Do you remember when the Taliban fell in 2001?

There was hope.

Things in Afghanistan were changing.

Things like greater human rights, stronger democratic institutions and education for women and girls in Canada committed to helping being part of all of that.

Between 2001 and 2014, over 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces personnel served in Afghanistan.

It was our largest deployment since the Second World War.

But in 2021, things changed.

The Taliban regained power.

Since then, Canada has suspended diplomatic operations in Afghanistan has largely faded from the headlines.

What the story of a hotel in Kabul tells us about the turbulent history of a country and its people.

Welcome to The Rundown.

Before it was ruled by the Taliban, Kabul was known as the Paris of Central Asia, and at the centre of it all was the city's first luxury hotel, the Intercontinental.

Since it opened in 1969, it has seen coups and wars, liberation and re-occupation.

I talked to Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent for the BBC, about her new book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, and how looking at the history of a single building can be a window into the history of a nation.

Lyse, thank you so much for joining us.

Welcome to our program.

How are you doing?

I'm even happier because I'm here in the studio.

It's cold outside, but it's so nice.

It's nice and warm.

I've been many times to TVO over the over the years, and it's always really nice to come back here.

I sort of feel I'm coming home.

I went to university in Toronto, so it's one of my many homes.

So thank you very much.

Great to have you.

Great to have you back.

Let's talk about your reporting.

You've reported in Afghanistan and about Afghanistan since 1988.

We actually have a photo of you.

This is back in 1989.

Tell us what we're looking at here.

This is a young Lyse Doucet right here.

Yes.

This is Lyse Doucet, who grew up on the eastern shores of Canada in New Brunswick and grew up wanting to be a foreign correspondent.

The only evidence I have for that is that I found one time in all the old boxes, a late slip for my local library, and the book was How To Become A Journalist.

I don't know if I returned the book, but the book was late and I'm sure it has cost me.

Could cost me a lot of money.

And that was my I first started out.

I spent five years in West Africa and then I went to Pakistan, Afghanistan and in Iran.

And that picture was that really was the big story of our time, the war in Afghanistan, which was in the Cold War.

Kabul was in the crosshairs of this global confrontation.

A Soviet-backed government in Kabul fighting against the Western and and regional states backed mujahideen.

And it was the most grievous war of our time.

It was the biggest migration crisis.

And there I was, a young journalist.

I arrived on Christmas Day, the day after my 30th birthday, and found myself with the biggest story in the world.

All the eyes of the world were on Afghanistan.

With that being said, why decide to write this book now?

I don't need to tell you.

I think it's something we worry about. Jeyan is we we have this expression in our in our profession, news avoidance that people are turning away from the news.

And I find myself in my kitchen in London, turning the dial on the radio away from the news channels to classical music and thinking, oh so depressing, so many wars, so many.

But of course we live in democracies.

We have the gift of living in societies where we can live a life with the values and principles that we hold dear.

So we have to turn back the dial, or on the TV, or on the radio or on on our phones.

And I wanted to explore a different kind of storytelling because, as you know, in our news business, if you watch the news on TV and it could be Afghanistan, it could be Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, it's just a snapshot.

We see people in these in these societies and people in great distress, people running for their lives away from from the bombs wailing in the rubble of their homes, moaning in the hospital the worst of their times.

But of course, that's just one part of their lives.

And what I have found in all of the places I have worked with.

And it doesn't have to be places far away.

You could talk about hard times, many parts of of Canada, people still have to get up, have a cup of tea or coffee and find an everyday courage to face the day with a measure of hope humour I have found.

I don't know whether you'd agree that humour is not just the universal language, but it's the sharpest of skills for people to survive in the darkest of times.

And Afghans have a sense of humour in great abundance.

And people celebrate birthdays and, and and weddings and celebrations.

And I wanted to I wanted to use the power of literature to expand the horizons and to, if I may so boldly say, to open hearts and empathy for people to look at these societies in a different kind of way.

And maybe I'll tell you a Toronto story, that exploring this kind of storytelling for me goes way back to when I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and I still I still remember the day it was a cold, grey, drizzly day, and I was down on Queen Street with in a cafe.

I still remember the day it was a cold, grey, drizzly day, and I was down on Queen Street with in a cafe.

There weren't as many cafes then in a cafe, and I was reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and I remember finishing it.

And you read a book and you just it you feel the enormity of this book and you want to savour it.

