Quite different from General McNeill was the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, Tom Königs. As head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), Königs was nominally in charge of all UN operations in Afghanistan, with well over a dozen different agencies represented. This was in theory only, however, as different baronies competed for turf and resources. Königs wasn’t helped by his character or background: a gentle German public servant, with distinctly Greenish sympathies, he was said to have given most of his family fortune to the Sandinistas, the left-wing political party in Nicaragua. Following successful tours with the UN in the Balkans and elsewhere, he had been chosen to wind down the UN political presence in Afghanistan, in the belief, prevalent in 2005, that the mission was all but accomplished. Instead, he found himself facing a steadily worsening security and political situation, although still far less serious than that which confronted his successors. Königs’s Deputy was the able Canadian diplomat Chris Alexander, whom I had met at Wilton Park; he was a formidable operator, who never let much check his unquenchable optimism.
The veteran European Union Special Representative in Kabul, Francesc Vendrell, had an even longer Afghan pedigree, having served variously as UN and EU representative for Afghan affairs since January 2000. Vendrell, who is Spanish by birth but British by upbringing, had forgotten more about Afghanistan than most of us would ever know. His family had sent him to England as a boy out of distaste for General Franco. He had ended up reading law at Cambridge and being called to the English Bar, before pursuing a long career as a UN diplomat. His wise understanding of the realities of Afghanistan was a refreshing contrast to the Panglossian pieties mouthed by others in the international community. Vendrell became a real soulmate. His one weakness was a passion for trams (or, more delicately, ‘light rail’), to which most of his vacations seemed to be devoted. Sadly, his tram-spotting tendency was contagious, as I was to discover.
Vendrell’s sceptical view of the Bush Administration’s ‘strategy’ for Afghanistan was informed by the expertise he had built up in his office, starting with his remarkable Deputy, Michael Semple, a genial Irishman with twinkling eyes and a straggling beard, who spoke both Dari and Pashtu. Semple had an unrivalled understanding of the situation in the tribal areas on both sides of the Durand Line which separated Afghanistan from Pakistan. His eventual undoing was the fact that he knew too much about Afghanistan, even to the extent of dressing as an Afghan.
Michael was to become a good friend, and the source of much wise advice on what was really happening in Afghanistan. He represented the very best of Western commitment to Afghanistan, as did another remarkable Irishman (albeit from another part of the island), Mervyn Patterson. Mervyn was the chief political analyst at the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and was celebrated among Westerners in Kabul for the remarkable range of interesting Afghans he managed to assemble at his house. I was to have more to do with both men than I could possibly have imagined when I first met them.
On my first weekend in Kabul, Michael Ryder made sure that I became acquainted with three other key parts of the Kabul landscape: the old British Cemetery, dating back to 1840; the old British Embassy, an empty ruin which we were in 2007 planning to buy back and restore; and, next door to the old Embassy, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, whose head, Rory Stewart, was in 2007 one of the leading lights of Kabul expatriate society. As ambassador to Saudi Arabia, I had already come across the TMF, when the Prince of Wales (who, along with President Karzai, was a patron of the Foundation) had asked me to help persuade Saudis to donate to it. Seeing for myself the excellent work they were doing in gradually restoring the ancient Murad Khane quarter in the teeming heart of old Kabul, and the dedication with which they were promoting traditional crafts, such as calligraphy, ceramics, wood-carving and jewellery-making, at their base in the old fort alongside the former Embassy, I was filled with admiration. Nor could I fail to be won over by Rory’s combination of courtesy, learning and intelligent ambition for his Foundation.
And they were only some of the characters with whom I would be working. Living and working in Kabul was indeed going to be interesting.
Chapter 3
Helmandshire
Within days of arriving in Kabul, I was travelling again: the soon-to-be-familiar high-speed dash through the crowded backstreets of Kabul out to the military side of the airport, then on to the RAF Hercules, for the ninety-minute night flight south to ‘KAF’ – Kandahar Air Field. On this, the first of countless such flights, I was accompanying the first of scores of Ministerial and military visitors from London, in this case the Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Kim Howells.
Dr Howells had spent the day in Kabul, on the Cook’s Tour of Afghan Ministers and international actors the Embassy’s hard-pressed visits team arranged for each of our senior official guests. As VIPs, the Minister and I were invited by the RAF to ride in the cockpit, rather than on the webbing seats slung the length of the cavernous cargo bay. Up front we had two advantages: first, we could see roughly where we were and what was going on, including awe-inspiring moonlight views as we flew south of the snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas beyond; and, second, we were offered a ‘brew’, of instant coffee or builders’ tea. I soon learned that, in the argot of the armed forces, milk and no sugar was a ‘Julie Andrews’ (white nun/none), whereas a ‘Jordan’ was white with two lumps, a ‘Shirley Bassey’ black with two lumps, and so on and even more politically incorrect and unrepeatable. Over the months that followed, I came to value what amounted to nocturnal confessionals with the RAF flight crew. Out on rotation to Afghanistan and Iraq, from the great RAF transport base at Lyneham in Wiltshire, the Hercules pilots had an intelligently detached perspective on both campaigns not always obvious to those of us caught in the toils of the ground war.
The approach to Kandahar was almost as spectacular as our spiralling ascent from Kabul. All lights extinguished, helmets and body armour back on, night-vision goggles for the pilots, radio silence, the groan of the landing gear being let down, and then the anxiously endless minutes of the final descent, before we hit the runway with a great shudder and were shaken by the roar of the engines going into reverse thrust. Once on the ground, we climbed out and were hustled into the building which now housed the RAF’s headquarters in Afghanistan. The rocket holes in the roof were a reminder that this was where the Taliban had made their last stand against the forces from the north in December 2001.
We spent the night in the VIP accommodation at KAF: austere Portakabins at the centre of a sprawling military metropolis. Dust everywhere, the roads clogged with jeeps and trucks and armoured vehicles of every type and nationality. A bizarre palette of differing national desert camouflage patterns. Forests of aerials, cables festooned like some out-of-control vine from every hut, clusters of satellite dishes and national flags denoting the headquarters of the different contingents. Fat soldiers, thin soldiers, blonde soldiers, bespectacled soldiers, women soldiers. Earnest joggers, usually American, at every dark and daylight hour. And always and everywhere the whine and roar of jets and turboprops and helicopters, an aroma of kerosene on the breeze and the low hum of diesel generators producing more power than was consumed by all southern Afghanistan beyond the wire.
Early next morning we were up with the sun for a briefing breakfast in the headquarters of the British General then commanding in the south. The leitmotiv of the long war: we are making progress, but challenges remain. Then a dash to the apron, earplugs in, helmets and body armour back on, for the roller-coaster Chinook ride out over the great red southern desert, lo-hi-lo in RAF jargon, before dropping down to 100 feet for the final approach to the British Brigade Headquarters in its compound in the centre of Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. In the back with us were British and American soldiers of every kind, listening to their iPods, reading dog-eared paperbacks, taking snaps with their digital cameras, showing their nerves. Piled high in the centre of the hold were Royal Mail sacks, and pallets of war cargo lashed down under nets. We flew in fast and low, across the fields and tributaries of the Helmand Valley, with sheep and goats running beneath and before us. Startled peasants stared up with a mixture of surprise and resentment, the women covering their faces and collecting their children.
Standing at the edge of the helipad in Lashkar