A Fortunate Life (65 page)

‘Because I couldn’t trust the Lib Dems in government then.’

‘And you can, now that you are going to be PM?’

He continued, ‘Well if you cannot be in my Cabinet, could you, say, be a Minister for Security for Northern Ireland?’

‘Gordon, I wish you success. Britain needs a good government, and I hope you can provide it. But my ambitions do not include being a junior member in a Labour Government.’

Our conversation lasted about half an hour, and we parted on good terms. But I noted in my dairy that night

After this flurry of excitement, Jane and I got back to living our lives: I pretending that I was retired, and Jane pretending that she believed me. But fate, in the form of Afghanistan, had other ideas. In October we left on a long-promised visit to see my brother and sister in Australia. I had not seen them since
This is Your Life
in 2001, and my last trip to see them in Australia had been in 1970, on my way back from studying Chinese in Hong Kong. This time Jane and I planned to spend a few weeks with them in order to be able to get to know their families, too, combining this with a trip to New Zealand, which neither of us had ever visited before.

Jane had always said that she would like to go on a cruise once in her life, to see what it was like. So we decided to see New Zealand by taking a two-week trip on a cruise liner. It was not a good idea. This was not New Zealand’s fault – it was wonderful and fully up to expectations – but we very quickly decided that cruise ships were not us. I was bored stiff and spent my time taking it out on the gym equipment, and we got hit by two spells of hurricane-force winds. My wife is neither a good sailor, nor a natural lover of the sea (though she is quite happy sitting, watching it from a safe distance). During the height of the two storms we passed through it was all I could do to persuade her that the time had not come to put on her furs and jewels (metaphorically speaking – she has neither in reality) and repair with me to the poop deck to start singing ‘Abide with me’.

So it was with considerable relief that at the end of our cruising we arrived in Melbourne to see my brother and sister, together with Jane’s cousin Wendy (who had also emigrated to Australia), standing on the quayside waiting for us. We had a wonderful three weeks with them in the Castlemaine area of Victoria, where my parents had made their home when they emigrated in 1959.

On 14 November, during our first week in Australia, we were sitting under a southern sky blazing with stars, having dinner with my sister Alisoun on her patio, when the phone rang. It was the Downing Street exchange,
*
they had David Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, on the line. Was it convenient for him to speak to me? A few moments later they put him through.

Miliband told me that the US and British Governments had been considering their policy on Afghanistan. Each had separately concluded that there had to be a substantial change in the policy if they were to regain the initiative from the Taliban. In due course the Prime Minister would be making a statement about the new approach the Cabinet had agreed on. The Americans had been doing the same thing in Washington. They had arrived at broadly the same conclusions, one of which was that there ought to be an uprated UN Special Representative of the Secretary General (UNSRSG), who would possibly wear three ‘hats’: those of the UN, NATO, and the EU (in other words the same person would be the head of all three organisations’ missions in Afghanistan). After an extensive review of the candidates they had decided to approach me to see if I would do the job. Was I prepared to consider it?

I replied that I
really
did not want to do this. The last thing in the world that I wanted was to disturb my life, with which I was very content. I had done my bit in Bosnia and was now enjoying writing books and articles and doing a little portfolio of jobs, not least for the Government. So I didn’t want to do this at all. However, as I had often said to him in the past, I was an old soldier and could, reluctantly, be drafted, provided I was given the instruments to do the job and the mandate was agreed.

Miliband replied that he understood my position, but that they really wanted me to do this. In the next hour, he continued, Nick Burns (whom I had known from Bosnia and who was the most senior official in the State Department) would ring me with a message from Condi Rice, the US Secretary of State, formally asking me to do the job and giving me further details. Finally, he stressed that I was the US candidate for this job, not the British one. But the whole British Government, from the Prime Minister downwards, hoped that I would consider the US proposition. Perhaps after I had thought about it I would, in the next week or so, let the US and UK Governments know my answer?

Half an hour later Burns, rang. He said that we were in a mess in Afghanistan. We had to turn things round; they were relying on me to do it. I repeated that I really did
not
want to do this; I wasn’t even certain that it could be done, now. However, as I had said to David Miliband, if they gave me the tools to do the job then – given that young men who had no option were being sent there, and that many of them were dying – I could not refuse.

Burns emphasised that this would not be the same as Bosnia: I would not have the Bonn powers. I replied that I fully understood that. Afghanistan was a sovereign state with a sovereign government. The international community’s job would be to help it, not to do things for it. I asked him to thank the Secretary (Condi Rice) for her confidence and promised to give her proposal thought and send him an email in a couple of days giving my response.

Jane and I spent much of the night talking about this bombshell that had dropped so suddenly into our lives. Jane was, of course, very unhappy at the prospect of my being away for another two years (this time she would not be able to come with me) and concerned about the security aspects of the job. But she was, as always, very philosophical. As she put it, if young Marines had no choice but to go there and risk their lives, then however much neither of us wanted this, we couldn’t easily say no.

Apart from the prospect of being parted from the family and the personal disruption to my life, my assessment at the time was that the job they were asking me to do was virtually undoable, and I had no particular wish to end my public career on a task for which failure was the most likely outcome. On the other hand, given my experiences in Bosnia and elsewhere, if they would give me the tools necessary for a fighting chance of success, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror if, for purely personal reasons, I were to say No on such an important issue.

