Veteran TV correspondent Sandy Gall on his adventures in Afghanistan, the Taliban and his family's charity clinic in Kabul
Your new book, War Against the Taliban, is really the third instalment of your long personal engagement with Afghanistan that began in 1981. Is it a labour of love?
Yes, it is in a way. I hadn't really planned it, but I suppose it began when we all saw the coffins coming back through Wootton Bassett. It made me want to try to explain what these men had been fighting for. And why it had all gone wrong.
It must sometimes feel that you have spent half a lifetime engaged with this particular corner of the world?
It sometimes seems like that. I had been with the mujahideen for the Russian occupation for ITV, and I was there for the civil war that followed, which was even more destructive in some ways. By that time I had set up a charity to help people who had lost limbs to mines [Sandy Gall's Afghanistan Appeal], so I've been back pretty much every year for 30 years.
If you were to boil down your sense of where the war against the Taliban went wrong, it would seem to resolve itself to a single word: Iraq.
Yes, I think that's true. I don't think anyone expected the Taliban to offer such resistance. So in 2003 America apparently moved all of their intelligence and spy satellite resources out of Afghanistan and into Iraq. They obviously believed Afghanistan had been dealt with.
One of the themes of the book is the misplaced faith that Britain and America had in Pakistan, whose intelligence services seem, in your reading, to have been supporting the Taliban throughout?
Several military figures told me we had the wrong mindset in our approach to Pakistan. The Foreign Office seemed to see Pakistan as an old ally; it's a post-colonial legacy, perhaps. If the Americans had ever cut off money to Pakistan the thing might have been over in months.
In some ways this book is a brief history of the military being let down by politicians. Would it be fair to say your sympathies lie with the armed forces?
Well I think that is partly because I couldn't get too many politicians to talk to me. Of course I wrote to Blair and John Reid and so on. I didn't get any reply. Much later, last year, I was awarded a CMG [Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George] and Cherie Blair wrote me a letter of congratulation, though I didn't know her. I wrote back asking if she might mention my request for an interview with her husband. She did try, but when it was heard that the subtitle of my book was "Why it all went wrong" I think that ended it.
What would you have asked him?
The same as I asked everyone. How on earth did we end up in this mess?
If the troops pull out now will we leave the country better than we found it?
Whatever they say no one has any idea what will happen if they do pull out quickly. I fear it might be like Vietnam. I was in Saigon when it fell. The Americans negotiated that peace settlement with very little in hand because the troops had already gone. You'd hope that they would not put themselves in that position again.
Your charity's clinic in Kabul has survived a lot of tough times. Which period was the worst?
It was very difficult with the Taliban in power. They wanted to run everything. We had women working in the clinic and one day all the watchmen came roaring in and told them all to go home. They did not dare return for months. We had four Land Rovers and the Taliban stole three of them. In the end when the EU withdrew support for charities in Afghanistan we effectively had to hand the clinic over. After 9/11 we got a call from the health authority asking us to come back and open up again.
It has been very much a family concern?
Yes, my eldest daughter lived in Kabul for seven years and ran the charity. And then Carlotta, my younger daughter, worked there for a while too before she became a journalist – she's now the Afghan and Pakistan correspondent for the New York Times. My wife runs the UK end of it from our home in Kent.
Do you keep a track of how many people you have helped in that period?
We have fitted at least 20,000 people with artificial legs or calipers. And many, many more have had physiotherapy of one kind or another. We have lately been doing a lot of work helping children born with club feet or hip displacement.
When you originally set the foundation up you had some qualms about getting emotionally involved as a journalist?
I did. And I still have qualms about that to a degree. I was urged to do it after I wrote my first book, but there were a couple of times since when I have had to avoid certain stories to prevent reprisals against the clinic.
Do you miss the frontline involvement?
I don't. Unless you are a very odd person you don't enjoy combat as a journalist. You are just there to tell a story. War is bloody dangerous, I know that much. I did go to Kandahar this time but I felt at my age I was probably a bit old to be embedded. It's too hot for one thing. When I went with the mujahideen in 1981 we walked for 12 days straight in the mountains. I'm obviously not fit enough to do that now.
Would you say that you worked through the golden days of television journalism?
I think it was that. We were always short of money of course. It was always "Can we afford to go?" I remember missing the Tet offensive by a few days, because someone had been havering about the expense. What we did have in our favour, though, was the ratings. On ITN we would consistently be in the top 10 of viewing figures for the week. People really wanted to see what was going on in the world, even if the news was mostly bad. I'm not sure it's quite the same now.
Though I'm sure you have more books to write, I am guessing this may be your last word on Afghanistan?
I can't imagine writing another book about it all. Though there are certainly chapters in the story that haven't yet been written.
Can you still hope for a happy ending?
Oh, one has to hope. The Pakistanis need to be persuaded that it is in their best interests to ally themselves wholeheartedly with the west. If that can happen, then who knows?