And I was dazzled.

I thought, wow, that you can use the convention of fiction, a novel, to tell a non-fiction, a true story.

And as then I just that was when I just had this dream of becoming a journalist and I thought, this is amazing.

Now, never mind that since then, people think that Truman Capote might have made up a little bit, but I'm a journalist through and through, so I didn't.

Those are all the stories in there.

In there are. True.

So that stayed with me.

And when I started to travel, I would often turn would, would usually turn to novels into what we call narrative history, where history comes alive on the page, characters come to life as the best way to immerse myself in places and people that I was visiting for the first time.

And so when I decided I was ready to to write a book, it seemed to be I'd start writing and I would I would stop and I would think, why are you writing it like this?

And I thought, because that I would. I was hoping it was the way to draw people.

Well, when people read this, this is while you are giving us a history lesson, the way that you are able to weave in these complex stories of, of of both hardship but also joy and the laughter of of of the folks who lived and worked at the Intercontinental Hotel there.

Help us understand sort of those relationships.

Who were the first people you met and what were those connections like?

The. So if you want to tell, you know, we say in our profession, the story, in the story, I need it.

You know, literally they they talk about a conceit or prism, like, how was I going to tell this very turbulent, this very tumultuous story of in Afghanistan in a way that we have this great, great author here in Canada, Margaret Atwood, and she says that I called it the Margaret Atwood test that she says, read five pages and you want to keep reading or not?

I had to keep people turning the pages.

So I needed a story.

So how what would be the place or the person?

Even the building, as I thought, that could tell this story.

And for me, the inter-continental Kabul, as you say, Afghanistan's first luxury hotel, which was opened with great fanfare in September of 1969 when Afghanistan was a kingdom.

Not a perfect kingdom, but it was a time before war.

And Afghans now remember that as the golden years.

And but in a country where people have lost so much, they haven't lost their deeply ingrained sense of hospitality.

And on top of it, that was my first Afghan home when I first arrived there, as I mentioned, that was where I stayed wondering when I arrived on that cold, dark Christmas Day.

You know, the lobby was dark, there was the marble floor, but there was the chandeliers from the ceiling were dimmed by dust, and they were, most of them shut off to save electricity.

And I wondered, oh my God, how am I going to stay? This mausoleum?

And I ended up staying nearly a year.

So the people who so the the Intercontinental Hotel was my first Afghan home.

And the people who kept the hotel running, the room service cashier.

Who's in it?

Amanullah, the waiters, the front desk people.

They became my first Afghan friends.

So again, I was hoping to tell an Afghan story through this iconic building where so much history has gone through this, this hotel, and also to the lives of these people.

Because although they can't tell everything about Afghanistan, they their lives are threaded through the history and how they kept going and the hotel kept going.

And in a place where so much, especially in the Civil War of the 19, was reduced to charred ruins, the intercontinental Kabul never closed its doors.

In a way, it's a metaphor for a country which, for all that has happened, good and bad, has never given in and never given up.

Well, with that, I want to actually read a passage from your book.

It reads, "A Soviet helicopter gunship was hovering ominously above while a clutch of bearded men on a nearby hill defiantly shook their fists and old British rifles at it. Journalists, always the first to rush towards a racket of any kind, leaned over the rails of their balconies. Afghan hotel staff weren't far behind, spilling into the forecourt, fixating on the gunship with bated breath, the chopper paused. Then it swooped, sending the fist shakers diving for cover. The helicopter held its fire, tilting sideways, turning back towards the city. A round of applause rose from the intercoms ringside balcony seats. The men with guns on the next hill dusted themselves off. The hotel staff went back to work."

To what extent did conflict just become part of the routine for those living in Afghanistan?

It's sad.

I've always been struck by Afghan history, and maybe some of the historians who are your are your loyal viewers may have a better idea than me, but I would wager that it's one of the few countries in the world which has lived through every possible political system.

The world has tried, and many of them have failed.

They had, as I mentioned, a peaceable kingdom.

They had Soviet backed communism.

They had warlordism, which tore much of Kabul, including the parts of the inter-continental apart.

They had Islamism under the Taliban.

They had a wannabe democracy backed by the West, including Canada.

And now they have Islamism again under the Taliban.

And in each chapter of this war, and every time the rulers changed the rules at the intercontinental changed, because after the Inter-Continental, when Soviet troops rumbled in in 1979, this luxury intercontinental chain pulled out.

