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.’ Throughout the book he laments lost opportunities to negotiate a settlement, as the military campaign gathered greater momentum:
We stuck at it because we wanted to believe our generals. Each year they assured us that, at last, they had the strategy and resources they needed to do the job. This year, they said every year, we were going to turn the corner.
The author believes that the army’s self-interest has prolonged the fighting. He recalls being told by a senior general that if battle groups being withdrawn from Iraq were not redeployed, they might be lost in a future defence review.
Service Chiefs are fair game for the Foreign Office. I thought it unkind of the ambassador, however, to say that the deaths of private soldiers ‘seemed to upset [their commanding] officers rather less than they did me.’ He concedes that perhaps ‘they couldn’t afford to be affected’, but the remark is still disturbing.
It was made clear to Cowper-Coles, at the outset, that HMG’s influence in Afghanistan ultimately depended on the closeness of its relationship to the US. On his first day in Kabul he told his embassy’s top spy that building a relationship with President Karzai would be his priority:
‘Oh no it won’t,’ he retorted. ‘Your key relationship will be with the American ambassador. He matters most to us.’
Later, during his first meeting with Hamid Karzai, Cowper-Coles observed the President’s obsession with Pakistan. This is a persistent refrain. The President ‘saw a Pakistani hand almost everywhere and in almost everything’.
Later, the author reveals that he mollified Karzai with a line cribbed — consciously or not — from Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf : ‘While I believed almost all Taliban were Pashtuns, I did not believe that all Pashtuns were either Taliban or insurgents.’
Occasionally there seems to be as much of Lawrence Durrell’s Antrobus as there is of Thucydides in Cowper-Coles’ book. He describes his job as ‘like being the headmaster of a rundown but generally happy… prep school, or the governor of an open prison’. At the funeral of Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, the sound of an explosion prompted his Close Protection Team to yell at everyone to take cover. As the booms continued it eventually dawned on the Royal Military Police that this was the Afghan army’s 21-gun salute. Then again, there’s ‘Chemical Bill’ Wood, the American ambassador, a P. G. Wodehouse fan who described a botched execution in which eight prisoners were mown down by machine-gun fire as ‘a beacon of hope for the future of Afghanistan’.
Cowper-Coles ends his account on a melancholy note, as he began. Only with a new strategy, he says, leading to a negotiated settlement, can we look in the eye the widows and orphans, the wounded and the veterans and,
with a clear conscience, assure them that the sacrifice has been worthwhile, that in Afghanistan dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
This is a wonderful book, even though the author is venomous about the generals.
Carey Schofield’s Inside the Pakistan Army: A Woman’s Experience on the Front Line of the War on Terror will be published next month by Biteback at £19.99.
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