2. THE EMBASSY

Bonn 1992–95

My first full posting as a diplomat was to Germany and its then capital, Bonn. The British embassy in Bonn was an ugly concrete block on the main road connecting the city and its suburb, Bad Godesberg. Everything about it was gray — the carpets, the walls, the faces of the people working there. My office overlooked the often-rainswept car park. If I craned my neck, I could see the road beside the embassy where cars sped between Bonn and Bad Godesberg.

My title was Second Secretary (Political), a junior diplomat, an embassy workhorse. The embassy had a large staff of diplomats, whose work was divided into many sections. My job was to report on German foreign policy. To do this, I would get into my car or ride the tram to the Auswärtiges Amt, the German foreign ministry, or, occasionally, the Federal Chancellery (where the Chancellor and his staff had offices). Once there, I would walk the long corridors until I found the desk officer I was looking for and I would ask him what German policy was on country x. After taking a few notes I would return to the embassy and compose a telegram or letter summarizing what I had been told. That was it.

Once I had realized the essential simplicity of this task, I tried to make it more interesting. I would seek out Bundestag members to talk to; I would cultivate journalists. I even participated in training courses with young German diplomats. All the better to understand what was going on in German foreign policy, in theory; but in practice my motive was to escape the incredible boredom of my job. For the Foreign Office in London, known in the service simply as “London”, was not in the least interested in the thoughts of the minor parliamentarians who were willing to talk to junior diplomats, and even less the insights of German journalists. They didn’t want to understand Germany, they just wanted to know what it was doing. And indeed it is much more the job of embassies to do the understanding in order that their home countries will have a better sense of what the target country is doing. That’s part of the point of embassies.

My beat was the world outside Europe. My friend J. covered “Europe”, which in those days included the former Soviet Union but not Turkey (that was mine). German foreign policy in the rest of the world was, and still is, mostly routine: the pursuit of its “interests” in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Almost invariably, this meant trade. From Turkey to China, this was the abiding German interest. There was only one interest that came close in importance to trade: namely immigrants and how to stop them coming to Germany.

“London” was moderately interested in German Chinese policy (at least the department in London once replied to my letters). Trade with the Chinese rested largely on the degree of favor granted by the Chinese government, particularly in the case of large engineering contracts. So official visits to China, for example by Chancellor Kohl, involved lots of sycophancy to the government, the signature of large contracts (for new rail systems for instance), and a bit of lip-service to human rights. I was disproportionately curious about this last aspect, since this was what I thought most important about China, so I would always give it particular attention in my reports (usually to emphasize how little attention the Germans had given it in their exchanges with the Chinese). London was of course much more interested in the contracts and how little lip-service it too could get away with: indeed, I was told that the value of my reports was in helping London calibrate the British approach with that of the Germans.

I don’t think that anyone I spoke to either in Bonn or in London was especially pleased that this was the manner and focus of our relationship with the Chinese. The German officials talked about it with a resigned air, that this was just the way things were. The desk officer for China in London and I, meanwhile, enjoyed an ironic to and fro, glossing over the “realpolitik” with humor. His true love was art. None of us really thought of questioning the direction of our policy. We just accepted that trade, not rights, should take priority. This was what foreign policy was about.

But the thing that most gripped the German government, which their officials would confess to me in quiet moments, was the risk that China would disintegrate (with a smack of pretense, they called it centrifugalism), launching a massive wave of immigrants towards Europe and above all, they feared, towards Germany. When I first heard it, this revelation astonished me since it had not occurred to me, nor did there seem much risk of it. But it made sense in the Germany of 1992, which that year had received nearly a million asylum-seekers (Asylanten, as they were known derogatorily), most of them from Eastern Europe and, above all, from the disintegrating states of the Balkans.