So it became a government owned hotel.

So whoever ruled Afghanistan set the rules that the intercon and what you will see in the books, you know, my my publishers always say, don't say lies.

If you read my book, you have to say.

When you read my book.

So I've compromised and said, if and when, if and when you read my book, you will find how their lives.

Because at the end of the day, and this is another thing that I've really been struck by.

And you don't you don't have to go all the way to Afghanistan to find this.

Is that people there for all that the whirlwind that they were constantly their lives being swept up in, they kept this pride and dignity, this honour of.

They were working in this national guest house, and they did it with pride and dignity.

And some of them would say to me, this is the best hotel in the world.

And of course, it was the only hotel in the world that they'd ever been in.

So for them, it was the best hotel.

And for those like Hazrat, who's the oldest character in his 70s, he was so proud that he had been trained by the proper Intercontinental Hotel.

And he was.

Whenever the rules changed, new rules came in. He would make it clear to them that he knew everything there was to know about running a proper a proper hotel.

And so this hotel became it.

Even one of my publishers said, Liz, are you sure that all that history went through the hotel?

And then later he goes, wow, so much, so much happened there in this, in this building.

And, you know, you mentioned the passage you took to to read from.

It underlines how when the hotel started.

So you have to imagine at that time, 1969, when when Kabul, at least part of Kabul, was described as the Paris of Asia.

This was when Juan Trippe, who was the enterprising, the visionary entrepreneur, set up Panamanian Pan American Airways Fly the World.

And then he built the Intercontinental hotel chain.

And this hotel rose in a country where there's so many of these old royal palaces with their curved windows and scalloped walls and tall.

Here was this modern palace of glass and steel on a pine covered hill on the edge of the city, and the facade of the hotel was 200 balconies, like eyes, you know, looking out over the city.

And literally at that moment it rose above the city's cares because it was an elite place.

People with a fortune, those fortunate in life, the wealthy tourists.

But over the arc of this 50 year history that I cover, the hotel gradually be, you know, went from witness of to everything happening to having and the most spectacular view watchpost of Kabul.

People went there just to see the the city by day and the lights of the city by night, but it got dragged into the front line of the war.

And the passage you cited is when, during the Soviet times, where you had the Soviet helicopter helicopter gunships and again, that was the best to watch this sound and light show, which was both awesome, but also terrifying, because then it was, you know, the all the weaponry of war of the Soviet of the Soviet Union.

And the passage you cited is when, during the Soviet times, where you had the Soviet helicopter helicopter gunships and again, that was the best to watch this sound and light show, which was both awesome, but also terrifying, because then it was, you know, the all the weaponry of war of the Soviet of the Soviet Union.

Now the Intercontinental or the Intercon, regardless of who was running it, it still it was still known as the Intercon stood strong regardless of of leadership and had to learn to adapt.

You had mentioned Hazrat.

We have a photo of him.

This is him who began working as you mentioned in the hotel in 1971.

What did change feel like to them?

They tried to still hold on there.

You see?

You see his white shirt and if you look, it was close enough, a little bit frayed.

He himself, you know, he's over six feet.

He's a former boxer.

But there he is, still showing up for work and the window is shattered.

So you can see in the in the reflection of the window, some of the spectacular landscape of Kabul.

And in the distance, the mighty Hindu Kush, the mountains of mountains which ring the city with their cape of glistening white snow.

But he's seeing it through the cracked glass.

And he took me to that room.

It was on the the first floor, because when they when the one new set of rulers after another came up, they never had enough money to the government of the day, never had enough money to renovate it.

And so even though they were trying to renovate some of them, you know, he would take me in and there's holes where the bullet.

And that was the result of one of the spectacular suicide bombings.

There was 1 in 2011, the first and the second was 2018.

And he had such a again in a in a place where people have lost so much.

I would say to Hazrat and others, do you have any photographs? Do you have any videos from your wedding at the Intercontinental?

And they go, no, I lost it when I was forced out of my home.

I, you know, it was destroyed when my home was attacked and but their memory was their memory was so sharp.

And I began to believe that for people who have lost so much, the mementos of their lives, that memory becomes a weapon to hold on to what you hold dear.

Because nobody can take what's inside your head.

And he remembered.

He remembered what it was like to be there in the early 70s and Jeyan the first, the first time I went to the hotel and tried to talk to to some of the hotel staff, I'm going to be writing a book. Do you want to be in the book?

