Pat Dollard

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Michael Semple

Times Online:

He looked like a native. He spoke the language. He wore a turban, long cotton pyjamas and a wool-len waistcoat. And he had a wild, scraggly beard. His hair was ginger, but Afghans came in many shades.

Captain Rob Sugden of the Cold-stream Guards had not been in Afghanistan long when he first saw this strange figure at a “reconciliation” meeting between two former Taliban leaders and a delegation of British and Afghan officials.

Sugden was in for a surprise. The “native” was not Afghan. He was Irish. His name was Michael Semple.

One of the ex-Taliban at the meeting, it transpired later, had just two business cards in his wallet: that of Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul – and Semple’s. It was an accurate measure of this mysterious figure’s significance.

Semple, employed by the European Union, was a “political officer”, a title that evokes romantic figures such as Lawrence of Arabia, with a special knack of winning the trust of the tribes.

He struck Sugden as very laid back and “not fazed by rank or anything like that . . . he was very at ease, a calm guy. He didn’t so much lead the proceedings, but it was quite obvious that he was central to them”.

Talking to the Taliban at that time – October 2007 – was a sensitive issue. In private, after six years of war in which British soldiers were being killed and maimed in large numbers, almost everyone thought talks needed to happen urgently. But, in public, they were wary. The politicians called it “reconciliation” and emphasised that it was “not negotiation”.

The British were the most keen on discreet contacts. The doctrine was simple: “Divide your enemy. Engage with those who can be reconciled. Kill or capture those who cannot.”

In their view, the “enemy” were not all hardened ideologues but included ordinary tribal Afghans who, if they might not accept the presence of foreign troops, might ultimately come to accept the Afghan government.

The trouble was that the Afghan government itself, while fully aware of the contacts, would turn against them publicly in a show of entirely hypocritical fury. Semple, branded a spy, would be expelled.

Now – when Britain’s military operations in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly controversial, and contacts with the Taliban are again on the agenda – Semple has talked at length for the first time about his mysterious role.

His revelations show why British senior officers and diplomats are openly unhappy with the task they have been set in Afghanistan, and why they increasingly believe it is time to rethink an unwinnable war.

Brought up in Dublin and Belfast, Semple moved to Afghanistan with his Pakistani wife to work for Oxfam in 1989 after the Soviet army had pulled out. By the time the Taliban were evicted at the end of 2001 after the 9/11 attacks in America, few foreigners left in Afghanistan had such deep local knowledge as Semple.

By then, he was working as a political officer for the United Nations alongside a close friend, Mervyn Pat-terson, a Northern Irishman who had also been working in the country for years. Rory Stewart, the author and former diplomat, described them as “two of the best political officers in the country”.

President Hamid Karzai himself once told the Irish ambassador: “Michael knows every Afghan.” It seemed like a compliment. But, for the president, someone with such deep knowledge was also someone to fear.

From the beginning of the western intervention in Afghanistan, Semple saw a tragedy unfolding. Some Taliban were hardcore Islam-ists, but others had joined for security or just for career reasons. Now every Talib was being branded a terrorist. US special forces hared round the country to catch them “dead or alive”. Some powerful Afghans on the winning side made the most of this.

“What you had was a shift to predatory mode, where the warlords and those with connections to Karzai came back and started grabbing land and booty,” said Semple. “They were seizing weapons, cars and stored opium. And sometimes they were tricking Americans into going after so-called terrorists. It forced people over to Pakistan – to where the Taliban leadership had stayed on.”

The actions of the foreigners and the warlords Karzai had installed began to encourage the idea of a war against the foreigners. The Taliban started to recrystallise. Semple, by now employed by the EU, was tasked to assist an official reconciliation programme helping to steer people out of the new insurgency.

Nearly 5,000 people were “reconciled”. Karzai claimed the reconciliation was vital. But Semple became convinced the president’s rhetoric and the whole official programme were bogus. He and his team had given assurances to people who changed sides that their security was guaranteed, but “before you knew it they had been targeted by corrupt, wicked officials and locked up”. He began to see the western-funded programme as simply another way of handing out money to the cronies of those in power.

Brigadier Andrew Mackay arrived in Helmand in early October 2007 to assume command of the multi-national brigade of more than 7,000 soldiers there, as well as all the British service personnel deployed across Afghanistan. Mackay believed in the mission, but did not approach it with blinkered eyes. After hearing relentlessly downbeat assessments of the war before leaving London, he heard nothing more encouraging in Kabul.

