From: B
Telegraph, 30/5/2011
Sherard Cowper-Coles: Our frank, frustrated man in Afghanistan
Charles Moore reviews Cables from Kabul by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (Harper Press)
In the 1990s, when people thought that history had come to an end, the Foreign Office became obsessed with "diversity". It wished to widen the pool of recruits – more black faces, more women, fewer old school ties. The apparently paradoxical result was more uniformity of mind. Once you launch a cultural attack upon yourself, you disable independent thinking. Diplomats became embarrassed about their role, and more inclined to watch their backs. The past, of which Britain's foreign policy experience is uniquely deep, was forgotten.
Sherard Cowper-Coles never succumbed to any of this. He sees British diplomacy in historical, even romantic terms. Being a classicist, he has studied the Roman imperium; having an old-fashioned English education, he compares that empire to our own and to the American one that succeeded it. He also has an adventurous spirit.
So when the "end of history" itself ended in the ashes of the World Trade Center, Cowper-Coles's time had come. Britain found itself with an active role in the world crisis. After serving as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he was translated, in 2007, to Afghanistan, where our embassy became our biggest in the East. He was playing the 21st-century version of the Great Game.
I stayed with Cowper-Coles while he was in Kabul, and I can testify to his excitement at the drama, his pleasure in the ridiculous and his engagement with the issues. I can also testify, however, to his sense of frustration. One morning, having arranged for us to call on President Karzai, he went first to a separate meeting with him. When we met Cowper-Coles at the presidential palace after it, he was looking dishevelled with rage. Karzai had discovered that one of his warlord enemies was holed up in Kabul and had demanded that American and British forces help go in to capture or kill him. When Cowper-Coles and the US Ambassador refused, the Afghan president had succumbed to paranoid ravings.
This vivid book is chiefly an account of the author's frustration, not only with the mercurial Karzai, but with the entire Afghan situation.
Because Afghanistan is a problem shared between many nations and international institutions, Kabul is infested with non-Afghans. And because the security situation is so dangerous, it is natural for those non-Afghans to spend most of their time being driven in bullet-proof vests and helmets to meetings over breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea. The place is stuffed with the multifarious operatives of the "post-conflict stabilisation industry". You could work there for years without having any real idea about what any real Afghans think. Besides, the conditions are so arduous that tours of duty are short and leave (the author is scathing about the effect of "breather-breaks") generous. Before you have time to learn much, you go home.
In these trying circumstances, those involved, particularly the military, try to sustain themselves with an optimism not necessarily supported by the facts. As Cowper-Coles says, the mantra is "We are making progress, but challenges remain". He became more struck by the challenges than by the progress.
What renders the diplomatic comings and goings even more absurd is that the only Western power which truly matters is the US. America spends about $125 billion a year on Afghanistan. It loses more men than any of its allies.
So Britain finds itself, in Cowper-Coles's phrase, "lashed to the American chariot". It was far more important for our ambassador to cultivate the American one than to deal with Karzai. Eventually, Cowper-Coles became the British special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The real purpose of the post was to try to keep up with the US equivalent, Richard Holbrooke. Some of the author's best comic passages describe his efforts to engage Holbrooke's attention when the great man is thinking of his dentist, his BlackBerry or his dinner.
Cowper-Coles admires Holbrooke (who died last year) and dedicates the book to his memory. But one of his themes is that "Americans are just too democratic, and too nice, to be very good at ruling other people".
The Cowper-Coles thesis is that allied attempts to achieve an "Afghan lead" have not worked. He gives a striking example. One day, the then Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, asked a couple of Afghan ministers how long Afghan government authorities would stay on in Helmand after Western forces left. The expected answer was "decades" or even "forever". The actual answer was "Twenty-four hours".
The author advocates a "political solution", a politer way of saying a deal with the Taliban. Although he does not state this directly, my memory is that he pushed hard for the new Obama administration to reconsider America's unconditional support for the unreliable Karzai, as part of this solution. Instead, along came General Petraeus's surge – a bad example, in Cowper-Coles's view, of the military dominating the political.
In the end, Cowper-Coles's frankness and impatience worked against him. Less adventurous colleagues secured the top jobs he wanted. He left the service earlier this year, a disappointed man. He will probably have the satisfaction, however, of seeing the policy he advocated put into practice. With bin Laden dead and US and British elections needing to be won, "moderate" Taliban will no doubt be unearthed soon and bound in to some deal.
There are several morals drawn by the author from his story, all of them interesting; but the reader may add another one. If your son or daughter is a person of talent, courage and originality, don't let them go into the Foreign Office.
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