Afghanistan Peace CampaignAfter an intense 20-year relationship, America and the West have largely ghosted Afghanistan. As the Taliban regime has implemented gender apartheid, as Afghans have endured hunger and earthquakes and internet blackouts, we’ve averted our gaze from the suffering.
To her credit, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, who has been reporting from the country since 1988, hasn’t wavered in her attachment. In “The Finest Hotel in Kabul,” she’s made an uneven but ultimately compelling attempt to provide a “people’s history” of the country through the story of one building, the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul.
The Inter-Con, as it continued to be known long after the chain that lent its name severed ties, was originally a five-star accommodation built by the British in the late 1960s on a hill at the edge of the city. From the start it was meant for foreigners and the Afghan elite; ordinary Kabulis rarely passed through its doors, except to work. In the opening chapters, Doucet details its glamorous early years while telling the story of the employees who made it run, and, she says, found a second home there.
Doucet does have an eye for the black comedy of successive regimes assuming control of both country and hotel. In 1973, the hotel staff takes down the king’s portraits after he is deposed, then in the succeeding three decades do the same for a series of presidents and commanders, all of them exiled or executed. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a dozen mujahedeen squeeze, with their rifles and rocket launchers, into the hotel’s unfamiliar revolving door, only to smash it in frustration.
For a good chunk of the book, I questioned Doucet’s choice to tell the country’s story through this particular place. As a foreign correspondent I spent time at the Inter-Con, though nowhere near as much as Doucet. The mix of warlords, government officials, spies and diplomats there was always intriguing, but I never considered it representative.
As Doucet herself writes, “The Hotel Intercontinental Kabul felt like a different country.” It’s not until the mujahedeen take power in 1992 that she lets slip that Afghan traditional dress had not previously been encouraged in the hotel, and that even the few local musicians who performed for guests usually covered their baggy tunics in sequins. Could there be any clearer sign that, despite its loyal employees, this was not a “people’s” place?
But at some point, the book rises — or falls — into the more representative history Doucet aims for. Violence and loss are so ubiquitous in Afghanistan’s recent history that no one and no fortress, not even the “finest hotel,” can avoid them. The Inter-Con comes into its morbid own as a vehicle for Afghanistan’s story. And a somewhat plodding, occasionally frothy book becomes both riveting and sad.
During the height of the fighting in 1993, an Inter-Con housekeeper named Hazrat finds he is unable to cross the city to reach the hotel. He ekes out a living making matchboxes at home with his family, Doucet writes, for “a city mostly lit by hurricane lamps and candlewicks.” A rocket strikes the house, killing his niece. When the family sets out for a safer area, another rocket kills his brother.
The hotel gets a new life during the two-decade American presence that comes with the U.S. invasion in 2001, but its identity as a Westernized hub makes it a target: It’s attacked not once but twice, in 2011 and again in 2018. Employees see guests and friends murdered. Some come to believe the hotel is haunted by djinns.
Doucet’s long focus pays off. In the early ’70s, Hazrat, the housekeeper, is an optimistic 20-year-old bartending at a discothèque for extra cash. Nearly a half-century later, in 2018, he’s pushing 70 and hiding for more than 10 hours in a tiny, dark cleaners’ closet while the hotel is under siege.
“In just one night, more of the hotel had been destroyed than in all the war-torn decades gone by,” Doucet writes of that attack. “The ruin didn’t stop at marble, wood and steel. The hotel’s people were broken.”
It’s those people who haunted me after I closed the book. They are at the mercy of the power hungry. They may believe their fate is in God’s hands. Yet their sheer determination to survive, to feed and house their families and keep them safe, and to improve their children’s chances, never flags. If their absence of flaws doesn’t ring completely true, Doucet’s choice to highlight their ordinary heroism in this deeply felt account is understandable.
After the second attack, the hotel faces a new precarity. In 2021, Hazrat is let go in a large staff cut. Soon after, the government falls, and the Americans withdraw in chaos. The Taliban, back in power, greet the hotel, the second time around, like an old friend. A sign (“Intercontinental for Everyone”) appears at the bottom of the hill.
“Everyone” does not include women, who are ordered out of government jobs. Malalai, the hotel’s first female waiter and her family’s sole earner, is sent home. In a stroke of good fortune, she’s later brought back, not to work in the restaurant but in security — body-searching the rare woman who comes up the hill.
Amy Waldman is the author of the novels “A Door in the Earth,” which is set in Afghanistan, and “The Submission.” She is also a former South Asia bureau chief for The Times.
THE FINEST HOTEL IN KABUL: A People’s History of Afghanistan | By Lyse Doucet | Allen Lane | 423 pp. | $29