So I drew up a list of conditions I believed were necessary for success, the most critical of which was that I must have the right to give political advice to the American General commanding NATO and US troops in Afghanistan. I then sent these back to Burns by email, saying that if they would accept them, then I would seriously consider their proposals; if not, they should look for someone else. I told Jane that I believed I had pitched my demands so high that the Americans were bound to say no – especially on the right to advise US commanders.

Over the next weeks, however, all the conditions I asked for, including the right to advise US commanders, were agreed by the US and UK Governments. One of my stipulations was that President Hamid Karzai, the head of the Afghan Government should agree to my appointment – I had always criticised the fact that far too often the international community imposed its nominees on host countries without any consultation with, let alone agreement from, the countries concerned.

Jane and I returned to Britain at the end of November and shortly afterwards I met the British Ambassador in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, for coffee in the Lords. He piled on the emotional pressure, ‘We are going to hell in a handcart out there. We are appealing to you to do it.’ I replied that it was no sort of incentive to be asked to do this on the basis that I was the drowning man’s last straw. The real question was, could we succeed? He thought we still could, but only if the international community started to get its act together, soon.

I had another conversation with Nick Burns shortly afterwards and sought his assurance that Karzai knew of this plan and was prepared to support me, telling him that the job would become completely impossible unless I had the full support and co-operation of the elected Afghan Government. He assured me that Karzai was fully on board and, indeed, enthusiastic.

In early December I started putting together a small team to help me prepare for the job, which, it was decided, should begin at the end of March 2008. Ian Patrick came back to join me again, shaking his head and saying, ‘I am afraid I am just not going to let you go out there alone – you will just get yourself into too much trouble.’

I was also joined by one of the brightest of my old OHR Bosnia colleagues, Daniel Korski, and by an extremely able US State Department official, Caitlin Hayden, who was sent over from Washington to help. We set up a small office in the Foreign Office and, with informal help from some of my old Bosnian team (including Ed Llewellyn, who was now working for David Cameron, and who Cameron kindly agreed could provide me with occasional advice) and the assistance of senior Foreign Office officials (including, crucially, some of my old employers), we put together a plan.

Three months before Miliband’s phone call to me in Australia, I had written a number of articles saying that I thought we were well on our way to losing in Afghanistan. But by the time we had finished assembling our plan (which included three key priorities – security, the rule of law and improving governance – to which all our efforts and all our aid would be exclusively directed), I concluded that success was still just possible, given enough determination and a good deal of luck. Nevertheless, I wanted to warn Prime Minister Brown and Foreign Secretary Miliband what the bottom line in Afghanistan could still turn out to be. And so I wrote them a very blunt, confidential minute which I sent to them both just before Christmas. This is reprinted in the Appendix.

On 11 December, I flew out to for a secret meeting with Hamid Karzai in Kuwait. He was there for discussions with the Kuwaiti Government and staying in the official palace set aside for important visitors, where it was agreed I should meet him for breakfast on 12 December.

President Karzai is an impressive-looking man, although quite feline and with a curiously soft handshake. He showed me into a room in which there was a table groaning with a huge breakfast and sat me down beside him. Around the table were all the members of his Cabinet: his Foreign Minister, and the Ministers of the Interior, Defence, Finance, and Information. It was very obvious that this was a job interview, and they were the selection panel. I had brought (at Cowper-Coles’ suggestion) a jar of honey, which Karzai apparently loves, and a teddy bear for his son, to whom he is devoted (the Foreign Office firmly instructed me on no account to ask after his wife, as this is considered very bad form in Afghan society). Over breakfast we talked about India and Simla, where I spent my early years and where he went to school, about poetry, which he loves (I had tried to find him a copy of John Donne’s work, but there were none in Heathrow), and about Britain. He greatly admires Tony Blair, and told me he had profound respect for the Prince of Wales, with whom he had spent some time.

Breakfast over, we then left the table and went into a drawing room next door for the more substantive part of our discussions. His Cabinet arranged themselves around the walls, and he brought them in one after the other to ask me questions. I stressed that this was not the same as my job in Bosnia. Afghanistan was fully sovereign, and my job would be not to govern but to support him and his Government in the policies they had decided on.

At one stage I called him a politician, and he objected, saying that he thought ‘politician’ was a dirty word. I said that I didn’t see it that way; a politician was a patriot who used politics to help his country. In Afghanistan, he said, politics was more about manipulation and serving yourself than serving the country.

We discussed how to co-ordinate better the aid flowing into Afghanistan and the necessity of ensuring more of it went through the Afghan system, rather than directly to bilateral aid projects. I told him I thought one of the most overwhelming failures of our Afghan operation was the international community’s complete inability to coordinate its activities, and said I saw my job as ensuring this happened in future, so that we could better support him and his government. At
the end Karzai accompanied me outside, shook me by the hand and said, ‘I really hope we will work together.’

It is in the nature of these kinds of societies, and especially true of Afghanistan, that they are always polite to guests. So whether or not we really got on well, or whether this was just the usual politeness, I was unable to tell. But when I got back to the UK Nick Burns called to say they (the US) were already receiving reports that the meeting had gone well. Karzai had said he felt that he could work with me.