Three hours later than planned, we touched down in Kabul. From the window I could see a curious cocktail of aircraft. Ancient Antonovs and Ilyushins, and recently refurbished Mil helicopters, seemed to symbolise Afghanistan’s past and perhaps its future. But the foreground – the present – was filled with Western military airframes: everywhere the C-130 Hercules, the utility truck of modern expeditionary warfare, bearing US, British, Canadian, Dutch, Danish and even Australian markings. Swarms of helicopters – American Black Hawks and Chinooks, a brace of French Eurocopters – covered the apron, plus a motley collection of civil aeroplanes: small propeller-driven aircraft in UN white; larger and older Boeings on charter, disgorging troops; and a rag-bag assortment of airliners of varying vintages, painted in the colours of airlines I had never heard of: Ariana, Kam Air, Pamir, Safi, among others.
My Deputy, Michael Ryder, an old Foreign Office friend and colleague, with the quizzical air of the Cambridge historian he once was, greeted me at the foot of the steps, along with my Royal Military Police Close Protection Team. I was hustled into a heavily armoured Land Cruiser and quickly briefed by the Team Leader: ‘Never open the door yourself. If there’s an incident, Sir, get down, and do exactly as we say. If we are incapacitated, this is the radio, and this our call sign. We are all medically trained, and there is a full first-aid kit in the back.’
We took the long, and supposedly safer, route to the Embassy. Only later did I learn that the direct route – Route White – was known as suicide alley. We wended our way through Kabul’s north-western suburbs. I saw for the first time just how poor the place was, how squalid the conditions were in which most of the population somehow survived, how far the city had been wrecked, mostly in the savage intra-Afghan fighting which had followed the collapse of the Najibullah regime in 1992. That had been before the Taliban had ridden into town and restored order in 1996.
In my three years living in or visiting Afghanistan I would never tire of the rich panorama of Kabul street life: donkey carts, flocks of sheep and goats, bazaars for everything from printer cartridges to garden hoses, and low-tech engineering of the most creative kind, producing anything from axes to air compressors. Scattered around were the wrecked remnants of what had once been the garden city of South-west Asia, a city of tree-lined avenues and lush parks, to which the citizens of neighbouring countries had repaired for the 1960s equivalent of a mini-break. Now it was all laid waste. There was virtually nothing to show for five and a half years of Western engagement, apart from the narco-tecture of the drug lords’ palaces on stolen land, and an encroaching tide of checkpoints, sandbags and earth-filled barriers of hessian and wire mesh. For me, the most poignant symbol of Kabul’s desolation will always be the catenary poles for the Czech-made trolleybuses which once crisscrossed the city, now standing splayed against the sky, their torn wires flapping in the wind.
And then we reached the Residence. Smartly saluting Gurkha guards swung open two black metal gates in a nondescript side-street. We were in the garden of a neat suburban villa, an Afghan version of a Barratt home, with a narrow lawn, a small swimming pool, a terrace, three guest bedrooms, a one-bedroom flat for me, with an armoured keep – in fact my bathroom – in which I could (and would) take refuge, all hurriedly furnished by the Foreign Office estates team in a much mocked blend of IKEA and the Land of Leather. The only clues that this was the British Ambassador’s Residence were the Royal Coat of Arms affixed, with a brass plate, to the wall by the front door; an idiosyncratic selection of gloomy British landscape paintings which my predecessor had persuaded the Government Art Collection in London to send out; and, hidden on the shelves of a pine-veneer sideboard, a small collection of battered silver rescued from Britain’s grand old Embassy in Kabul.
In 1920, when the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon ordered the construction of what was then known as the British Legation in Kabul, he decreed that the British Minister in Kabul should be the best-housed man in Asia. Ninety years later, Her Britannic Majesty’s Representative in Kabul was not exactly the best-housed man in Kabul, let alone in Afghanistan, still less in Asia. Nevertheless, the Residence was warm in winter and cool in summer. A loyal and conscientious team of Afghans made it all work. The ability to offer British, international and Afghan guests food, drink and even a bed at almost any hour, with little or no notice, proved to be a powerful tool for the job – the kind of ‘corporate entertainment facility’ which every good ambassador’s residence should be.
On that May evening, Michael Ryder had assembled well over a hundred members of the Embassy staff for a barbecue to meet the new Ambassador. It was only then, as I moved from group to group gathered in the dusk, that I realised just how diverse my new team would be. At least a third were women. There were people of many different ethnic backgrounds, and with disabilities (courageously, in Kabul).
But what was really striking was the range of institutional cultures represented on that Residence lawn. Only a small minority were ‘straight’ diplomats. Of course, there were spies, and members of the home civil service, from departments as different as HM Revenue and Customs (advising the Afghans on raising their tax take), the Ministry of Justice (which had sent out six prison officers), the Crown Prosecution Service (including a Rumpole-esque representative of the English Bar), the Cabinet Office (a fast-streamer in search of excitement) and of course the Department for International Development (scores of enthusiastic development experts, known affectionately to the military as tree-huggers). But there were soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen in desert uniform too, and British policemen, from the Met and the Northumbria Police, and customs men and women, and officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, technicians of every kind, and even builders from Britain, refurbishing the Embassy’s secure zone. And, everywhere, the ubiquitous Men In Beards – some genuine Special Forces operatives, but mostly just pretending. Few of the home civil servants had ever worked in an embassy or dealt with the Diplomatic Service, let alone operated in an environment as difficult and dangerous as Afghanistan.
Turning such a mixed bag of officers, officials and civilian experts into a real team would be a never-ending challenge, especially as the working pattern for most civilian staff of six weeks on, two weeks off, with six-or twelve-month tours, meant that the turnover was unending. Every Thursday night (Friday was our only full day off) somebody would be holding leaving drinks of one kind or another, even if only to celebrate surviving another six weeks ‘in theatre’. Sometimes, in despair, learning that some member of the team had just disappeared ‘on breather’, I would feel I was running a railway station rather than an embassy.
Mostly, however, it was more like being the headmaster of a run-down but generally happy and successful prep school, or the governor of an open prison whose inmates were repaying their debt to society handsomely and many times over. None of us doubted that, compared with our rivals – the overlarge and persistently unhappy American Embassy, the Canadians, the French, the Germans, the Danes and the Dutch, plus a UN mission almost always at war with itself – we were by far the most effective diplomatic operation in town. We knew more, did more, worked harder and had more fun than any of the other Embassies.
But, in May 2007, all that was still before me. In the gathering gloom, and with a distinct nip in the air encouraging brevity (Kabul is nearly 6,000 feet above sea level), Michael chinked on his glass, welcomed the new ‘HMA’ and asked me to ‘say a few words’. I can’t remember now exactly what I said then, or at meetings the next day for the British staff and then at a town-hall meeting for all the several hundred Embassy employees, of many nationalities. But I know that the messages I wanted to get across were as follows. First, and most important, we needed to be honest in our assessments of what was happening, and of what would and wouldn’t work. Both the intervention in Iraq and the Afghan project had in my view been bedevilled by too much wishful thinking, an excess of over-eager-to-please officers and officials telling their masters, locally and back in capitals, what they thought those bosses wanted to hear. Second, I wanted us to work to high standards, everyone delivering to the best of his or her ability. Sloppy drafting, for example, meant sloppy thinking. Third, I wanted people to behave as though they were professionals: I had no objection, for instance, to casual dress, but visitors to the British Embassy needed to come away thinking we were an operation they could trust. ‘More Goldman Sachs on dress-down Friday than