One senior western diplomat told him bluntly that Karzai was “not the president we want or need”. How was the British Army supposed to support the Afghan government and extend its reach of power in Helmand unless the president took decisive steps to purge the warlords whose actions helped to encourage the Taliban?

Mackay was drawing up plans to retake Musa Qala, a key town in northern Helmand. During the build-up to the attack, Semple was active behind the scenes. The “reconciliation” process successfully kept some key Taliban commanders out of the battle. Semple thought about 400 local fighters stayed away.

After the Afghan government flag had been raised in Musa Qala, I met Brigadier Mackay sitting outside an abandoned shop. He candidly revealed his own concerns about the war and his own strategy for beginning to win against the odds. Later, he sent me a copy of his latest thinking, which spoke of avoiding battles and killing. His

views were shared by Cowper-Coles and others. All wanted to stop the needless killing.

To Semple, the time was ripe to take reconciliation on to another stage. In a meeting with Munir Mangal, a deputy interior minister, the concept of “training camps” for former Taliban was thrashed out.

“The idea was simple,” said Semple. “You needed somewhere to invite people to. An assurance of love and goodwill from them was not enough. But simply recruiting them into a fighting force wasn’t either a good idea or something that Nato would accept.”

Semple thought up a six-week “life skills” type of course for former Taliban: Afghan history and constitution, some reading and writing and plenty of physical exercise. Mangal suggested getting a private security firm to run it.

The Afghan officials Semple met in Kabul liked the camp idea, as did the British. Soon the army got to work on the planning for the camp, even finding a place for it. But Asadullah Wafa, Helmand’s governor, was not informed. Semple was invited to go down to lay things on the table.

Two days before Christmas, Semple hitched a ride to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, on a United Nations helicopter with his friend Mervyn Patterson, who was on separate UN business, nothing to do with Semple. Wafa invited them both for a meeting. The atmosphere in the living room of the governor’s residence that night was claustrophobic, the windows all shut. With Semple on the ornate couches was General Naquib Stanikzai, a former head of the Taliban’s air force, whom he had recruited as his partner in the reconciliation process. Patterson’s Afghan assistant, Amini, was also there.

Wafa was deep in conversation with his intelligence chief, Muham-mad Naeem. Suddenly he switched his gaze to Semple and asked: “Michael, what are you up to at the moment?”

Semple tried to think of a way of introducing the idea of the training camp. But Wafa already knew about it.

“Do you want to set up a military unit for the Taliban?” he asked.

“No. But we are suggesting some rehabilitation training for them – something to make humans of them!”

Naquib spoke: “Nobody wants to set up a military unit, but there is this idea of a training camp to provide a destination for the Taliban who have fought – ” Wafa interrupted, his face tensing with anger.

“Guards, arrest these men!” he bellowed, pointing at the Afghans in Semple’s party.

Naeem’s plainclothes officers stepped into the room, silently producing handcuffs. “It’s the president’s orders,” shouted Wafa when Semple protested. “Talk to the president, not me.”

Andrew Patrick, the deputy head of mission at the British embassy, was pouring drinks for Christmas Day lunch when he was summoned to the foreign ministry. Semple and Patterson were being declared personae non gratae and ordered to leave the country within 48 hours for “actions prejudicial to the security of Afghanistan”.

The Afghans told anyone who asked that they had been mixed up with British intelligence. Their talks with the Taliban were a plot by the Secret Intelligence Service, a revival of the spy intrigues of the 19th-century “Great Game”.

Cowper-Coles got back from leave on December 28 and saw Karzai in the palace the following day. He took with him a sheaf of e-mails from the Afghan interior ministry and their intelligence service, the NDS. Semple had exchanged more than 100 messages on his work with the NDS alone. They showed that the contacts with the Taliban and the plan for the camp had been directly approved by Karzai’s own most senior officials.

“This has all been authorised,” Cowper-Coles told the president, who looked taken aback. All his men had denied all knowledge.

Karzai was not about to back down, however. The whole programme of discreet contacts with Taliban commanders was suspended.

Brigadier Mackay regarded the Semple debacle as a huge lost opportunity. It undermined “so much of the promise opened up by the capture of Musa Qala . . . after that, reconciliation was dead in the water”.