Finest Hotel In Kabul - Lyse Doucet

In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan s hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world.

Lyse Doucet now the BBC s Chief International Correspondent, then a young reporter on her inaugural trip to Afghanistan first checked into the Inter-Continental in 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors.

Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country.

It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel s 1970s glory days an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the Paris of Central Asia . Of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021.