My introduction to Germany was over a month of what is accurately called “immersion” with a family near Münster. For five suffocating weeks, I stayed with a German family in order to cement my language skills. My German certainly improved, and so did my understanding of Germans, at least some of them. Night after night on the television news, we would watch pictures of traumatized Bosnian refugees escaping the war(s). On one occasion a train filled with refugees had been stuck on one of Germany’s eastern borders. The people on board had been trapped on the train for days and were very clearly in desperation and agony, their faces an unpleasant echo of earlier genocidal wars. One of my hosts turned to the other, “More bloody (verdammte) Asylanten coming to take our money.” My days would be filled with what were supposed to be German lessons, which in a way they were: didactic lectures from the father on how unfairly Germany had been treated (there were war crimes on both sides during the war etc.). Every evening, the mother would return from her medical practice to regale us with incessant complaints about the appalling and untrustworthy behavior of the Bosnian girl whom she had foolishly employed. To escape, I smoked in the garden (to enormous disapproval) and taught myself to juggle.

But in some ways that family was more connected to the reality of what was going on in the Balkans than we were in Bonn. At least they had some contact with real Bosnians. In Bonn, like all the other diplomats in the embassy, I had quickly to learn to defend British policy over the breakup of Yugoslavia from the criticisms of many German officials and journalists. At that time (in the early 1990s), and indeed throughout the war, the “British” view, which was in fact the view of a few ministers and key officials, but which we were all required to uphold, was that the Yugoslav wars were a civil war, driven by ethnic hatreds. Unwilling to intervene to stop it, we presented the murderous killing as inevitable and unpreventable. All we could do in such circumstances, we argued, was provide humanitarian aid (which British troops, as part of UNPROFOR, bravely and professionally did) and prevent any inflow of arms through an embargo.

I did not understand the Balkans. But this did not prevent me or anyone else in the embassy from repeating the analysis set out above. Indeed, that is what we were told to do. On the war in former Yugoslavia, as on any controversial issue, “London” would send out regular “lines-to-take”, setting out in succinct and well-crafted bullet points what “we” thought. I would read these, learn them and deploy them authoritatively whenever a German interlocutor would argue that we were standing by while genocide was perpetrated, or that we were preventing the Bosniaks from defending themselves by denying them arms. I believed those lines-to-take, which helped when I had to use them. I did not stop believing them until I actually went to Bosnia many years later.

If the lines-to-take failed to do the trick, as they usually did, we would resort to criticizing the Germans or the Americans. For of course the Germans, claiming that their constitution did not allow it (which it then did not), were unable to intervene to stop the Serbs. And the Americans, well, that’s a story better told by others.[6] It is human nature that when you are on weak ground you seek to undermine your attacker, rather than examine the ground on which you are standing. Once a position has been taken on an issue — for example that the wars in Yugoslavia were a “civil war” — all analysis becomes suborned to that meta-analysis. Groupthink, in this case as in others, not only ruled but was encouraged. If we believed in a nice, tidy, ordered world of states, as British officials most emphatically did, then the breakup of a state was a Bad Thing and must be “contained”. British policy seemed logical, and the facts could, if we chose, be made to fit our views (telegrams from our posts in the region, particularly Belgrade,[7] did just that). If you see one group fighting another inside the borders of a state and you believe in the primacy of the state as the organizing unit of “international affairs”, you will tend to see that conflict as a “civil war”. You can disregard the now undeniable fact that this war was deliberately initiated by one group against another, where the first group used the extant machinery of government, in particular the army, to remove and often annihilate the other. That we may have been entirely wrong never seemed to occur to us. To this day you may still meet senior British officials who will repeat the “civil war, ancient ethnic hatreds” analysis, Srebrenica notwithstanding. Charge them with our inaction and they will, with knee-jerk certainty, immediately blame the Americans (for not bombing sooner) or the Germans (for recognizing Croatia too soon) and usually both. In extreme cases they will even blame the Bosniaks, presumably for somehow instigating their own annihilation. Not for a moment will they concede that “we” might have been wrong.

My area of responsibility covered other, even bloodier events. One day (and only once) I was asked by London to find out what “Germany” thought about the killings in Rwanda. Following a routine explanation from the Auswärtiges Amt desk officer on why the killings were inevitable and impossible to prevent — and of course I understood, he added, that Germany itself could not possibly do anything thanks to its constitutional position — I was treated to the desk officer’s own more personal analysis of why the killing was so widespread. You see, he said, there’s just not enough room for all of them in that little country (he asked condescendingly if I had been to Rwanda) and they must kill each other like rats in a cage.

