Category: Kabul: Final Call

15 August 2021. I messaged London. ‘Taliban are through the palace gate.’ Shortly afterwards, pictures appeared on social media of the Taliban gathered around Ghani’s desk in the Presidential Palace, from which he had broadcast to the nation a few hours before. Kabul had fallen. The Taliban had taken Kabul.  On the third anniversary of…

The Taliban captured the city of Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz province, next to the Iranian border in the southwest of Afghanistan. Above all, Zaranj mattered because it was the first provincial capital to fall to the Taliban. Its fall turned out to be the beginning of the end. Over the nine days that followed,…

Our dilemma over whether and when to close the embassy was becoming pressing….Move too early and we would risk bringing the whole edifice down….Move too late, and we could put our people at unacceptably high risk of being killed or taken hostage by the Taliban, by ISKP or by other extremists….We just did not know…

The pressure was mounting over who should be eligible for refuge in the UK. A group of UK broadcasters and newspaper editors wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary appealing for an urgent special visa programme for Afghan journalists, translators and support staff who had worked with British media organizations over…

I wrote to London that we should now base our planning for the summer on the assumption that the republic would lose one or more major cities in August, maybe Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, and that this was looking increasingly likely to happen within the next seven days….The republic would be unlikely to recover if…

I reported to London that we were facing a new reality in Afghanistan. Unless there was a major turnaround on the battlefield, it was likely that the Taliban would soon control at least one major population centre, with maybe more to follow. If that happened the impact on the Republic’s already fragile political unity, military…

The closure of Bagram changed the mood in our embassy. At the morning meeting of the senior embassy staff I asked the team to test the closure plan. Testing a contingency plan of this sort means going through it meticulously, working out what you would do in a range of scenarios. … You need to…

Overnight on 1-2 July US forces pulled out from Bagram airbase. Bagram, a Soviet-era airbase about 50 km north of Kabul, had been the linchpin of US and NATO operations throughout the 20-year campaign. … The news broke as the USA was going into the 4 July Independence Day holiday weekend. In Washington, President Biden…

I asked my staff to set up calls on the ambassadors of Russia, China and Iran. These countries are some of our most difficult international partners. But they have important interests, and play significant roles in the region.  As NATO’s forces withdrew, the leadership of each of these countries was having to reassess and recalibrate…

I presented credentials to President Ghani… It is an ancient ritual, but still central to what an ambassador is and does…The letter of credence is handed over in person to the Head of State. Diplomacy depends on personal contact, as much personal trust as you can build with the people you are dealing with, and…