Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World: The War on Terror in Afghanistan

Twenty-seven years ago, Christina Lamb left Britain to become a journalist in Pakistan. She crossed the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan with mujaheddin fighting the Russians and fell unequivocally in love with this fierce country of pomegranates and war, a relationship which has dominated her adult life.

Since 2001, Lamb has watched with incredulity as the West fought a war with its hands tied, committed too little too late, failed to understand local dynamics and turned a blind eye as their Taliban enemy was helped by their ally Pakistan.

Farewell Kabul tells how success was turned into defeat in the longest war fought by the United States in its history and by Britain since the Hundred Years War. It has been a fiasco which has left Afghanistan still one of the poorest nations on earth, the Taliban undefeated, and nuclear armed Pakistan perhaps the most dangerous place on earth.

With unparalleled access to all key decision-makers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, London and Washington, from heads of state and generals as well as soldiers on the ground, Farewell Kabul tells how this happened.

In Afghanistan, Lamb has travelled far beyond Helmand – from the caves of Tora Bora in the south to the mountainous bad lands of Kunar in the east; from Herat, city of poets and minarets in the west, to the very poorest province of Samangan in the north. She went to Guantánamo, met Taliban in Quetta, visited jihadi camps in Pakistan and saw bin Laden’s house just after he was killed. Saddest of all, she met women who had been made role models by the West and had then been shot, raped or forced to flee the country.

This deeply personal book not only shows the human cost of political failure but explains how short-sighted encouragement of jihadis to fight the Russians, followed by prosecution of ill-thoughtout wars, has resulted in the spread of terrorism throughout the Islamic world.

Christina Lamb was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the British Press Awards and the BBC What The Papers Say Awards in 2007 – the second time she has won both of these awards. In 2002, she also won these, along with the Foreign Press Association award for her reporting on the war on terrorism. She has won numerous other awards starting with Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards for her coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1988. She was named in She magazine as one of Britain’s Most Inspirational Women and chosen by the ASHA foundation as one of their inspirational women worldwide (www.asha-foundation.org) with her portrait featuring in a special exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. Currently roving foreign affairs correspondent for the Sunday Times, she has been a foreign correspondent for almost twenty years, living in Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa first for the Financial Times then the Sunday Times. She has also spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard where she met her husband.
She is the author of the bestselling book The Africa House as well as House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe; Waiting For Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy; and The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years which was runner-up as Best Non-Fiction book in the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Awards. Small Wars Permitting: Despatches from Foreign Lands, a collection of her reportage, was published in January 2008, and I Am Malala, co-authored with Malala Yousafzai, was published in 2013.

Praise for ‘House of Stone’:

‘Lamb is a careful observer, and her anguished refrain is the terrible schizophrenia of people who fiercely love their land but do nothing to save it … the strength is in the storytelling … her book deserves to be read.’ Daily Telegraph

‘A remarkable blend of outrage, compassion and hope, Christina Lamb’s book is an alternately horrifying and uplifting insight into the Taliban regime.’ Justin Marozzi, Evening Standard —