Lyse Doucet: Just after 1979, when Soviet tanks rumbled in, then a lot of the guests came from friendly countries in the Soviet bloc, the revolutionary brothers and sisters. When the Mujahideen came to power, these were the Western-backed rebels who overthrew the Soviet-backed government. It was the Cold War days. It was, in many ways, the Ukraine war of our time, the most grievous war in the world. But when the Mujahideen took over the hotel, then the hotel guests were other fighters, friends of the Mujahideen, including people from Pakistan, Iran [and] people from the Arab world. And then came the Taliban. Their guests were Pakistanis and Arab guests, and the most famous one of all: Osama bin Laden.

After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, everything went through the lobby because the world came to Afghanistan’s door. And the Intercon was far from being a luxury hotel then, but it was still the finest in town. You had wannabe Democrats, female parliamentarians [and] people of goodwill from the world over. They all went back and forth into that lobby. And they were all, I can remember so vividly, all around that big buffet table. And boy, were the plots hatched, lots of gossip and conspiring went through that hotel.

What really struck me was what pride they took, most of all by those who had been trained by the proper Intercontinental. And the oldest character in the book, the 70-some-year-old Hazrat, still carries himself with the bearing of an Intercontinental waiter. And then he became a housekeeper. And he remembers those days and what a privilege it was, he saw. It wasn’t his world.

The first story he told me, he even mimicked the gesture of the wealthy tourist who would fling a white, soft, plush towel across their shoulders and glide across the marble floor on the way to the swimming pool. It oozed a life of privilege and ease that was not his life, or indeed a lot of the people who worked in the hotel, except, of course, for the royals. It really was a different world, but they found their place in that world. In fact, to a person, especially those who’d worked there for decades, and many had, they said they saw it as their second home.

Every time the rulers changed, the rules changed at the Intercontinental. When the Mujahideen came to power, they had to keep their Black waiters’ jackets, trousers and black tie locked away, and they came to work in the traditional Afghan clothing. They grew a beard, wore a turban, had to stop serving alcohol, there was no music as a backdrop. And when I would talk to them about politics, of course, I had to be very careful not to put their lives at risk. They had their own views, but when it came to the hotel, they had a job there, and they did their job.

When the Taliban came to power, they smashed the music systems, they took the alcohol that was in the basement, and then tanks rumbled over it just to make a very public display of destroying it. There were difficult days, and I describe the monotony of those days when there weren’t many hotel guests. There wasn’t that buzz of guests coming in and coming out and celebrations by the pool. They just had to listen to the clock tick down until the end of their shift. Just to hold on to a job was a big achievement. And in fact, in the worst years of the Civil War of the 1990s, the Mujahideen leaders couldn’t pay them and the the staff couldn’t even get to work because it was so dangerous, because it was a turf war between the competing armed groups, and so a lot of them had to just stay at home and make do, literally make do. Hazrat, who went from being an Intercontinental trained waiter to putting together matchboxes at home with his children.

It was a moment of excitement for the Taliban who surged up the hill. This was a big tourist attraction for them because the would-be suicide bombers had heard about this hotel which had been bombed spectacularly by the Taliban in 2011 and 2018, and they saw it as having been a den of their enemies, of the infidels. And they came in confrontation with the 20-somethings who were working at the hotel, who had lived through those suicide bombings, who’d lost their loved ones. And so, Marco, it was this amazing moment where you had the young men in their 20s who’d lived under American bombs and American raids on their villages, confronting the young men and women in the hotel who had grown up in a system of international engagement, of aspiring for a Western education, even to travel to the West. And so, this was really, let us say, a moment of reckoning.

I started in 1988 and stayed nearly a year. I went back time and again. I was there in 1992 when the Soviet-backed government was toppled. I went back again during the Civil War. I didn’t get there during the Taliban days, but it was a place to stay after the Taliban were toppled and the two decades of international engagement began.

There was one moment when I was living at the hotel for months on end in 1989. It was the summer after the Soviet troops had pulled out, and more than a hundred rockets were falling on the city a day, fired by the Western-backed Mujahideen. And of course, the hotel was high on a hill, but it never hit the hotel except that week when myself and another journalist who was staying there, John Burns of the New York Times, we decided to make a trip to the other side to Pakistan to see the war from the side of the Mujahideen, and a rocket slammed in to the first floor of the hotel.

Your listeners can go on to booking.com or however you book your travel. The Intercontinental Kabul is open for business. You’ll see photographs of the gorgeous buffet offerings in the main restaurant. You’ll see the luscious cakes in the cafe and the rooms. They don’t mention there’s no music, don’t bring your bikini, there’s no cocktails and it is run by the Taliban. But it is a hotel, and Afghanistan is more peaceful because the Taliban have stopped their suicide attacks.

n focusing on this hotel, Marco, I was trying to tell what I hope is an everyday kind of story, which allowed me to tell the story of lives lived in the hardships of war, but a life where people still find hope and humor. They still live for joy. The the kind of lives that all of us lead, we get up in the morning, have a cup of tea or coffee, and find an everyday courage to face the day.