My first conversation then with Hazrat was he actually mimicked the wealthy tourists, you know, the the throwing the the towel over the shoulder, white, soft, plush.

Don't we love them?

I'm sure all your viewers say we all love a hotel and a luxury hotel if we can.

If we can manage.

So he mimicked it, and he remembered how they would glide across the marble floor with their white shirts and skirts on their way to the tennis courts or the swimming pool.

And of course, for him and he, because it oozed privilege and a life of ease.

It was it was a world apart from his world.

The eldest of ten children, his father died when he was just a teenager.

So he had to leave.

He had to leave high school.

He enrolled in hotel school.

And so again, he of course, everyone who works in a hotel, the business of hospitality is serving and taking pride in serving your guests.

And they still they still have that.

So he some of the others didn't want to take part because they worried about repercussions.

At a time when the war was intensifying, the Taliban were advancing.

There would be questions, but he was so excited because, again, for him, this was he said, you know, in the 70s, this was possibly the best hotel in the world.

Okay, maybe it was the second best hotel in the world.

But again, that sort of sense of and they all said to me that this hotel was like their second home.

And I had an Afghan colleague who worked with me who's zubaidi, and I have to emphasise that I couldn't have done a book like this without a dear Afghan colleague who helped not just to translate from Dari and Pashto, but to help me understand the emotions and experiences of of Afghans living through these times.

And, you know, there's a great expression by our great novelist Robertson Davies, which I've always loved, what's bred in the bone and that we are who we are from our ancestry, from the DNA passed on from generations.

And even though someone like, like me has spent decades of my life going in and out of Afghanistan, it's a story that has which is not a story for me.

It's part of my personal life.

And even though I speak some Dari not, I wish it was, wish it was better. I will never know as much as an Afghan knows.

So it was really important for me that he be with me at my to help me understand all of the what really Afghans were going through.

You talk about memories, and I want to talk about one specific moment that I think when we look at not just the Western world, not just in Afghanistan, but the entire world took a moment.

It was September 2001, 9/11.

And I want to understand, because you wrote, that the well-informed Afghans understood that their country, so cut off from much for so long, was now being pushed into the centre of world attention.

How did 911 affect Afghan Afghanistan?

We know very well how much that impact was.

But for the people.

In the picture, picture a country this is 2001.

Afghanistan at that point is has been under nearly five years of Taliban rule.

The first time the Taliban took power.

And this was really then of the fighters who came from the villages, which they even themselves will say had almost no knowledge of the world.

And they were under international sanctions.

There were no flights into Afghanistan, there were no telephones working, no international telephone lines.

If Afghans wanted to make a call, they had to go to neighbouring Pakistan to make a call.

It felt like the city felt like it had been pushed back into the last century.

And so when they heard on the crackly radio, many of them listened to the BBC in Dari and Pashto that somewhere far away in New York, North York meant nothing to them in their closed world, and also that there was more than 100 stories.

And they like how, you know, the biggest, the biggest building skyscraper in Kabul was 18 stories high.

And it had it was legendary because it was so, so high and how to begin to understand.

But of course, it quickly became clear to them, as you mentioned, that this was going to come home to Afghanistan because their guests, of all guests, was Osama bin laden.

In fact, as I write in the book, he was a guest at the Intercontinental Hotel, but they only knew him as Osama.

And it was one of the first stories that the Afghan, some of the Afghan staff told me when I when I started researching the book, they said, you know, there was this guest.

He never came in the front door.

He came in the back door and he had a special entrance.

He had two rooms up on the second floor.

He had his own cooks.

He had his own cleaners.

He and he, he had these Arabs with him.

And he went would go up to the roof with the telescope and they'd look out across the city and all these gadgets and computers.

His name was Osama.

And then when 9/11 happened, they heard Osama bin laden.

They go.

Put it together.

That's our that's our, that's our guest.

And and of course, there was all these warnings to, to the Taliban.

And again, Afghans were listening, were listening on, on their, on their radios to see what would what would happen, what would happen next.

And those who have I mean, it's a date that's seared in memory.

It's a date where the world, the really world stood up.

And Canada, of course, being so close by.

And, you know, that ominous foreboding that the warnings from the United States, if you don't give up Osama bin laden, we blame him for these attacks.

He must be brought to the United States and the Taliban, saying, get back to my point about hospitality.

