Blair’s wars only edged their way into British popular culture in the 2000s and 2010s. But I always thought it was darkly ironic that, when the BBC reimagined Sherlock for the present day in 2010, they didn’t have to reimagine Dr Watson’s colonial backstory. The Victorian Dr Watson: served in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, fought at the Battle of Maiwand and was sent back to England with enteric fever. The Elizabethan Dr Watson: served in Afghanistan in the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers and was shot in the shoulder, invalided home with a psychosomatic limp. When, in the summer of 2021, the retreat from Kabul turned from farce to tragedy, America could still receive the spectacle with a spirit of novelty: “Joe Biden’s Saigon” they called it, to connect it with America’s canonical rout. But Britain should have known better; we had been there before.
A more direct televisual engagement with the Afghanistan war has come with Kabul, a European drama about the 2021 evacuation. My own memories of that summer are choppy. As the Taliban advanced on the capital, we were all arguing about football and race and Englishness (don’t pretend you had eyes on Herat). When the stories started tumbling into the news, they came, bizarrely, as comic set pieces: Dominic Raab refusing to pick up the phone from his Graecian getaway, even as the trucks sped towards Kabul; a man called “Pen” Farthing rescuing 94 dogs and 68 cats from Afghanistan, having told a British diplomat “I will fucking destroy you” if he was not given government assistance. These are the memories I have, and, shamefully, not thoughts of the 1,000 Afghan interpreters who had helped the British army during the occupation and who were left to the Taliban.
Kabul should go some way to restating the enormousness of these events in the British public mind. The series is a chaotic, expensive epic, beginning as the Taliban close in around Kabul, and following a diffuse cast of Afghans, diplomats and soldiers, all either trying to escape, or to make restitution to the Afghans they had served alongside. There’s a German special forces agent trying to rescue an Afghan general who had saved her life in 2019. There’s the leftovers of the French diplomatic mission, huddled in their embassy compound, under siege from desperate locals with visa claims. And there’s a junior Italian consul, wearing Kevlar for the first time and wildly coordinating departures on the runway.
The European focus is understandable, from a production company called Cinétévé, but it results in some errata. While the Afghan characters speak the local language (Dari), the Europeans all speak accented English of varying verisimilitude (there is an Italian soldier who, with his fat, yodelling vowels, sounds like a Scandinavian on a gap year). And there is some stereotyping: while all the European characters are plucky and principled, the Americans appear as overequipped, officious arseholes, who chew gum in the face of their continental colleagues and who, in heated moments, lapse into full cowboy: “I can arrest, you, I can shoot you on the spot, and they’ll just give me a medal. Copy that?” Yet the heart of the story is not to be found among these interlopers, but with Kabul’s main characters, the Nazany family. They are presented as a model of the Afghanistan that has been lost: the mother, a prosecutor whom we first see putting away Taliban terrorists; the daughter, a doctor; the son, a soldier in the Afghan army. Their story, fresher and rawer than the Europeans’, should have been given more background and space.
And while the grandeur of Kabul can’t be denied, it is best told in moments rather than stories. A little girl in the hospital having her iPod snatched by a screaming Talib (“Music is haram!”). The French diplomat negotiating an exit for his colleagues and telling the Taliban leader: “The war is over. You won.” An Afghan who had informed on his countrymen snarling at the Italian consul: “Why did we trust you? You come in my country and make a mess of everything.” Through the 2000s and 2010s, the war in Afghanistan lurked at the edge of the public mind, making strange, distant names for the kitchen radio to pronounce. Whether it succeeds in bringing the war home, Kabul is a reminder that it should have done so long ago.
Kabul
BBC iPlayer
[Further reading: In praise of crap daytime TV]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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Subscribe here to commentAh, the old feminist imperialist saviour narrative about liberating women in Afghanistan. How contemptuous of actual universal humanitarian principles.
Until prompted by this NS article, I had put off watching this BBC acquired politically charged dramatisation: inaccurately portraying a country emerging from war after almost two decades of occupation. Being aware of how such a profound historical tragedy would most likely be promoted by the eroded public service institution, I had every intention of not watching Kubal – only because BBC iPlayer inspires none of the curiosity I might have had for say an ITV real-life drama. However, the unfortunate reality is that this “heroic framing” has become a popular rational for the war having taken place. It goes without saying that Afghanistan was invaded in 2001 in the context of a morally compromised rationale, after the United States had been targeted and punished domestically for its past clandestine violent pursuit of geopolitical supremacy, in the wake of WWII. It’s difficult to reflect on anything about Kubal without addressing its backward chronology and disproportionate narrative perspective.
Honestly, if we are to understand current events within Britan and beyond its borders, what more has provoked and fuelled the current apocalypse migration to this country, other than the wars that have taken place in recent history?
Oh dear. This film and this article are the very emptiest, most hypocritical and most futile liberal lamentation over the defeat of interventionist liberalism in Afghanistan.
Still the film will make good sofa-viewing to munch Hobnobs by, easy crocodile tears coursing down one’s cheeks.