The Gardener of Lashkar Gah by Larisa Brown review

Jul 13, 2023

A deeply moving book that lays bare the human cost of the 2021 western withdrawal

Even people around President Biden now accept that pulling out of Afghanistan in the way the US did two years ago was an utter disaster. It ruined the lives of millions, destroyed the social and economic advances of 20 years, and returned the country’s women to a state of slavery. The result was to make the US look weak and pathetic; no wonder Vladimir Putin decided he could safely invade Ukraine, only six months later.

The suffering of ordinary Afghans as they panicked and tried to escape the Taliban shocked the entire world. The scenes in the approaches to Kabul airport on those 17 boiling hot August days were unbearable. People tore at one another and trod the dying underfoot in order to get to the barbed wire that separated them from the airfield, screaming and waving the bits of paper they hoped would get them out of the country. The Taliban fighters lost all control, hitting out indiscriminately with their rifle butts, and firing into the air or at people’s feet. Some women tried to throw their babies over the barbed wire to the British and American soldiers on the other side; more than one baby landed on the wire itself. Then came something more appalling still: an Islamic State fanatic worked his way into the thickest part of the crowd and blew himself up. In this one incident alone, 160 people were killed, the ditches running thick with blood.

Larisa Brown, who is now the defence editor at the Times but was then working for the Daily Mail, played a major part in that paper’s campaign to secure asylum for interpreters and others who had worked for the British during the 20 years of western presence in Afghanistan. Her account of what happened to one particular family – the father, who used to tend the gardens in a British compound at Lashkar Gah base, his son who worked with British soldiers as an interpreter, and the rest of their relatives – is beautifully researched and deeply moving, her account brought me to tears more than once.

Brown skilfully interlaces the complicated story of Shaista Gul, his son Jamal and their wives through the wider history of chaos and betrayal. They were among the lucky ones: despite everything, they made it through to safety in Britain. Shaista has even started gardening again at his new home in Scotland.

The Mail’s campaigns aren’t always appreciated by everyone, but to the paper’s credit it started calling as early as 2015 for Britain to give asylum to the people who worked for the British forces. At that stage, no one imagined the US, as leader of the international force in Afghanistan, would ever simply abandon the country; but the Taliban campaign was building up, and anyone who had worked for the foreign forces was a target. Yet in Britain there often seemed to be an institutional meanness about helping the people without whose support the British operation in Afghanistan couldn’t exist.

Ministers and bureaucrats dragged their feet right up to the brutal climax; it’s hard to forget the then British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, on holiday in Crete as the Taliban closed in on Kabul, said to be irritable and “unavailable” when officials at the Foreign Office urged him to pick up the phone and ask the tottering Afghan government for help in getting the British translators and their families out. And, of course, there was the episode of the plane organised by the animal charity boss Pen Farthing, reportedly helped by the parliamentary private secretary to the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, which took out 94 stray dogs and 68 cats while former British employees were still desperately fighting the crowds, the heat and the Taliban in the hope of escaping. (The charity says it had repeatedly pleaded with the government to fill the empty plane seats without success.)

Some British ministers, notably the former home secretary Sajid Javid and the current defence secretary Ben Wallace, come out of this well; and a number of army officers and other ranks played a magnificent role in extracting the people who had worked with them. But, according to Brown, more than 5,000 Afghan support workers, including hundreds of interpreters, are still waiting to be brought out of Afghanistan. They are in intense danger – 182 Afghans who worked for the west are thought to have been murdered while waiting for visas.

Those like the Gul family, who managed to get to Britain, encountered kindness and generosity; there would have been more if the invasion of Ukraine hadn’t brought in a further wave of refugees. It’s an important story, and Brown deserves great credit for telling it so well – and for her part in the award-winning campaign that, modestly, she scarcely mentions. But with the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul upon us, many people will find it hard not to feel profoundly angry about the way in which the US government abandoned a vulnerable nation to its fate.

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John Simpson is BBC world affairs editor. The Gardener of Lashkar Gah: The Afghans Who Risked Everything to Fight the Taliban by Larisa Brown is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.