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Farewell Kabul is unquestionably my favourite non-fiction book of all time. A review had always been on the cards. I figured I might have to step up the timetable earlier this year when, a couple weeks after the New Zealand Defence Force departed, Biden announced US troops would be out by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. A few days ago, I was starting to worry I might not be back in Christchurch and able to get my hands on Kabul for a reread and a writeup in time. Could I get this out before September 11th? Yesterday, the news looked so bad I started to wonder if I would even get to Christchurch before the Taliban got to Kabul.
Well, here we are.
As hundreds say “Farewell, Kabul”, and thousands more are denied that chance, here’s my review of the best book I know on the subject. Something that speaks to the sticking power of the text is that I can write this entire review from the hole burnt in my memory, never mind that I only read it once, years ago.
Author Christina Lamb has one error on her record (handling Prince Phillip’s racism poorly in an obituary). Otherwise, she is in every respect an incredible war correspondent. In the 80s, as a young reporter, she travelled to observe the mujahideen fight Soviet invaders. Over the next three and a half decades, she found herself coming back again and again, even after a Taliban ambush hit her and the British troops she was with in Helmand province in 2006. She lacks the experience of any actual Afghani but, short of that, she is as good a source as we can get.
Charting the post-9/11 stage of the war, we begin with the NATO invasion. Taliban fighters, obviously part of a terrible cause, nevertheless had many naive young men against them, who cowered helplessly in caves as gargantuan explosions rocked them. Some were literally vaporized; others doomed by caveins to crushing or slow asphyxiation, just like the hundreds of captured fighters who would go on to be suffocated inside shipping containers by brutal (and recently decamped) Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. She especially lambasts the Americans for relying overly much on fancy CIA schemes with on-the-ground collaborators to prevent them having to get their hands dirty, letting Osama bin Laden slip over the border to Pakistan, where, as we now know, he survived for the next decade.
Unsurprisingly for somebody who studied the war and saw her “side” up close, Lamb is critical of how the West fought. She provides plenty of insight into the NATO force and allies, and, being from the UK, is particularly familiar with them and their operations in Helmand province. One of the most fascinating points she makes is her critique of the British destroying vast opium fields, as part of the wider (and in this case quite literal) War on Drugs. Defending opium growing (heroin being a far more vicious drug than, say, weed) may seem counterintuitive, but these attacks not only destroyed the income of many farmers and drove them towards the alternative the Taliban offered, but in the long run opium production has rebounded and boomed.
Her sense of nuance and detail does not abate outside of the Brits. She understands well the different Western commanders and the different strategies they brought - most notably David Petraeus, who met with more success in Iraq than here, and most infamously Stanley McChrystal, an otherwise tight-laced, high-discipline ghoul who inexplicably sat down for a disastrous interview with Rolling Stone, of all media outlets, and was promptly sacked for his troubles.
For an outsider, she is also as familiar as one can be with various Afghan individuals and groups. She gets that the country is not, as is commonly misunderstood, part of the Arab world, and explores the implications of the presence of a range of ethnicities - predominantly Pashtuns, but also Central Asian ethnic groups like Uzbeks. Similarly, she brings that perspective only a woman can in seeking out and speaking with Afghan women, from ceiling-breakers taking up positions of power like politicians and police chiefs, to the heartbreaking bittersweetness of a secret poetry society. I’ve thought of nobody less than them in these past days. I hope they’re okay and, inshallah, they can yet continue their covert education, and escape the notice of the Taliban and any other misogynistic men.
A couple individuals stand out from the pages. She never met Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” who nobly fought first the Soviets, then the Taliban, but her portrait paints a picture of a man who would have made an ideal leader of a post-invasion Afghanistan, were it not for his tragic assassination a mere two days before 9/11. The theory runs that this was an astonishing quid pro quo - in return for bin Laden taking out their chief challenger, the Taliban would make their defiant, and doomed, refusal to hand him over to American authorities.
Another luminary is Hamid Karzai, who memorably hits the dirt alongside Lamb as they stubbornly make their way into the country during the invasion. In one of their worst displays of hubris, Western delegates picked this exiled academic to be the first leader of Afghanistan, and, even though his reelection was full of fraud, he would hold onto power for the next dozen years.
Through close and repeated personal contact, Lamb charts his descent from a shining light of democracy and human rights, into an out-of-touch, lonely, corrupt old fraud, who represents the marginalisation of other Afghans by Pashtuns. The image of this man in his lambskin hat and his tribal robe, standing alone in his courtyard and insisting he has done all the right things and will be rewarded yet, lingers with me. There is an unearthly echo in the flight of present President Ashraf Ghani (another former warlord) just this morning.
