Clashing by night

Cables from Kabul is Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s valedictory account of his years as ambassador to Kabul (2007-9) and as this country’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-10).

Cables from Kabul is Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s valedictory account of his years as ambassador to Kabul (2007-9) and as this country’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-10).

A long telegram reporting on the ramp ceremony for a fallen soldier, Corporal Damian Stephen Lawrence of the 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, opens the book. It is a beautiful piece, describing the service — ‘in the best traditions of lapidary Anglicanism. Plenty of dignity but not too much religion’ — and the military ritual of the event. The Hercules taking the young soldier home flew over the parade ground ‘starboard wing dipped, in impossibly eloquent tribute from the Royal Air Force to Corporal Lawrence and all those who had fallen here.’

This elegiac mood continues as the author begins his Preface with the last stanza of ‘Dover Beach’. The former ambassador feels that we are fighting in the darkness, like the Athenians, and a lambent sadness pervades the book, despite the author’s energy and verve. Like Thucydides he hopes that his record will help to prevent mistakes being repeated.

Cowper-Coles admits that he had doubts about what the West was doing in Afghanistan, even before he arrived in Kabul. At a conference at Wilton Park, and at a workshop in the Old Library at All Souls, he wondered how the task of rebuilding the country would ever be accomplished when all the players ‘were still competing in what amounted to another round of the Great Game’. Later on, he realised that the situation in 2007 had been more serious than he had been prepared to admit: ‘I had not grasped the extent to which we lacked a coherent overarching political strategy.’