Читать книгу Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign - Sherard Cowper-Coles - Страница 12

Monday 30 October 2006 – the Ambassador’s Office, British Embassy, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: I was sitting sleepily at my desk after lunch, catching up on reading. I had returned only the night before from a family holiday in Egypt. My secretary came in: could I have an urgent word on the secure phone with a senior official in London?

Of course I could, I said, wondering with the usual mixture of excitement and dread what this could be about. The silky tones of the senior official soon cut to the chase. ‘Ministers’ had decided to upgrade Britain’s civilian effort in Afghanistan, to try to keep pace with the huge increase in military resources being pumped into Helmand. They thought that I was the right person to take charge of what would become one of the largest and most unusual British diplomatic missions in the world. There had been pressure from the British military for a ‘heavy hitter’ to be sent as ambassador. I would be working on the standard terms of six weeks on, two weeks off. I would see more of my family than if I remained in Saudi Arabia to complete my tour there. I would go to Kabul for a year or so to start with, but, naturally, it was hoped I would stay for longer. The whole thing was still very secret (hence the secure line), not least because the incumbent in Kabul had not been told. Was I interested? Like the fool I am when flattered, I said of course I was interested. I would need to talk this over with my wife, but I knew this was just the sort of challenge I relished. The senior official sounded relieved. London would be back in touch in due course. In the meantime, not a word to anyone – apart of course from my immediate family.

Weeks, and then months, passed without my hearing anything more. I wondered if I had been dreaming, or if the senior official had changed his mind – as he was prone to do on personnel matters. I managed to persuade a worried family that this early move made professional sense. I had already completed three of the four years I had been due to spend in Saudi Arabia. Privately, I thought, without being too pompous, that much of my career had helped prepare me for this. I had been opposed to the invasion of Iraq. But I had believed that we had had little alternative to joining the Americans in toppling the Taliban from power in Kabul in October 2001, when in the wake of 9/11 they had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Like President Obama and many others, I had an instinctive sense that Afghanistan was the good campaign (in 2006 it was not yet evident that it was a full-scale war), in which much had been achieved for the long-suffering people of Afghanistan.

Moreover, I knew the job would involve working with the military. Ever since as a small boy I had manoeuvred my battalions of Britain’s toy soldiers around the sandpit at home, I had been interested in matters military. I enjoyed dealing with soldiers. I knew their jargon, and admired their can-do style. I was in awe of their confidence and efficiency. And, at least since I had followed the great counter-insurgency campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s (Malaya, Algeria, Aden, Northern Ireland, Vietnam above all) through the pages of the Illustrated London News my grandmother had sent me each week, I had been interested in strategy and tactics. I had read widely about counter-insurgency. At Oxford, my best subject had been Roman military history. My favourite historians were those great chroniclers of ancient wars, Tacitus and Thucydides.

At least as important, my years in different parts of Arabia, and my fluent but flawed Arabic, had given me a sense of what mattered in the Muslim world and made it move. Working in a part of the Islamic world where people prayed in Arabic, but spoke or thought in other languages, had enormous attractions – especially one with as much history and geography as Afghanistan and the North West Frontier of Imperial India.

But what really decided me was a sense that, unlike so many British ambassadorships, this would be a real job. Success, or failure, in Kabul would matter to Ministers. It was a job for which I would be given the resources – both human and financial – I needed. Less flummery, more serious work. Vanity and ambition urged me on. I dismissed an American friend’s earlier warning: Afghanistan was a morass; and there could be no good outcome to the present half-baked Western intervention, however well intentioned it had originally been.

Three weeks to the day after that call from London, personal tragedy struck, in the form of another wholly unexpected phone call from England. Out of the blue, my sister-in-law rang at nearly midnight Saudi time. My beloved middle brother, Philip, had been taken seriously ill. Every Monday evening in winter he and his friends in the Honourable Artillery Company Saddle Club used to exercise the gun-carriage horses of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. Philip had just taken a particularly difficult horse over the jumps in the covered school at the St John’s Wood cavalry barracks and had collapsed. He was now at the Middlesex Hospital: could I ring and find out what was happening?

With a heavy heart, I got through eventually to the A&E department. A nurse answered. I told her who I was, and whom I was trying to track down. Trying to sound calm, she put her hand over the mouthpiece, but not well enough. I could hear her calling to a doctor. ‘It’s his brother,’ she half whispered. ‘Shall I tell him?’ In a ghastly flash, I knew that my brother had suffered the same fate – sudden death by massive, unannounced heart attack – as our father had, on another Monday night, thirty-eight years earlier.

The weeks that followed passed like a rushing nightmare – working at long distance with my surviving brother to deal with all the awful consequences of sudden death, especially for a young family, all the while going through the motions of continuing with my work in Riyadh. Somehow, I summoned up the strength to preside and speak at a glittering Taranto Night dinner in the Residence Garden organised by my Naval Attaché. His enthusiasm for the Fleet Air Arm of which he was a member extended to inviting the Italian Ambassador to attend a celebration of the greatest defeat in the brief and inglorious history of Mussolini’s Navy (luckily, the Ambassador had refused). And then, returning to England for a desperately sad funeral in Devon, I found myself summoned to London the next day for a meeting on policy towards Saudi Arabia.

