Lyse Doucet: ‘The fear of not being a journalist was bigger than the fear of what was around me’

Lyse Doucet is the BBC’s chief international correspondent, a renowned Canadian journalist whose work has taken her all over the world, recently to Afghanistan and Iran. Last year she published her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a narrative non-fiction account of Afghan history told through the prism of its first luxury hotel. The InterContinental sits on a hill above the country’s capital city and opened its doors in 1969, when Afghanistan was still a kingdom with a monarch. In those days the hotel played host to “le tout Kabul”, as the book puts it, entertaining “Afghan princes, bejewelled princesses and the privileged elite” in a country of widespread poverty.

Those times were long gone when Doucet arrived at the hotel on Christmas Day in 1988. She’d come from Pakistan and ended up staying for a year, covering the “biggest story in the world” – the Soviet withdrawal from the country after 10 years of occupation and a bloody war with the western-backed mujahideen. She has been covering Afghanistan ever since, reporting on the perennial power struggles. “I often say that the Afghans have lived through every political system the world has known,” she says. “They've been a monarchy, which, while far from perfect, is [a period] now remembered by Afghans as the ‘golden years’. Then came Soviet-backed communism, followed by warlordism, followed by Islamism with the Taliban, then democracy – would-be democracy, backed and bankrolled by the west – and now they're back to Islamism again.”

And the hotel has remained standing throughout. When she first arrived, she recalls being immediately taken with the faded grandeur of the place and the warmth of the staff, and since then she has returned many times, making close friends and eventually writing her book about it. Warmly received by both reviewers and readers, The Finest Hotel in Kabul won this year’s Women’s Prize for non-fiction. The lives of ordinary Afghans working in the InterCon (as it is commonly known) – waiter Malalai, chef Abida, manager Mohammad, housekeeper Hazrat  – are vividly described with such care even in times of tragedy. And despite the suicide bombings, gun battles, endless changing of the guards, the hotel is somehow still open for business, run these days by the government. And Doucet’s BBC work in Afghanistan goes on; in August of this year she managed to get a visa to return to report on the five years of Taliban rule since the US withdrawal in 2021.

Can you reflect on what the book’s success has meant to you? 

Every writer’s life is said to be fraught with doubt. Will I finish this book? Will my writing be good enough? This is especially the case for a debut author – which I am. In my case I was exploring a different kind of writing than journalism, a different kind of story. So I held my breath. Winning the Women’s Prize was a bolt out of the blue – I was up against literary giants. I still ask myself if I really won it. I have been so touched by everyone who has come up to me to say they never thought they would read a book about Afghanistan and who tell me they found meaning in its pages and cared about the people they met in them.

Both your professional and personal life must feel inextricably linked to the country now?

This place and its people have been woven into my life for decades. I had been trying for three years to get another visa and it was wonderful to be back [last month] even if it was laced with the pain that so many friends, forced to flee five years ago, were no longer there. And so many are suffering, especially the schoolgirls barred from going to school but still trying to hold fast to their dreams. But it was good to see senior Taliban, some of whom I’ve known for years, who don’t agree with the harshest of edicts handed down by their ultra-conservative emir and believe Islam gives girls and women the right to be educated. It was overwhelming to return to the hotel … The first person I met was Malalai, the former waiter now working in security in the female body-search cabin. We hugged each other tightly.

You often work in difficult, even dangerous, circumstances. Do you think you are a brave person?

There's a [line in a] poem I’ve carried with me from the end of university. My sister Andrea gave it to me and it’s by Seamus Heaney: “The way we are living, / timorous or bold, / will have been our life.”  and I think I've tried to live an everyday kind of courage. People come up to me and they say, "oh you're so brave: you're on frontlines’, but I've really come to believe that we all have this courage within us.

