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Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel on Christmas Day 1988, as Soviet troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of a decade-long occupation. She expected to stay briefly. Instead, she remained for almost a year, and the hotel became her first Afghan home.
More than three decades later, it became the subject of her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, which has now won the Women’s prize for nonfiction. But while the prize recognises a remarkable work of reportage and history, the BBC’s chief international correspondent is more interested in what it might do for the country that inspired it.
“Afghanistan has largely slipped from the headlines,” Doucet says. “Perhaps this win will bring some attention to the country. None of us should be ready to accept a situation in which we live in a world where there is a country where girls cannot be educated after they’re 16, where women cannot go to university, where women are barred from so many jobs. This is something we should all be angry about.”
Afghanistan was not ever thus. After nearly four decades reporting from the country, primarily for the BBC, Doucet, 67, has watched it pass through almost every political experiment of the modern era: Soviet-backed communism, civil war, Taliban rule, western-backed democracy, and now the Taliban again.
“I was conscious that Afghanistan has a very difficult and violent history,” Doucet says. “I needed to find something that would draw people in rather than push them away. I didn’t want people to close the book and say: ‘It’s too dark. It’s too bloody.’ So a hotel was a device to tell the story in a way people could recognise.”
The Intercontinental Hotel – known simply as the Intercon – offered the perfect lens to tell a people’s history of the country. Built by the British in the late 1960s, it was once a symbol of a different Afghanistan. In the 1960s and 70s, Kabul was known as the “Paris of the east”, a vibrant hub of fashion, jazz, miniskirts and apres-ski resorts. Afghan pop star Ahmad Zahir – known as the “Elvis of Afghanistan” – performed at the hotel; Gloria Gaynor was a guest. Foreign travellers passed through on the hippy trail.
As the following decades saw immense political upheaval, the Intercon remained open. “Politics, like hotel guests, checked in and out,” Doucet writes. “As Afghanistan lurched through decades of trial and terror, laced with bright but brief beginnings, the Intercon was an unbreakable constant.”
The hotel staff who remained through those changes are at the heart of her story: Hazrat, the housekeeper who worked there from the hotel’s opening; Abida, the hotel’s first female chef; Amanullah, the engineer; and Malalai, one of the first female waiters.
“I have to pay tribute to the Afghans who helped me and spoke to me for the book, because in Afghanistan even sharing stories can have risks,” Doucet says.
Doucet began her career in journalism as a freelance reporter in west Africa for the BBC. She went on to cover conflicts across the world, eventually becoming chief international correspondent in 2012. Her book opens with the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and the disastrous American withdrawal, which remains one of the defining moments of Doucet’s career. She recalls watching the evacuation from the airport: military transport planes, helicopters and Afghans carrying only one bag as they fled.
“There was this fear at the end. People kept talking about Vietnam – that image of the people clinging to the last helicopter rising from the roof of the embassy in Saigon,” she says. “In fact, it was a hundred times worse – Afghans racing to the airport, clinging to the underbelly of planes. It’s been a really traumatising experience.”
Since returning to power, the Taliban have systematically erased women from public life through a series of draconian measures. Girls have been entirely banned from secondary education and university, women have been forced out of many workplaces and banned from public spaces, and strict adherence to the burqa is required. Last month, an official decree was passed effectively legally recognising child marriage. And just this week, a rare protest that erupted in the western city of Herat against arrests of women accused of violating hijab rules ended with two people killed, including a child.
“Five years in and it is getting worse. It is a stain on our world,” Doucet says. “But the courage of Afghan women is extraordinary.”
Doucet is also frustrated that the barriers facing Afghan women go beyond those inside the country. “There are Afghan women getting scholarships, but there are no visas now to allow Afghan women to come and study in Britain and in many other places,” she says. “They are meeting obstacles everywhere. We live very privileged lives here, and it’s not our privilege to give up on Afghans.
“People who were somebody in Afghanistan – activists, world-class journalists – find themselves having to start again from scratch,” she continues. “It’s something none of us would want to do.”
Doucet believes, though, that the world must be careful not to dismiss the achievements of the post-2001 period. “People often say: what did 20 years of international engagement achieve? Was it all for nothing? I always say it wasn’t for nothing. There were many mistakes, but that period helped create the most educated, the most connected generation in Afghan history,” she says. “When you see girls saying: ‘I want to get online, can you help me get a scholarship, can you help me get some kind of education?’ … They know their rights now.”
This month, for the first time, the EU is preparing talks with Taliban representatives in Brussels, despite concerns that engagement risks legitimising a bloody and despotic regime. Doucet is cautious about prescribing a solution.
“I’m a BBC journalist,” Doucet says. “My job is to explain, not advocate. But [some] mediators would say that it’s better to negotiate than isolate. The only change is going to have to come from within the Taliban.”
For now, there is little sign of change in the country. But Doucet is reluctant to surrender the quality Afghans themselves prize above all others.
“Afghans always used to say: the last to die is hope,” she says. “Afghanistan has possibly lived through every political system the world has tried – the thread through Afghan history is that nothing lasts for ever.”