Despite the fact that the worst killing in Europe since the Second World War was going on just a couple of hours’ flight from where we sat, the war in ex-Yugoslavia impinged little on our consciousnesses (Rwanda was barely spoken of). Both the British and German governments were much more preoccupied with “Europe” or rather the European Union, and the tedious battles over things like Qualified Majority Voting on milk packaging directives. The embassy had an entire team to cover such crucial questions.

Despite its sometimes vivid but abstract content of genocide and human rights, the day-to-day reality of my life in Bonn was dull beyond words. Not for nothing did John le Carré, who once served in the embassy, describe the town as “half the size of Chicago cemetery and twice as dead”. I acted in a couple of local amateur dramatic productions (don’t ask). Occasionally I would drive very fast along the autobahn to Cologne, there to seek excitement (I didn’t find any). I kept a diary, detailing the agonized, spasmodic but seemingly inevitable collapse of my relationship with my girlfriend who had stayed in London. I had a few friends in Bonn who, in the manner of those who become friends in dismal circumstances, were good ones. But my days were gray and lonely, all in all.

Recognizing the limits of my official duties and perhaps, though he did not mention it, my melancholic aspect, my boss, an enlightened soul, encouraged me to pursue what I thought interesting. This was an unusual attitude for a Foreign Office manager but he was and is a singular man. I decided to investigate the minorities in Germany, the outsiders. Working on and off as my regular duties allowed, I spent months on the task and eventually produced a weighty paper which I proudly dispatched to London. Perhaps it was the Münster family who had inspired me, but I was fascinated by the many millions of people who lived in Germany but were not Germans, and in particular by those who lived there for many generations but were still not considered Germans, culturally if not legally. German residence law has since changed, but at that time, over six million “foreigners” were living in Germany without citizenship.

I will not repeat the contents of the paper, much as I enjoyed preparing and writing it. Its significance to my story is this. My researches led me to some of the most oppressed people in Germany, and perhaps in Europe (with the exception of the Balkans), at that time. The Roma and Sinti peoples (almost universally known in Germany as Zigeuner, or gypsies, the English word does not have the same derogatory overtones as the German) were, and I suspect still are, routinely discriminated against. I visited a community in what could only be described as a ghetto, for it was a dilapidated housing estate, set in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Hamburg. The chemical pollution from surrounding factories was so bad that the local council would not allow “ordinary” housing, but this was where the Roma had been housed. The estate was surrounded by barbed wire, with a kind of sentry box, occupied by a policeman, at the entrance. The conditions inside the estate — the dirt and overcrowding — were disgusting. The local Roma leader told me that ambulances would not attend emergency calls at the estate. The inhabitants were barred from all the local shops.

But the relevance of this depressing story is that this was the most potent and moving experience of my time in Germany. I was shocked. I tried to convey the experience in my paper back to London, but could not. Neither by employing a sub-Orwellian journalese nor the drier vocabulary of a diplomatic dispatch could I capture the full power of what I had seen. I developed, with my boss’s help, a theory of minorities in Germany,[8] partly because I sought an order, an explanatory system, to understand the messy human reality I had witnessed and also in order to find terms (words like citizenship, identity and rights) more palatable to the discourse of diplomacy, where of course abstractions are much more comfortably consumed than cruder, more colored representations of reality. It is simply not done to write to London that people are being screwed in Hamburg, Bosnia or anywhere else.

Moreover, since the condition of the Roma and indeed other minorities in Germany did not fall under the rubric of Britain’s “interests” there, the report was not placed on the normal channels of the embassy’s communication with “London”, namely the classified and encrypted telegrams that would be circulated on receipt to officials across Whitehall in many different government offices. It was instead sent back in the “bag”. This was our weekly diplomatic bag to London, which contained everything deemed least urgent, a means of transportation almost guaranteed to deter the recipient from reading the contents. Unlike the telegrams copied in their hundreds to numerous departments in the government, it was sent in a single envelope to the Germany Desk Officer in what was then known as the Western European Department. I never received a reply, or even an acknowledgment of receipt. Nor did I really expect one, because such matters are not really what foreign policy, and the Bonn embassy, was “about”, namely the hard stuff like EU governance, the future of NATO, trade negotiations and what “we” couldn’t do about Bosnia. It was certainly not our business to comment on the internal affairs of an ally (we only do that to poor countries). The desperate condition of an oppressed minority was regarded, even by me, almost as a hobby, a thing apart from the core.