Another important politician who gets an intimate and surprisingly favourable portrayal is former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto. She is hardly a villain of history: a feminist icon (if in the same way Margaret Thatcher is one), the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority democracy and to give birth as an elected head of government, and an opponent of socially ultraconservative forces and the authoritarian military. Still, she and her father (another Prime Minister who was killed for his troubles) remain deeply controversial to this day. What surprised me was Lamb spending more time on her affluent, out-of-touch background - significant, but hardly earth-shattering - than the accusations of corruption that dog her to this day.
Lamb was with Bhutto when both suffered a bombing; at the next assassination attempt, the latter was not so lucky. This serves as the grim yet almost inevitable coda to her lethal rivalry with General Pervez Musharraf, who became President after a coup in 1999, and the ISI.
What’s the ISI? Think of every accusation and intimation about the misbehaviour of the CIA, and the reputation that clings to that intelligence service. The ISI is that in the flesh but, unlike the CIA, have managed to remain unobserved in the international eye. You’d expect a book about a war correspondent in Afghanistan to describe her fear of the Taliban killing her. Yes, she does, but almost the more sinister threat is what the ISI might just do to her and her colleagues if she keeps asking questions. Particularly in a place and a time when anything can be blamed on al-Qaeda (who are relative bit players in this geopolitical opera).
Lamb was never just an Afghanistan correspondent, but one for the “AfPak” region, and this book is just as much a history of Pakistan. The story of the Afghan War cannot be told without Pakistan, from the transit of militants back and forth across the border, to the interference of the ISI to covertly support their regional proxy in the Taliban, to the USA idiotically coddling Musharraf, their exact enemy, in a vain attempt to secure his cooperation.
These big reveals on how the Pakistani military government and complex have been the real villain of the whole war are utterly astonishing. I still haven’t picked my jaw up off the floor from them. They could also easily descend into scaremongering, conspiracy or Islamophobia. While I’m not qualified to confirm she doesn’t err, everything I saw convinced me she had done her research and presents matters extraordinarily well. Even the issue of madrassas - traditionally Islamic centers of learning, a fine thing indeed, but sometimes perverted in Pakistan by the ISI to train terrorists - is dealt with deftly.
Books about war can get depressing. Another book I finished recently about war correspondence is In Extremis, a biography of Marie Colvin, a veteran journalist killed by shrapnel in the Syrian Civil War. Both that and this describe horrible and seemingly endless wars in the Middle East. However, In Extremis (aside from the impressive picture it paints of a troubled but awe-inspiring personality) doesn't tell us anything we don't know. War is hell. People die for no good reason, in terrible, awful ways. We ought to do something to stop that.
This call to action is good, but the specifics often elude such works. Christina Lamb knows what she is talking about. This book is a travel guide, a personal recount, a history and a geopolitical treatise all in one. The lessons never stop multiplying. Why this matters is because these lessons should've been learnt. The US fought and lost the Vietnam War, and yet it managed to do the whole thing again in Afghanistan and, somehow even more egregiously, in Iraq. Farewell Kabul is a comprehensive depiction of a terrible series of events, but the writing reassures me that we may be better these days at understanding the world around us and working to avoid making the same mistakes.
Our specific call to action, right now, is to let in Afghan refugees. Especially collaborators with our forces, who risk reprisals, but we should be getting anyone we can out of there right now, and it pains me to think that we may well not. Credit goes to Canada for doing way more on this. If they can let in twenty thousand refugees, and Germany let in twenty times that number of Syrians, that should be proof enough that we can and should say "Let's do this".
Farewell Kabul describes an era that ended today, on August 16th, 2021, seven thousand, two hundred and seventy-nine days after four aircraft crashed across the United States. The conflict is still well worth your understanding. Beyond that, the text is simply fascinating. You stand to learn so much from it, but also just to really feel, and be awed, by what is described within, and the revelations you never dared dream could be possible.
The fact that I am looking forward to rereading Farewell Kabul is a testament to the strength of the writing. I still want to immerse myself in a draining, endless war that's been waged since a week after I was born. For now, though, we, and Afghans everywhere, within and without the country, even members of the Taliban or even worse organisations - inshallah, even those fearing for their lives right now - at least have that chance of letting the truth sink in. The war’s finished. It’s over. There will be death and oppression yet to come, but the shooting and the bombing is done. I pray that this prediction is not premature when I say: for the first time in forty-two years, Afghanistan is at peace.
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