And, through all of this, no one got back to me, as promised, on the Afghan job. A tentative enquiry to one senior official provoked surprise that I had even asked: it had all been agreed (even though I had heard nothing, still less any formal proposal, since the phone call out of the blue). My appointment would be a ‘managed move’, with no selection board or any of the usual procedures: it awaited only sorting out at the Kabul end, which I took to mean breaking the news to my predecessor. Alarm bells should have rung. The casual desperation with which the Foreign Office was moving to fill the post meant that the terms and conditions of the appointment were never put down in black and white, as a less credulous or ambitious officer might have insisted.

But, as I started to read and talk about Afghanistan, my enthusiasm grew. To those not in the know about my next job, I revealed only that one day I might be interested in working in and on that fascinating country. Rashly, I decided to try to learn Pashtu, the language of the great tribal confederation to which Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, belonged. It was a choice between that and Dari, the Persian dialect spoken by the Afghans in the north, and the language of Afghan business and government. For an Arabist, the Pashtu alphabet was easy. But I soon discovered that neither the grammar nor the vocabulary was, especially when delivered to me in Riyadh down a video link of extreme fragility and fuzziness from the Diplomatic Service Language Centre in London.

By March 2007, my posting to Kabul was official, and I returned finally from Riyadh for eight weeks of unremitting preparations for the new job, from which the only relief was a ten-day family holiday in Syria. The pace and intensity of work were a foretaste of things to come.

What struck me most forcefully was the towering scale of British ambition in the troubled Afghan province for which Britain had assumed responsibility, Helmand, and across Afghanistan more generally. Then Lieutenant General David Richards had returned from Kabul only in February 2007, after nine months commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan. During a triumphant tour, he had displayed the charm and charisma, and aptitude for leading from the front, which would later take him right to the top of the military tree. Under David Richards, NATO had pushed into Helmand, the neighbouring province of Kandahar and across the south. When I visited the newly returned General and his staff at the headquarters of the NATO Rapid Reaction Corps at Rheindahlen in Germany, they briefed me, with PowerPoint displays, on Operation Medusa. This, they said, had been a significant victory over the Taliban before Kandahar, in which British and American troops had shored up underpowered Canadian forces in cleansing an area of the Taliban.

Back in London, I was given a stack of British plans and papers, including a ‘United Kingdom’ strategy for Afghanistan, and a ‘United Kingdom’ joint strategic plan for Helmand. In their enthusiasm no one seemed to notice the hubris of Britain drawing up, at great length and in extraordinary detail, its own semi-independent plans for stabilising a vast and violent province of Afghanistan, let alone the whole country.

Paddling furiously in the wake of this bow wave of military enthusiasm were Whitehall’s civilians, notably the Foreign Office (FCO) and the much put-upon Department for International Development (DFID). My appointment was one of the main ways in which the FCO sought to show its support for the enterprise. But so was an elaborate and expensive (in FCO terms) plan to uplift both our Embassy in Kabul and our Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand. Occasional plaintive bleats from the Treasury about how much all this was costing were brushed aside. Our soldiers had to be supported with a proper civilian effort.

But it was not only those in government who spoke so persuasively of imminent success. Within days of my return from Saudi Arabia I was down at the Foreign Office’s Wilton Park conference centre, in the lush downlands of Sussex, at a conference taking stock of progress on the ‘Afghanistan Compact’, between Afghanistan and the international community, signed at a great gathering in London in early February 2006. That Compact was a remarkably ambitious prospectus of commitments the Afghan Government had promised the international community it would fulfil over the following few years, covering almost every area of its national life. At Wilton Park, speaker after speaker took a line that was to become all too familiar in the months and years ahead: ‘progress has been made, but challenges remain’.

Among the most persuasive of the optimists, and in many ways the golden boy of the international effort in Afghanistan, was Canada’s former Ambassador to Afghanistan, and later Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, Chris Alexander. No Dr Pangloss, he was smart enough to acknowledge the warts on his vision of a slowly rising tide of security, governance and development. But, like so many other able and ambitious Westerners involved in the project, he saw no point in being anything other than optimistic.

In Wilton Park’s ancient halls, and again several weeks later, at yet another conference, this time in the even more hallowed precincts of All Souls College, Oxford, my first doubts crept in. I was sure that progress had been made, and was being made. But I wondered how we would ever complete the enormous task we had set ourselves – of rebuilding the Afghan nation as well as the Afghan state – when none of the three main tools essential for success was yet fit for purpose: neither the Afghan Government in all its different manifestations, at national, provincial or district level; nor the international community, whether organised through the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, or through the UN, let alone the European Union; nor Afghanistan’s neighbours, each of which needed to be committed to working in sustained and co-ordinated fashion towards the greater common good of a gradually stabilising Afghanistan, but all of whom were still competing in what amounted to another round of the Great Game.^*

It was at Wilton Park too that I made my first acquaintance with a phenomenon of which I was to see much more in the years ahead: the Afghan conference industry. As with Ireland, or Palestine, or Sri Lanka, or most other conflicts, so Afghanistan’s travails attract what can at times seem like a stage army of caring and committed local and international actors. They travel from conference to conference, endlessly re-examining the entrails of the problem. Such consultations, among governments, and between governments and non-governmental actors, can be valuable, in pooling knowledge and sharing best practice. But when the issues under debate are as intractable as those we face in Afghanistan, such meetings risk becoming ends in themselves, rather than means to the end of solving the problem. And, just occasionally, I have had a sneaking suspicion that some of those taking part – myself included – would feel a bit lost if the problem were actually solved and the conference circus ceased to rotate.

