David Chater

The lessons of history

Biting into another Oreo made in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I cannot escape that uncomfortable feeling I’ve lived through this moment before.

I'm sitting in much more comfortable circumstances than usual: a room in the 5-star Serena Hotel in the centre of Kabul, watching the outpourings of the cable channels across the world as President Obama’s moment of history approaches.

I began my career in journalism just as the war in Vietnam was ending. The images of that debacle - which only with hindsight now seems inevitable - did much to propel me into a career as a television correspondent and a check-in to the world’s conflict zones.

In the opening stages of the civil war in Sri Lanka I was staying in the Hotel Oberoi as the bloody pogroms against the Tamils were underway on the streets of Colombo.

Blue sky thinking

The news from Kabul was bad. Heavy rain and clouds were shrouding the city. All incoming domestic flights had been cancelled.

Marooned in Herat with deadlines pressing we knew any attempt to drive to the capital from the west of Afghanistan would be suicidal. That's the only road you could use through the province of Helmand.

The scene that greeted us at the airport  twenty four hours later was not for the faint-hearted. Eid was approaching and every passenger was bearing sack loads of gifts. Pumpkin seeds, pomegranates, almonds and pistachios.It was like a giant souk.

Hundreds of people were crowded onto a field about the size of a football pitch snaking in three impatient lines towards a small hut guarded by a policeman with an unsheathed truncheon.

Only slightly safer

As Noel Coward once observed, mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

I've just been walking down a road in Afghanistan where a few weeks ago I'd have been shot on sight by the Taliban. Or worse.

Passing a pylon still smeared in dried blood, I was told it was where a government worker had been decapitated by the insurgents.

Normally this would have quickened my pace. But my companion was reassuring.

He was after all, no less a figure than the chief of police of Herat, a man whose substantial frame would challenge even Friar Tuck or Little John from that other haunt of insurgents – Sherwood Forest.

It also helped that we'd gone for our little drive into the country with about 50 of his merry men - all of them heavily-armed. The front line of the Taliban is being rolled back from the outskirts of this city in western Afghanistan.