowd. And then it was all over. Or so we thought.
Suddenly, there was the sound of a huge explosion. My Close