Not everyone to whom I spoke in London that spring was quite as upbeat as the British officers who briefed me. To his credit, one of the more senior Foreign Office officials responsible for South Asia told me, quietly, that he suspected that the Western military intervention in southern Afghanistan had provoked more violence than it had suppressed. His instinct was that the only approach capable of treating the problem would be a political one, involving both the internal and regional participants in the conflict. His quietly owlish demeanour belied a persuasive radicalism far removed from the conventional wisdom of the time.

Similarly worried were some of the more academic analysts in government, especially those more removed by temperament or geography from the pressure and pace of daily military and diplomatic activity in London. They warned me that, gradually, the insurgency in the Pashtun areas of the south and east of Afghanistan was spreading and deepening, and that NATO and its Afghan accomplices were not succeeding in creating stability that was either sustainable or replicable in the insurgency-infected areas where Western forces were not, or no longer, present.

Such gloomy thoughts were, however, far from my mind as I made my final preparations for a posting to which I was greatly looking forward. My team of three Pashtu teachers gradually brought me up to what the Foreign Office language experts call ‘survival level’. They took enormous trouble to equip me as best they could for the linguistic and cultural challenges that lay ahead. One kindly invited me to stay with his family in north-west London for immersion training. All spoke of Afghanistan’s recent history: the overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973 by his cousin, Daoud Khan, who established a republic; the Communist coup of April 1978, followed by the Soviet invasion in December 1979; the nationalist regime of the former Communist Dr Najibullah, which was established by the Russians and which survived their departure in February 1989 by three years; the appalling struggle between the warlords from 1992 until 1996; and, finally, the Taliban’s beginnings as a movement of resistance to the depredations of the warlords, and their rule from 1996 until the Western intervention in October 2001. But my teachers played down the horrors which they and their families had experienced, in and out of prison. Each was a talent that would have been better employed back in his homeland rather than, for example, doing dry-cleaning in Shepherd’s Bush.

My final week before departure was spent in the surreal surroundings of a former prep school in the Surrey heathlands, undergoing what is euphemistically called Hostile Environment Training. Overenthusiastic ex-Special Forces instructors took a thinly disguised relish in putting us namby-pamby civilians through the meat grinder. They taught us how to wear a helmet and body armour; how to board helicopters and leave them in a hurry and in a dust storm; how to navigate across country with a compass; how to ‘cross-deck’ or, rather, be violently ‘cross-decked’ from a disabled vehicle to a rescue vehicle; how to apply a tourniquet and staunch a gaping chest wound; and, most terrifying of all, how to cope with kidnap and torture. My efforts to build a relationship in what I assumed was his native language with a very convincing-looking Al Qaeda operative were rudely rebuffed in unmistakable Geordie: ‘Shut the fuck up, willya?’

And then it was time for my final calls in Whitehall before departure. The Permanent Secretaries of the three Whitehall departments directly engaged in the conflict had just returned from the first of several joint visits to Afghanistan. Their report to Ministers had struck an upbeat note. ‘Overall, we are encouraged,’ it had begun, before going on to celebrate the way in which all elements of the British presence in Afghanistan were working together, while noting that, of course, ‘challenges remain’.

This was only the first of scores of reports back to Whitehall by visitors from London that I was to see over the next three years, only a few of which would address head on the scale of the mountain the allied effort in Afghanistan had to climb. Like the ‘Three Tenors’ (as the Permanent Secretaries had been dubbed, with that precious wit beloved of Whitehall), most such reports chose to accentuate the positive. Cautious optimism was the dominant theme. The civilian and military sides of the British effort in Helmand and Kabul were more ‘joined up’ than ever. We were at or approaching the turning point. There were no awkward questions about the credibility (or even existence) of a wider strategy for stabilising the whole country. Such was the pressure not to sound defeatist that all of us indulged from time to time in such self-congratulatory vacuities, as if the fact that most members of the UK team were facing in roughly the same direction, and talking to each other, was a matter for celebration.

At my last meeting in the Foreign Office before leaving for Heathrow, I mentioned to a senior official that my instinct was that we had made a strategic mistake in piling into Helmand the previous summer. He brushed my worry aside, assuring me: ‘Well, we are there anyway, and there is nothing we can do about it now, so there is no point in worrying about it.’

^* The nineteenth-century struggle between Britain’s Indian Empire and the expanding Russian Empire for control over the lands which separated them, especially Afghanistan.