Afghanistan, Spring 2002

A thundering C-130 Hercules is swooping through the mountains. Just behind the pilots, I clamber on to a small platform and poke my head up into a small, perspex dome just large enough to accommodate my shoulders.

Pure exhilaration. I look out from the top of the fuselage with a panoramic view of the aircraft, to the rear its fin cutting through the wispy cloud, to either side its huge, stolid wings and bellowing engines. I turn forwards, and we break through the clouds, skipping sharp mountain peaks and diving steeply over an immense plain. It is like the dangerous pleasure of a child sticking his head through the sun-roof of a speeding car, but this is a huge aircraft and we are five thousand feet above the ground, roaring over the Hindu Kush, diving down towards Bagram.

Afghanistan. It was perhaps appropriate that this should be my last diplomatic posting, a brief sojourn from my permanent post in New York. As a teenager I had stuck a collection of postcards to the wall by my bed. One, a well-known photograph, showed a mujahideen fighter kneeling on a prayer mat in the Afghan mountains, his hands raised in supplication to Allah, a Kalashnikov by his side. Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush had been one of my favorite books; Ahmed Shah Masood’s romantic struggle against the helicopter gunships and bombers of the Soviet Union my favorite war.

I had lobbied hard to be posted to Kabul when Britain reopened its embassy after the Taliban fell. My qualifications were scant: that I had “done” Afghanistan on the UN Security Council, for instance by negotiating the Security Council mandate for the International Security Assistance Force which now helped police Kabul. But only a very few British diplomats had even set foot in Afghanistan in the long years since the Soviet invasion. Fewer still knew anything of the local languages. And so it was that in March 2002 I found myself in the embassy, being served tea in the garden by the ancient retainer, who had loyally tended the gardens and buildings throughout Britain’s long absence.

The former British embassy was now a ruin, a once grand but now decaying neo-classical ambassadorial residence set in a large estate littered with the burnt-out houses of the lower-ranking diplomats, their style that of suburban Surrey — mock Tudor in the Afghan hills, a home from home for the archetypal Bromley man of the British civil service. But the embassy site now belonged to Pakistan, and Britain was obliged to occupy a small corner of its former estate, a gathering of cramped, low-rise buildings which had once housed the embassy hospital.

The embassy team –– the ambassador, the diplomats, the support staff and the many soldiers who protected us –– shared a few small rooms. Our main office was a tiny drawing room and the corridor outside. We ate together in a long dining room, using the be-crested crockery and cutlery that the embassy’s retainer had managed to save through the long years of Britain’s absence (he had hidden the silver candlesticks too but these had been stolen, to his great distress, by an early visitor from Britain’s Special Air Service). Bacon, eggs and cornflakes in the morning; beef and roast potatoes for supper. Tea whenever you wanted it. The staff, cooped up in the embassy for most of the time, talked of what they knew: the latest soccer games in the Premiership, television soaps. In the evenings we sometimes played games (Trivial Pursuit, charades) and drank beer and whiskey flown in at enormous expense by the Royal Air Force. After four cosmopolitan years in New York, it felt like being trapped in a rather stuffy hotel in Weymouth.

Afghanistan lurked behind the high walls that protected us from “outside”. The walls were topped with coils of razor wire and sack-cloth netting, the latter to trap the rocket-propelled grenades that were feared as the greatest threat to our safety. My job as the political officer in the embassy was to report to London on political developments in the country. Before the posting, I had visions of sitting in crowded tea-shops in Kabul chatting about politics with the locals. Instead, on arriving, I learned that we were only allowed beyond the walls of the embassy inside an armored Land Rover with an escort of at least two members of our close protection (CP) team. Appointments had to be made days in advance in order to allow the CP team to reconnoiter the site before our visit. This was a frustrating and time-consuming process, involving endless failed telephone calls to the few Kabulis who owned satellite phones or sending out our local “fixer” to set up the meeting. Once the meeting was arranged and the reconnaissance complete, we would roll up in our lumbering white Land Rover, the bodyguards would hop out, machine guns at the ready, and I would emerge in my gray suit, notebook in hand, interpreter at my side, bright-eyed and ready to learn what was “really” going on in Afghanistan.

