Award-winning journalist and war correspondent Christina Lamb talks to Richard Nye about her new book on the tragedy of Afghanistan
Justin Sutcliffe
Folly, mused Aldous Huxley, can be crueller in the consequence than malice in the intent. When folly and malice are conjoined, the results are more devastating still. And nowhere more so than in the Greater Middle East; where, for more than three decades, the road to hell – often paved with good intentions – has led through Afghanistan.
For a brief interlude 14 years ago, with images of falling towers fresh in every mind, Afghanistan was the centre of the world. In time, however, blighted by confusion of aim and mounting human cost, overshadowed by the calamities of Iraq, the struggle to reorder this mysterious, unconquerable country stalled. By the time British troops left last year, 453 of them had lost their lives – to say nothing of innumerable Afghans – and Islamic State was the new dark star in the East. As so often in its crimson history, Afghanistan receded into the haze.
All the more reason, then, to welcome Farewell Kabul, an exploration of the country’s recent past by one of its most distinguished observers. Much garlanded for her war zone reporting – she has twice been Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the British Press Awards – Christina Lamb OBE, of East Sheen and the Sunday Times, has charted events in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan since the late 1980s. The resultant book is a moving, horrifying and draining account of seemingly insoluble strife.
But more than that: it is a love letter to a bruised and beautiful land caught up in a whirlwind of despair.
“I never set out to be a war correspondent,” says Christina, her impeccable tones barely audible above the café chatter going on around us like a barrage of friendly fire. “As a young reporter, I just wanted to have a few adventures and then come back home to write novels.
“But then I found myself in Pakistan, in Peshawar, looking through my window at the mountains with Afghanistan beyond. I thought of all the people who had tried and failed to conquer that land: Alexander, the British, the Russians. When I got there, I fell for it at once. Sitting on the roof under the stars, listening to these guys talk of fighting and feuding, yet clearly so in love with beauty too; I’d never known storytelling like that.”
Justin Sutcliffe
Christina with troops from 16 Air Assault on patrol in Zumbeley
But Afghanistan’s is a tragic tale. In 1979, as Soviet tanks rumbled in, the United States threw its weight behind the Mujahideen resistance, using Pakistan and its intelligence agency (ISI) as a proxy. It took a decade to roll back the Russians, but the aftermath was catastrophic.
Soon the writ of warlords ran across a country in which law and order had collapsed, while the US – content with the accomplishment of its primary aim – melted happily away, leaving its Pakistan ally to cope with the chaos unfolding beyond the Khyber Pass.
It was, says Christina, an example of the myopia that so often afflicts the West – and the price was the emergence of the Taliban.
“The problem wasn’t supporting the Mujahideen against the Russians, but the fact that we then abandoned them. I was shocked at how people just left overnight – aid workers, diplomats, spies, everyone. We should have stayed and helped to form an administration.”
A decade later, having removed the Taliban from power in the wake of 9/11, the West did stay to help rebuild a shattered land. Hamid Karzai, the bloom of promise resting upon his trademark striped chapan, was plucked from the ranks of familial eminence to lead Afghanistan into the dawn. But the threads of destruction would not be so easily unpicked. In a land where tribal loyalties run deep, where drugs and poverty fuel corruption, and where the old, discredited warlords offered an all-too-ready replacement for the theocrats, the liberal renaissance was doomed.
“It was when a government minister offered to sell me a prisoner that I knew we were really in trouble,” recalls Christina. “Corruption was running wild, but for most people it was almost unavoidable. The average Afghan was spending two months of his annual salary on rice alone, but to get a better job – in the police, say – he would have to come up with a bribe.
“It’s a vicious circle and we’ve made it worse with all the money we’ve poured in. Western agencies have to show results, so they come up with all sorts of fashionable projects without listening to what the people really want. No Afghan ever told me that she wanted a gender awareness class!
“We have to learn our lessons. I don’t buy the line that there’s no appetite for getting involved in these places – I think ordinary people do care. But you have to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve. I was out there, yet even I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing.”
And always there was the spectre at the feast: Pakistan. Separated from Afghanistan by a porous border, as bound up with its fate as Troilus with that of Criseyde, Pakistan played an ambiguous role in the years after 9/11. Ostensibly a US ally, it was frequently accused of sheltering Al-Qaeda militants: Osama bin Laden was killed there in 2011. Yet the suspicion was mutual. For many Pakistanis, there is no more fickle friend than the land of the free.
“They know what it feels like to work with the US and be abandoned,” says Christina. “So, to an extent, they were simply hedging their bets. But for some of them it was ideological too. It would, admittedly, have been difficult for President Musharraf to change what was happening on the ground, but I don’t think he tried very hard.”
Christina’s own response towards Pakistan is nuanced. Afghanistan, she says, is a passion; with Pakistan the relationship is love-hate. As a young reporter she interviewed the future prime minister, the late Benazir Bhutto, and was subsequently invited to her wedding. It was the start of a 20-year friendship terminated in December 2007 by an assassin’s hand. Just two months before Benazir was killed, Christina had been with her at a rally in Karachi to mark her return from exile, when their bus was rocked by a bomb. Just before the attack, the streetlights had unaccountably dimmed. The history of Pakistan is so often a tale of the unexplained.
“Benazir was the bravest person I ever met,” reflects Christina. “I can see her now, after that first attack, touching the photos of her children and wondering if she would ever see them again. When she died, there was no post-mortem and it looked for all the world like a cover-up. I asked Musharraf outright if he murdered her: he was very angry. It was made impossible for me to join the dots and piece together what had happened.
“I didn’t always agree with Benazir. She failed as prime minister because she never felt able to take on the military and the mullahs. She was also very loyal, which made her stick with bad people. She was a terrible judge of character. But I think she genuinely felt that she was a daughter of destiny; that somehow it was her task to save Pakistan.”
She couldn’t – any more than Karzai could save Afghanistan next door. There the candle of hope guttered feebly, as corruption, military error and a resurgent Taliban took the country on a voyage to the underworld charted sorrowfully in Farewell Kabul. For in Afghanistan the cost of failure is measured, inevitably, in stories: in tales of fractured families, dashed dreams and women denied the flourishing of their humanity. It is an anthology of loss.
“I’ve been a war correspondent for 28 years and there have never been so many wars,” reflects Christina sadly. “It used to be just one obvious conflict. Now they’re popping up all over the place, yet we seem to have less influence than ever. Where we’ve intervened, we’ve made things worse; where we haven’t, they’ve got worse anyway. You will only succeed if you go in to make a country better, not just to remove a rogue regime.”
As for Christina, she admits to having long since used up her nine lives. Does she ever baulk at dancing with danger?
“When I had my son, I started thinking: ‘What story will I get if I go down that road? Will it be worth it? My first responsibility is as a mother.’ Then, after being on Benazir’s bus, I wondered how many escapes I had left. I mean, you develop antennae, but you also need luck. But back home I had dinner with a brave lawyer from Zimbabwe. ‘If people like you don’t report what’s going on,’ she said, ‘things will never change.’”
For now though, the world remains far more volatile than on that long-ago night in Peshawar, when Christina first set eyes on Afghanistan. Back then, as communism crumbled, it seemed briefly like ‘the end of history’, in Fukuyama’s famous phrase. But this afternoon Christina is off to Calais, where migrants from a whole array of war-torn states loiter palely in a world sans merci.
Just another chapter in the history of despair, of which the end is still nowhere in sight.
Farewell Kabul is published by William Collins (£25)
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