I was thinking about this when I was speaking with a 13-year-old schoolgirl recently, at a secret school in Kabul; this room of girls so eager to learn, were full of dreams, but also full of fear because they knew that the morality police could come and chase them out, or detain them. But the fear of not being educated was greater than the fear of being caught. And I think throughout my life, the fear of not being a journalist was always bigger than the fear of whatever was going on around me.  

The US troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the return of the Taliban was a particularly seismic time …

I was flying into Kabul in a Qatari military plane as some of my colleagues were on the tarmac trying to get out. There was a sort of dystopian scene where, you know, the mouth of the military transporter opens up and you see this grey tarmac, the grey military transporters from Nato armies the world over, rotors whirring, and then Afghans in single file going into them, and it was just the most surreal moment. And then I see friends in the lines. You know, one of them was Bilal Sarwary, who used to work for the BBC. I said "Bilal, you're leaving,” and he says “Lyse, I didn't want to leave, I love my country”, and so there were moments of tears – and then the British and the Americans tried to expel us. They said: “What are you doing here? It's too dangerous”

You felt it was important to be there?

The BBC have a high-risk team, and we have editors, and you know, I've been covering Afghanistan for a long time. I just felt, and some of my colleagues agreed with me, that we'd be OK. We were not at risk. I'm not reckless. It was really important to be there and you know, when I was in Kabul this year on 15 August [five years to the day that the Taliban captured the capital], I spent most of the day just messaging friends, Afghan friends, and others who weren't in Kabul saying “thinking of you”, because, you know, it really was a moment that crystallised for me that moment of leaving. Just seeing that scene at the airport, where you realise they're not just getting on a plane with a suitcase: they are leaving loved ones, their dreams, their ambitions, everything they've held dear, all that they've built. Knowing they're fortunate to get out, but knowing the price is such that they will lose who they are and their country. 

How do you process it all? 

You know one of the gifts of working in television and radio is that you have a team and if we're in Afghanistan, we go there with Mahfouz. If we're in Syria, we're with Lina – we're always working with someone from that country who, whatever we're feeling, their future is there. You have ways of processing it. You come away from a traumatic scene and you discuss it. You cry together. Of course, that's not for broadcasts. I work for a public broadcaster who thinks that's not the kind of journalism we want, and it's not the kind of journalism I want to do, so you deal with it, and [we have] these WhatsApp groups. I'm still in touch with all my team in Afghanistan. We joke about having separation anxiety because you spend so much time together.

You come from a large Catholic family. Are you a religious person?

I am, and you know when I was in Muslim countries in West Africa, or when I was in Afghanistan, I would go to the mosque with my women friends. When I was in Jerusalem, I would go to the synagogue with Jewish friends. I'm still a believer, that's very much part of who I am, and I think it helps me to understand other people for whom belief really matters.

Tell us something that's given you hope in the past few months.

Oh, seeing that Afghan schoolgirls haven't given up, haven't given up their hope. 

What do you always carry with you?

Yorkshire tea bags, soya milk and gluten-free bread.

What or who brings you joy?  

The deliciousness of being with friends you love and just laughing.

What annoys you?

Pessimism. People who think the worst. 

Who do you talk to when you're feeling low? 

My women friends. They're all the way around the world. Australia, Canada, here in London. I talk to my women friends who are doing the same thing that I'm doing. We talk about the way the world is going, concerns about friends. 

Do you have any regrets?

I've tried to live a life without the big R, without regret. I still wish I could play the violin and that I'd spent more time on languages, but, you know, I’m still carrying my Dari books with me when I go to Afghanistan, my Farsi books to Iran, my Arabic books in the Middle East, so I'm still working on it. I'm not giving up yet. I still set goals for myself.

What do you wish you had known at 18 that you know now? 

That life will just keep going forward. I'm so glad I’m not at that place where you think, “am I going to become a journalist”? You just have to keep looking forward. Don't look down. Don't look back. Don't look back is important. 

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann) is now available in paperback with a new epilogue and afterword (buy it at a discount at the Nerve bookshop)