Naturally, this was not the best way to detect the complex and powerful forces sweeping that country. The Afghans I met were guardedly friendly, and with armed men at my side it was no surprise that they generally told me what we wanted to hear. They were pleased the Taliban had gone and grateful for our help (they were polite enough not to point out that the Talibs’ defeat was largely the Americans’ doing). They wanted peace, stability and –– mentioned less often –– democracy.

I spent a lot of my time talking to the impressive Afghans and UN staff who were working to prepare the Loya Jirga, the gathering of representative groups of Afghans from around the country that was to choose a new government (“democracy Afghan style” as some of my colleagues chose to call it). The UN, unencumbered by the stringent security precautions that so limited our work, was much better informed than we were, and moreover employed some of the more skilled and experienced Afghan “hands” in the international community (several were fluent in Pashtun and Dari). Desperate to get some kind of orientation in this unfamiliar country, I sought out all the factions I could identify on the political landscape and tried to talk to them all.

I made a few trips around the country to meet local leaders. When the Prime Minister’s Special Representative visited Afghanistan, I accompanied him to call on the bear-like General Dostum in Mazari-Sharif and the delphic Ismail Khan in Herat. But my efforts to get out of Kabul on my own were thwarted by the fact that we could only travel by air (the roads were too dangerous) and then only in Royal Air Force planes (which were usually employed in more military duties) and once an escort of Royal Marines (to guard the aircraft and us on the ground on arrival) had been arranged. This I managed only once, by goading a reluctant member of the British military to allow me to piggy-back on his own visit to the beautiful and remote town of Bamiyan (site of the famously destroyed Buddhas).

High in the mountains, we rode four-wheel drives bouncing down dirt tracks and steep valleys, then sat for hours, cross-legged, at a feast of lamb and rice discussing the future of Afghanistan with Karim Khalili, the leader of the Hazara sect:

Me (through interpreter): “Tell me, Mr Khalili, what do you think are the prospects for the Loya Jirga?”

To get home, our squad unfurled a small parabolic antenna on the roof of their Landcruiser and called down our C-130 to Bamiyan’s dirt airstrip, where it barreled in, roaring and spitting gravel from its wheels.

The mountains were very beautiful; the people picturesque. The light had a wonderful, limpid quality. But whether these images had much, or anything, to do with the real Afghanistan, remains a mystery to me. I spoke no local languages (there was only one person in the embassy — the interpreter — who did). All my conversations were thus limited to stilted, somewhat impersonal exchanges. The most resonant image of my time there is looking out at the people of Kabul, bustling and alive, through the cold, thick armored glass of the CP Land Rover.

However, this separation did not prevent me from writing nice, clear telegrams (divided, as the Foreign Office practice dictated, into Summary, Detail and Comment) informing “London” what was going on in Afghanistan. My missives covered such diverse topics as the prospects for the Loya Jirga, the future of the Hazaras, and the celebrations in Kabul for the New Year (Nawruz) festival. I tried to say that I didn’t really know what was going on (I repeatedly mentioned the restrictions on our work, linguistic and otherwise), but I was being paid to produce a product, and produce it I did. And I did feel that there was one message that was worth getting across. This was the one thing that every Afghan I met, with the exception of the so-called warlords themselves (Dostum, Ishmail Khan et al.), told me and this was that they wanted to be free of the warlords. They wanted “security”.

The UN said it too, the US Ambassador said it, as did mine, so did the military men I met from our own forces, and so did all the journalists. My own confinement to Kabul and protection by the CP team carried the same message. The country was not safe. ISAF provided a modicum of security in Kabul but outside it there was considerable anarchy, only moderated in limited areas by the autocratic and occasionally tyrannical rule of the regional big men, such as Dostum and Ismail Khan. Most striking of all were the messages carried to the organizers of the Loya Jirga by innumerable delegations from the regions: they wanted security; and they wanted ISAF deployed across the whole country to provide it. And although this of course was the one thing that everyone decent and sensible there said very clearly, it was the one thing that “we” — the UK and US governments — were not prepared to give them.