They say hospitality is in our pashtunwali, the pashtunwali, our tribal code.

We we can't give him up.

We can't give him up to his enemies and then them not really believing that the Americans and the British and other countries that got involved.

Canada too, got involved in that US-led invasion of Afghanistan, that they would actually come and attack.

And they did, of course.

And that was the Afghanistan was turned upside down because it ended the Taliban regime.

And I have to say, Jeyan at that moment to be in Kabul, I went I went in as soon as it was, the journalists could go in.

We went in from neighbouring Pakistan.

And for a moment Afghans savoured that.

This was the they thought, we all thought the best chance in a generation that this country would finally move away from war and towards peace.

And for a while, for a while, that's what it was like.

It was. So it was delicious.

We have a few minutes left.

I have two more questions for you.

When people read this, they are going to pick up on a theme of empathy.

Empathy for the people on the ground whose lives are affected, for better or for worse, by the conflicts outside of their control.

You've spoken about the difficulties reporting on Gaza with no international journalists anywhere near the borders, and I wanted to get your understanding of how you think social media has changed the way we report on conflict zones today, because you're able to put a face to the people impacted.

But in a day where we are constantly bombarded by conflict, you know, we were talking about about that, you know, turning the radio down, classical music a little.

But yeah, tell me a little bit about how how that impacts how we process it.

It's it's interesting in a very skilled way. You have brought our conversation back to where we began talking as as colleagues, both both journalists.

And you commented on much as you've got this great studio, you want to get out, you want to get out and meet people.

And that's what I also tried to do in my job.

Social media has this power, this intensity.

We can see it, we can hear it, even feel it.

Something happening so far away we get drawn into it.

But I think you would agree with me.

And because you've already said it, I still believe that there is no alternative to old fashioned face to face in the heat or the cold kind of journalism.

You know, this is the, the, the beautiful paradox of our time that I always say everything has changed and nothing has changed in journalism.

For all of the dazzling changes in technology, it's still the old fundamentals to and that is the the best possible way to try to get as close as possible to the truth, to be there, to be there where it's happening.

And that is one of the greatest gifts, but also one of the greatest responsibilities of our job.

Because when you meet people face to face, there's that extra, you feel it that you have to get that story, story right.

Any attack on independent journalism and could it can be in podcasting and streaming and all that. But any of the attack on that is an attack on the democracy that we hold dear and the values.

So we continue.

We have to fight.

Don't we have to fight for journalism now?

And I say to students in journalism, now that journalism as we know it is going to live or die in their generation, and it and its fate also depends on our listeners, our viewers, those who consume our now, we call it content and understanding that knowing what is happening on our street, in our neighbourhood, in our city, places far away which are actually are not far away, places like Afghanistan are threaded through our own history, is incumbent upon us as as citizens.

We don't.

I mean, obviously we don't have to be glued to our the news all the time.

And sometimes it's difficult to find hope and optimism, but we all have to get up and face these these days and, and our times.

And I would like to say one last thing, because I think it, it may be on the minds of the of your, your many, many viewers is that people say, well, what was it for in Afghanistan?

We did engage.

We sent our troops.

We sent our diplomats.

We sent our goodwill.

We spent money over there.

Our troops were on the ground, some 40,000 troops.

For ten years.

We lost 158 soldiers.

This caused pain which exists to this day.

Was it for nothing?

And I always say no.

You helped to create a space where a new generation came of age in Afghanistan.

And you see in my book, but not just my book, but since we're talking about my book, where a new generation of of young Afghan men and women were became the most educated, connected generation in history, they they could dream bigger than ever before.

Women could dream of being doctors, lawyers, presidents, whatever.

And that spirit that we helped to create is still there.

It's in the minds of the girls who are desperate.

You know, they're getting on to onto social media or onto online schools or they're accessing the internet.

I was listening to Malala Yousafzai, the education activist, and she was saying, the girls she's in touch with, even reading a book now in Taliban Afghanistan, is an act of defiance.

And that was our commitment to Afghanistan.

We would have liked it to work out differently, but none of us should think that it was for nothing.

But we should take a lesson, lessons from that, about different ways to engage in countries and cultures which are not our own.

But we are all in this together.

I think we're going to leave it on that lesson, please.

Thank you so much.

It's really lovely to meet you.

Thank you.

I could listen to you all day.

And I could listen to you all day.

Thank you so much.

Really appreciate it.

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Until then, see you tomorrow.