Abstract
Men and women have always been drawn to war even as they hated it. Few of them come home unchanged. This is true of Christina Lamb, the award-winning journalist for The Sunday Times. The brutal, challenging, chaotic and complex war in Afghanistan has been a deeply personal as well as professional journalistic experience for her.
Lamb has covered Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan for many years, and Farewell Kabul is her account of how the west allowed itself to become embroiled in a war it could not win.
It is an exceptionally good book. She knows the region inside out. Afghanistan and its wars have coloured her life like nothing else. Little wonder then that at the handover ceremony in Helmand province in October 2014 when the last British troops left she felt tears stinging her face.
The cost of Britain's longest war for half a century had been terrible, she writes. Four hundred and fifty three British dead, many young enough to be her son. Hundreds more limbless from roadside bombs. Tens of thousands of Afghans had lost their relatives or homes. She had recently met some of these Helmandi refugees in a camp in Kabul. They were “begging for scraps of dry bread and meat fat, and burying children in the mornings who had frozen to death overnight in the winter cold”.
Lamb got her first taste for covering the country as a fledgling young journalist 27 years ago when she crossed the mountains of the Hindu Kush from Pakistan into Afghanistan with Mujahadeen forces fighting the Russians. She was back there again in 2001 when she returned in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Having toppled the Taliban, the Americans were hunting Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. They should have got him but the operation was woefully mismanaged and they allowed him to get away. Rather than commit American soldiers to the hunt for fear of casualties, the Americans paid corrupt and venal warlords millions of dollars to send their own tribal fighters into the mountains to capture Bin Laden for them. Of course, the warlords pocketed the money and allowed the world's most wanted man to slip over the border into Pakistan.
It was the first of many mistakes that have squandered so much of the good that was also achieved in Afghanistan by many devoted people, Afghans and foreigners, men and women. Most fateful of all was America's cynical abandonment of post-Taliban Afghanistan to its fate in favour of invading Iraq in 2003 with its faithful ally Britain fighting alongside. The aftershocks of this decision are being felt to this day.
Inevitably, fuelled by the malign influence of the ISI, the powerful intelligence agency of Pakistan, no friend of Kabul, the Taliban returned and Afghanistan began to fall apart. America and Britain felt they had no choice but to intervene militarily.
Lamb was there as the war spread and intensified, but Farewell Kabul is not a book of journalistic derring-do, though it captures a sense of the excitement and the difficulties of reporting conflict. Her description of being under fire when embedded with British paratroopers who had blundered, ill-prepared, into a Taliban ambush in the first naive weeks of Britain's military intervention in Helmand is vivid and gripping. Only their training as crack troops saved them and Lamb from disaster.
As in Iraq, the British liked to think they were the masters of counter-insurgency but they were proved humiliatingly wrong for all the bravery and dedication of the individual British soldier. Time and again Lamb highlights how woefully prepared Britain's armed forces were to take on the pacification of the province. For too long, they ignored the cultural environment in which they were fighting and dying. The irrationality of the war became more and more apparent.
Lamb quotes one British officer who resigned as saying that the whole British chain of command was complicit in wilfully ignoring the sound principles of counter-insurgency leading to an “ever-expanding dance of destruction and death” all over Helmand, leaving him with no choice but to use extreme violence to keep his soldiers alive.
Bizarrely, the British thought they could win over the people of the province while at the same time eradicating their opium crop – their only means of livelihood. Many Helmandi farmers were already in so much debt that they were unable to feed their families and were having to sell their daughters as “opium brides” to the smugglers. This sad traffic only increased as a result of British meddling.
It is Lamb's wealth of first-hand knowledge of Afghanistan, her intimate understanding of Afghans – from leaders such as Hamid Karzai in his palace down to impoverished villagers eking out a living in the countryside – that makes Farewell Kabul such a compelling read. She interviews decision-makers in London, Washington, Kabul and Islamabad, glaringly laying bare the compromises and contradictions at play.
I am sure her book will be studied at staff colleges and read, with discomfort perhaps, in the corridors of power. While often in awe of soldiers in the field she has little praise for the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence.
Lamb has provided a great lesson in journalism too. For in this increasingly fast-paced world many editors have a notoriously short attention span as they send their journalists scurrying from assignment to assignment, chasing deadlines and datelines in a breathless attempt to keep up with events. Lamb has demonstrated the virtues and rewards of encouraging journalists to stay faithful to one place or region and a story they care deeply about.
In my case it was Vietnam. In Lamb's it is Afghanistan. She never allowed herself to be completely sidetracked by any other assignment. Afghanistan became a part of her. She made it her own war. It is an old-fashioned approach to foreign reporting. Well worth preserving and encouraging, nonetheless, for out of it come books like this.