What the campaign to overthrow the Taliban was about, of course, was not the Afghans’ security but our own, as defined by us. The reason why the smiles of welcome on the Afghans’ faces were not as warm as they might have been was that they knew perfectly well that, but for 9/11, Osama bin Laden and all the rest, they would still be languishing, forgotten, under the rule of the Taliban. Our protestations, from the Prime Minister downward, that we would not again forsake Afghanistan, were met with skepticism.

While I was at the embassy, I slowly became aware that there was a different narrative being played out by the various powers in Afghanistan, one that hardly featured in the telegrams I or my Ambassador wrote, one that had nothing to do with building democracy, the Loya Jirga or anything so noble. [9]

After a while, I realized that while I was running around encouraging and cajoling politicians to engage in the Loya Jirga process, the purpose of which was in part to take power back from the warlords, others were running around doling out bribes to buy loyalty among those very same warlords. Their purpose, so they claimed, was to track down the terrorists, Al-Qaeda and the remnant Taliban or “AQT” as they were known. Although it took me a while to cotton on, this was and had been for some time an open secret among the international community in Kabul (in fact, I think it was someone from the UN who first told me about it). Indeed, it was something of a joke among the more cynical observers that the Afghans, within the government as well as the regional war-lords, were encouraging a bidding war between the foreign powers involved in Afghanistan — the US, UK, Russia, Pakistan and Iran, to start with — to extract the most cash. It was widely believed that some in the government were taking money from all of them (and who could blame them?).

It is not hard to see the contradictions. In the embassy, our version of reality went like this: we favored a process (the Loya Jirga) leading to a democracy based around a centralized system of government, with the center supreme over the regions and people like that nice Mr Karzai (who happens fortunately to speak a language we can understand) in charge of the whole thing. Our activities and our reports were thus directed towards this end. The UN too, which helped run the interim administration and the Loya Jirga process, was working towards this aim.[10]

But meanwhile a different strategy was being played out, often entirely unknown to us. In theory it was a complementary strategy, but what has happened since suggests otherwise. This was to buy off the support of the regional powerbrokers in order to win their cooperation in the war against the “AQT”. A further goal was added, which reinforced the contradictions. Shortly after the Taliban fell, someone in the British government remembered that Afghanistan was the source of much of the heroin that ended up in Britain. So the plan was hatched to remove this supply at a stroke by paying the farmers in the poppy-growing areas (otherwise known as most of Afghanistan) to plow in that year’s crops.

This occupied many of the staff of the embassy, and several officers were drafted in especially for the task. Vast amounts of cash were dished out to the various regional leaders to pay off “their” farmers to destroy their crops.

The result of these strategies soon became clear. In 2002, according to the UN Drug Control Program, the heroin crop in Afghanistan was ten times bigger than it had been in 2001, when the country was for most of the time under Taliban control (the Taliban were, with some exceptions, largely hostile to drug production in areas under their control). Meanwhile, the process of political stabilization has faltered, it seems because of two main factors: the persistent insecurity and instability outside Kabul and the continuing intransigence of the regional warlords in ceding real control to the central administration. Indeed, by 2006 some analysts were arguing that the warlords, and the drug runners, were now running the central government: a narco-state was in the process of creation.

How the war against terrorism — “AQT” — is going I do not know, but over the four years since the allied invasion there have continued to be bloody skirmishes in the south and areas bordering Pakistan, where the remnant Taliban (if that is who they really are) are strongest. The signs, even in early 2002, soon after the Taliban had so precipitately collapsed, were inauspicious. Twice I visited Bagram airbase, where much of the British military were then stationed. A senior British officer there voiced his fear that the strategy that the allies (his polite way of indicating the Americans) were adopting would perpetuate the very problem it was designed to solve. He gave an example.

