Reviewed by Saif Asif Khan

IN Farewell Kabul, author Christina Lamb attributes the Western world’s failures in post-2001 intervention in Afghanistan to a lack of direction, the haste to rush into Iraq, and Pakistan’s alleged “double game” of supporting the Afghan Taliban while overtly being a Western ally. She does so by writing a deeply personal account of her travels as a war correspondent between London, Washington and South Asia, which she first began in 1988.

Lamb traces events chronologically, starting in December 2001, and ends almost 13 years later, with the October 2014 handover of Camp Bastion — the main allied base in Afghanistan — to the Afghan forces. While doing so, she refers periodically to her visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s, when the Soviet ‘jihad’ was at its peak and she first met some of the Afghan warlords who later emerged as power brokers in the years following the fall of the Taliban. In between, she covers important milestones in the ‘war on terror’ — and indeed, the region’s recent history — such as the arrest of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 2004 Afghan presidential elections, the Karsaz attack and Benazir Bhutto’s subsequent assassination, the Mumbai attacks and the Osama bin Laden raid, almost building a continuum, linking one episode to the next. She even manages to slip in coverage of her hurried visits to Iraq, India and Guantanamo Bay, providing further evidence of the Western miscalculations, wrong assumptions and often, sheer ignorance, that she was a firsthand witness to.

Her network of contacts who divulge nuggets of insider information is certainly impressive: politicians such as Hamid Karzai and Bhutto, various Afghan warlords, civil society activists, and a host of serving and retired senior officers in the Pakistan, British and American armed forces. Her understanding of how Western intervention interplayed with Afghanistan’s intricate warlord nexus, which thrives on patronage and cronyism, is particularly useful to students of statesmanship and development. She also speaks to common people who run hotels, write, grow crops, or work as contractors for the government in Afghanistan. This, she believes, gives her a more informed view of the state of affairs than diplomats, army officers and development agencies who are ensconced behind security barriers in Kabul and Kandahar.

The book makes for easy bedtime reading because it is gleaned from diary-style notes that the author has compiled over the years. Unfortunately, this also means that there is a degree of editable repetition, as some characters are introduced twice, while certain events are mentioned more than once. Editing could also have corrected some minor incorrect details which, ironically enough, the author includes to add credibility to her account. For example, she mentions incumbent Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s age back in 2002 to be 58 which would make him a septuagenarian by now (he was born in 1949). The first suicide bombing in Pakistan actually preceded 9/11 by six years; and occurred in 1995, rather than 2002, as Lamb asserts. The Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal won 63 rather than 68 National Assembly seats in Pakistan’s 2002 general elections. Also useful would have been a more detailed map of Afghanistan identifying all the locations that she mentions. There are a few maps, but it is felt they do not do justice to the breadth of her travels across the country.

The author makes no attempt to disguise her contempt for government planning, even as this reveals certain interesting contradictions that she is herself party to. While she is unapologetic about being a female journalist in Afghanistan, even remarking how this confers her with an edge over male colleagues since she is able to meet women, she is dismissive of female Western civil servants, and questions the wisdom behind sending female diplomats and development agency workers to the country.

There are other problems with her narrative also. Throughout the book, a rather overbearing sense of condescension is palpable towards the common Afghans and Pakistanis that she encoun-ters. So, for instance, she jokes at the very outset that the Afghan soldiers flanking Western troops at the Camp Bastion handover had been “instructed beforehand not to hold hands”. She compli-ments Afghan hospitality almost backhandedly by recalling “fatty mutton soup” she was asked to eat everywhere. She finds Pakistani English “quaint” and describes Bhutto’s Liaquat Bagh memorial as “a garish painting of Bhutto surrounded by what looked like pink bathroom tiles”.

Similarly, when describing Afghanistan, she reduces an entire country to just poppies, pomegranates and war; done no matter how lovingly, this smacks of Orientalism. For want of a better parallel, it is akin to describing America as simply hamburgers and skyscrapers.

In particular, despite her assurances that she empathises with the common Afghans (and Pakistanis who have suffered — though that is not quite apparent, since the book is dedicated just to Western and Afghan victims of terrorism) it appears that she suffers from a mild strain of the saviour complex that policymakers in London and Washington have been accused of by human rights activists. She repeats ad nauseam the losses suffered by the American and British armed forces, neglecting the severe imbalance in casualties since the 2001 invasion (3,500 Nato soldiers versus 37,000 Afghans, as mentioned by Lamb herself — though the figure could vary, depending on whom you talk to). When she remarks that “the West lost the moral high ground by giving positions of power to those Afghan people most blamed for the war, and by the detention and torture of prisoners”, one is forced to ask if that was all the West did wrong in attacking a country which was severely impoverished to begin with.

Perhaps, as a Briton, she finds it easier to empathise with the children of New York’s deceased firemen who fought the flames bravely on 9/11 than orphans who have survived “collateral damage” airstrikes on wedding parties in Afghanistan. But then this begs the question if empathy should be dependent on skin colour rather than humanity — especially when those responsible for such air-strikes are the same “well intentioned men and women” she believes were sent to deliver Afghans from the clutches of the evil Taliban.

More worrying is her not-so-hidden disdain for Pakistan, which seems to stop just short of advocating military action against the country for its double dealing. This comes despite her claims of being friends with many Pakistanis and having met the people of Pakistan, not just politicians or generals. While she does touch on Pakistan’s national interests being at odds with those of the US, her assessment of the former’s role in Afghanistan is almost wholly negative.

I find this to be too simplistic a view of a situation which has shades of grey amid the black and white which Lamb appears to see. I suspect her account will not be received too well by those in Pakistani military circles. Another observation that is likely to rile Pakistan’s decision-making circles is her complete silence over Indian presence in Afghanistan, even as she mentions Iranian influence in Afghanistan frequently — though the latter is believed by independent observers to be of minor significance, beyond western Afghanistan. Alternatively, her oversight of India makes the reader wonder if Pakistani fears about Indian foreign policy concerning Afghanistan are exaggerated.

Journalists such as Lamb do a valuable job in covering war zones that helps bring faraway wars to the breakfast tables of the Western world, where the decisions concerning these wars are actually taken. In doing so, however, they sometimes fall prey to the bloodthirstiness of their readership for exoticism over substance (funnily enough, this ‘Othering’ works both ways: at a talk I attended earlier this year, I recall historian and journalist Victoria Schofield’s thesis that the carefree attitude of travellers along the hippie trail during the ’60s and ’70s formed a poor impression of decadent, lazy Westerners on Afghans; a perception which still colours their interaction with the former today). Conversations weighed by prejudice, no matter how well-intentioned or well-researched, can only give us half the picture. 

The reviewer is a political economist, and has taught social sciences at various academic institutions in Karachi.

Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

(POLITICS)

By Christina Lamb

William Collins, UK

ISBN 978-0007256921

640pp.