On December 5, 2001, a group of Taliban leaders sent a letter to Hamid Karzai, the one who would become Afghan president a few days later and remain so for 13 years. The strict Islamists, driven from power by the United States and its allies, offered to lay down their arms in exchange for an amnesty.
The letter went unanswered.
“What would have happened if this olive branch stretched out by the Taliban had been seized?” “Asks BBC journalist Lyse Doucet in her stunning Afghanistan podcast, A Wish for Afghanistan (“A wish for Afghanistan”), one of my favorites for the year 2021 in international journalism.
Listening to the podcast in English, we learn of the existence of this letter which had the potential to change everything and save tens of thousands of lives.
We also learn that the transition after the withdrawal of Soviet troops could have been peaceful, rather than leading to a civil war which, in the long term, resulted in the advent of the first Taliban regime.
In A Wish for Afghanistan, the Afghan history appears to us like a series of missed appointments, highlighted by the correspondent in chief of the international service of the BBC.
Few Westerners know Afghanistan as well as Lyse Doucet. The journalist, originally from Bathurst, New Brunswick, has been traveling the country since the late 1980s. She was there when the Soviet troops withdrew and the difficult years that followed. It covered the first Taliban regime, its fall two months after the 9/11 attacks and the years of military occupation by the United States and NATO.
PHOTO PAULA BRONSTEIN, BBC ARCHIVES
Lyse Doucet with Hamid Karzaï, in Kabul, Afghanistan
On August 15, when the Taliban retook Kabul without resistance, she was on board the last commercial flight which attempted to reach the Afghan capital, but which had to turn back. She took a week longer to reach her destination.
“For the past two years, the mantra among the Afghans that I have known has been that everything should be done not to repeat the same mistakes as in the past. Not only have the mistakes been repeated, but the situation is even worse than it was when the Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, ”the journalist told me in a videoconference interview from her London apartment.
She dissects this tragedy by interviewing ten key actors in Afghanistan, all larger than life. First Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, who was her friend long before becoming head of state and whom she does not spare in her interview.
It happens that our friends become presidents. But when you sit down for an interview, I’m the reporter and he’s the president. I have to be able to separate the two roles. And I have to be able to ask all the questions.
Lyse Doucet
She also interviewed Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban dignitary. She is chasing Zalmay Khalilzad, the former United States ambassador to Afghanistan who was chief negotiator during talks with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of American troops. She mourns with Shaharzad Akbar, an Afghan feminist who had to flee the country in August, but who says her fight is not over. She puts both hands in the brain of a pro-Taliban-friendly female doctor who speaks of her disillusionment with the foreign occupation.
Listening to these testimonies, collected over a long period, we sometimes want to scream, sometimes to take the interviewees in our arms to cry with them. The whole thing is an exercise in high-level journalism, anchored in both expertise and empathy.
No wonder Concordia University awarded an honorary doctorate in 2020 to this great reporter who, over three decades of reporting on the ground in Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East, has become the most famous face in the world. of the British public broadcaster.
Despite her success, she never concealed her Acadian origins or changed her accent.
“At first, it was bothering. You could only hear one type of British accent on the BBC. Once in a while, I was asked to go on the air to explain my accent. I once explained that I am Acadian. As a joke I said that the British took my ancestors’ land, but in return I got a job. I have never been asked to explain where my accent comes from, ”she laughs.
Today, she rejoices to hear a wide variety of accents and to see much more diversity on the BBC as elsewhere in the great world of global journalism.
“Western journalists, we are no longer the only ones telling the stories of the countries we cover, and that’s good,” she said, convinced that there is room for many voices in the universe. media.
In her podcast, Lyse Doucet asks her interlocutors to formulate their own wishes for Afghanistan.
But what would be his? “I want Afghanistan to be a country where people’s wishes are granted. They want their children – boys and girls – to go to school. They want a job. They want a place that gives them some room to thrive. It is an excessively painful moment in their history and for which they must take some responsibility. ”