Lyse Doucet | A People’s History of Afghanistan

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the wider world. More than half a century later, the Inter-Con still stands, its scarred walls and windows having bared witness to Soviet occupation, civil war, US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise again of the Taliban.

Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Con since 1988. Across those decades she has come to know the staff and guests whose lives have unfolded within its walls: Hazrat, the ageing housekeeper who still holds fast to his 1970s training from the hotel’s glory days; Abida, the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban; and Malalai and Sadeq, young staff who seized the opportunities of fragile democracy only to see the Taliban return in 2021.

In The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse brings together these stories and her own extraordinary perspective to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan. This is not only the story of a hotel, but the story of a people: how Afghans have survived half a century of destruction and disruption, heartbreak and hope.

In conversation with Sian Kevill