Aerial reconnaissance had photographed an encampment close to the Pakistan border which bore suspicious signs that it might be an AQT base. There appeared to be circular pits, perhaps for mortars or small artillery, camouflaged trucks and trenches. A British patrol was sent to investigate. First, it observed the camp from the hilltops above, but could not tell what was going on. So they boldly decided to descend to find out more. On entering the village, which it turned out to be, they realized that the settlement was not AQT but a camp of nomads, the Kuchi, as they are known in Afghanistan. The “gun pits” were circles made in the grass by goats tied to stakes. The “trenches” were drainage ditches and the “camouflaged trucks” were ragged old tents. The patrol was greeted with a friendly welcome, and they went on their way after arranging for an airdrop of “HR” (humanitarian relief).

Had “our allies” first received the information of this encampment, argued the officer, they would have bombed it flat. As he spoke, A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft taxied along the runway behind him and blasted into the air for another mission. (The incidents of accidental bombings of civilians in Afghanistan have been frequent since then. For example, in May 2006 over a dozen civilians were reportedly killed when their village was struck by allied bombs.) The officer argued that the “allied” goal was to kill as many AQT as possible, not to win over the local population. At the same time, there were plenty of people, he argued, not only in Afghanistan but also from the surrounding countries, who were delighted to come to fight the Americans. Thus a cycle would be established and perpetuated.

In June 2006, over 22,000 US and British combat troops remain deployed in Afghanistan to fight the “AQT”.

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The thick screen of “armor plating” and bodyguards that separated us from the reality of Afghanistan was unusual, but in its way symptomatic of the separation of the embassy from its surroundings. It successfully allowed us to project our own narrative on to what was “really” going on, even if the consistent message from the Afghans who broke through our screen was a clear one.

What I experienced in Kabul and Bonn has echoes of other episodes of diplomatic history. The then British ambassador candidly admitted the failure of his embassy in Tehran to detect the rumblings of frustration and revolt which led to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. We were distracted, he confessed. What the work of his embassy had been “about” was maximizing sales to the friendly and pro-western Shah, whether of tanks or chemical plants.

Even in countries very similar to our own, like Germany, there is an inevitable tendency for the diplomat to gravitate towards those like us; those who speak our language, or share our values. For they are inevitably easier to find — indeed they may seek us out. They may become our friends (as the Shah and many of his ministers became of the British ambassador), and come to comprise our understanding and memory of what Germany, or Iran, or Afghanistan is.

(In Afghanistan, the diplomats, UN staffers, NGOs and journalists formed a large group of expatriates who socialized and gossiped together. It was too unsafe and, frankly, alien to socialize with the Afghans. The journalists looked to the diplomats for information, and we did the same to them. Thus a circle was formed, where we were able to confirm our chosen narratives of what was “really” going on. There were some great journalists and international workers who rejected the temptations of this circle of affirmation, and sought out the facts on their own, but they, regrettably, seemed to be the exception.)

The good diplomat will resist this tendency, but it is difficult, even for the most diligent. As the screen of security around US, British and other western embassies grows ever thicker, it will become even harder for the diplomat to locate and meet “real people”: my dream of sitting in tea-houses in Kabul with “ordinary” Afghans remained a fantasy. It was easier for me to meet them in New York.

But this restriction will not prevent the embassy from producing detailed reports on what is going on in its host country, just as I dutifully reported from inside the fence in the embassy in Kabul. The local government will still speak to us from inside its fence and thus the utility of embassies, government speaking to government, is in this narrow sense preserved.

Ambassadors and diplomats moreover tend to emphasize their intimate relations with the local authorities, as a mark of how well they are doing their job. When I was a diplomat, ambassadors took great care to relay to London detailed accounts of every mutter and hint of their late-night conversation or round of golf with the President or Prime Minister. Usually, these accounts would be given a high classification and restricted circulation, in order to underline the unusual access the diplomat has secured (even if the information contained is banal). They are often spiced with little personal details (the President’s favorite whiskey; his fondness for the British royal family etc.) in order to demonstrate the intimacy and uniqueness of the exchange. The product of such behavior is to reinforce the sense that diplomacy offers a rarefied and unique level of communication, where one élite talks to another, elevated from the cacophonous hordes beneath.

This remains one service that embassies can perform for their governments.