days later, she is there, reporting on the world’s latest war. We are meeting to talk about her book,
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann). Drawing on her more than 30 years of reporting from that country, it is a captivating debut in which Doucet gives herself only a tiny walk-on part. Instead, she centres the lives and recollections of those who have worked at Kabul’s renowned Inter-Continental Hotel across five decades; from 1971 when the future looked bright for Afghanistan, through to 2021 and its fall to the Taliban. She first stayed at the hotel from December 1988, arriving the day after her 30th birthday to report on the pull-out of the Red Army following its decade-long occupation, and soon came to realise that it was “more than just a hotel”. Once a gleaming white edifice, the “Inter-Con”
– as everyone there calls it – opened in 1969, the embodiment of Afghanistan’s hopes of becoming an affluent, modern country. Five decades later it is a dilapidated, shrapnel-damaged shell that has endured civil war, terrorist attack, the US occupation and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. Among the hardy, dedicated staff members we meet in the book are Abida, the first female chef to work in the hotel kitchen; future engineer Amanullah, who at 19 and on military service aspires to work at the Inter-Con; and later 24-year-old Sadeq on the front desk, who embodies the ambitions of the current generation of Afghans. The narrative is bookended by Hazrat, who begins his hotel career in 1971 as a 20-year-old busboy, and 50 years later has survived everything his country’s bloody recent history has thrown at him to remain the Inter-Con’s loyal servant.
The book’s construction became clearer after she settled on the idea of telling the human story of Afghanistan through the prism of the Inter-Con and its staff. “I’ve always felt that behind the headlines lie a thousand little stories. Connect the dots and you have a lived history,” she reflects. Many hours of listening to and recording people’s recollections followed. “If it was going to be a proper Afghan story, I couldn’t just see the hotel from in front of the reception desk. I had to really understand what it [was] like to work there.” I ask Doucet whether writing the book
was also a way to refocus our attention on a country, which while in dire humanitarian straits, seems to have almost entirely fallen from the news agenda. “Let’s be honest, Caroline, the world has forgotten Afghanistan. How is it possible that we live in a world where we’re not protesting about women not being able to go to school?” While she returns often to her native New Brunswick, Doucet’s BBC biography states that she feels at home in many places. Still it is evident that Afghanistan and its people are particularly close to her heart. She vividly recalls her first meeting with Afghan women while reporting from neighbouring Pakistan in the late 1980s, when she was immediately struck by their energy and exuberance. “Afghans have a strong sense of self and a strong sense of humour to go with it.” In her book’s introduction she states that it is written with “enormous gratitude for the many Afghans over the years, who have made me feel at home”. “I don’t believe in emotional broadcasting,
It was like Mad Max with the whirling of the blades of the transporter planes and people walking in straight lines almost zombie-like towards them
Doucet – a warm and generous interviewee
– tells me that she signed a contract to write the book while in Kabul in 2021. But finding time to write it soon became a bigger challenge than she had anticipated. “Every year since there’s been a major war. The fall of Afghanistan in August 2021, which none of us expected; then the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022; and then the Gaza war from 2023. Though I have a full-time job I can find ways to slip in some writing hours when I’m in London and between small stories. But I can’t miss big ones.”
but I do believe in empathy,” Doucet is on record as saying. Having recently rewatched her August 2021 reports from Kabul airport during the desperate mass airlift of citizens after the country had fallen to the Taliban once more, I ask Doucet about her feelings on that day. “It was like Mad Max with the whirling of the blades of the transporter planes and people walking in straight lines almost zombie-like towards them. They were literally leaving everything behind. For me that was the moment I understood what it means to be a refugee, and to have everything taken away from you.” Due to the prominence of other stories and the difficulty of getting a visa, Doucet has not been able to go back to Afghanistan since her last visit in early 2023. And yet, The Finest Hotel in Kabul concludes
in a spirit of enduring optimism, or at least with the inshallah tenacity that seems to characterise the Afghan people. At the end of the book, we encounter Hazrat sitting in his old floor-supervisor’s chair, thinking of all the guests he has looked after down the years, and musing both on his own survival, and that of the hotel he loves. “He still believed, with all his being, that the Inter-Continental could one day be the finest hotel in Kabul again.”
09
Extract
Over the decades, when returning to Kabul to report on momentous times, I have often stayed in the place that everyone called simply ‘the Inter-Con’. Eventually I came to realise it was more than just a hotel. As Afghanistan lurched through decades of trial and terror, laced with bright but brief beginnings, the Inter-Con was an unbreakable constant. A white box of cement and steel, it stands on a hill, watching over the city, a front-row seat to its history. At its peak, its kicking letter K still proclaims its pedigree – even though its connection to the global Inter-Continental chain was severed soon after Soviet tanks rumbled into the capital in 1979. Afghans stubbornly held onto the name, in the hope of restoring its early glory and membership in that coveted club. It never gave in, never gave up; the Inter-Con was a very Afghan hotel.
PAULA BRONSTEIN
Books Author Profile
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