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Sherard Cowper-Coles talking to female drug addicts at a detox centre in Kabul, 2007. Photograph: Saurabh Das/AP

On his first day on the job as Her Majesty's ambassador to Kabul in 2007, Sherard Cowper-Coles told the mission's top SIS (MI6) officer that his priority would be to develop a good relationship with President Hamid Karzai. The gruff northern spy quickly puts him right.

1. Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West's Afghanistan Campaign

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   Sherard Cowper-Coles

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Oh no it won't. Your key relationship will be with the American ambassador. He matters most to us

That dependent relationship is one of the central themes of Cowper-Coles memoir of his three years spent as ambassador and the UK special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a dependence only skimpily veiled by the hubris and narcissism of Whitehall which is determined to be seen as driving events on the ground.

It was such personal and institutional vices that led to Britain's ill-fated decision to deploy over three thousand troops in Helmand in 2006. Not long after that, Zamir Kabulov - the long-serving Russian ambassador who had been in Afghanistan on and off since 1977 - confided in his new British counterpart (in Cowper-Coles' phonetic spelling):

I have a very varm feeling toward you Sherard. You are making all ze same mistakes as ve did.

On his departure for Kabul for the first time, Cowper-Coles was handed a stack of policy documents with grandiose titles like "UK strategy for Afghanistan", obscuring the fact that strategy was made in Washington and the Tampa headquarters of US Central Command.

As the years passed and Helmand descended deeper and deeper into conflict, British mandarins would routinely visit the front and return with confident reports of progress made "while challenges remain". Cowper-Coles confesses:

Such was the pressure not to sound defeatist that all of us indulged from time to time in such self-congratulatory vacuities

In private, however, Cowper-Coles quickly became a trenchant critic of the Britain's army-driven military-first engagement in Afghanistan, and the most brutally honest diplomat in Kabul. A half-hour conversation with him was generally a sobering corrective to the usual 'happy talk' disseminated at Nato briefings.

That 'happy talk' was not necessarily intended to deceive, Cowper-Coles argues. Military intelligence is produced by serving officers who are, he says:

part of a machine which understandably places a premium, especially in war, on optimism, loyalty and, to some extent, group think

Embedded journalists also find themselves enmeshed in a web of obligations (conscious or otherwise) to the brave soldiers who have kept them safe on the battlefield.

The memoir is based on memory and "four daily line of scribble in a rough and ready diary". Cowper-Coles was not given access to the official record. There make be a little too much here on the endless round of parties and morale-boosting fun and games at the Kabul embassy, but the book more than makes up with some telling anecdotes. My favourite is the account of a huddle with President Karzai over the fate of a small heavily-contested slice of Helmand around Musa Qala.

We called for a map. But it turned out that the president's staff had no map of their country available. I therefore pulled out an RAF map of the country, which I always carried in my briefcase. The map was meant for aircrew to help them escape and survive if they were forced down in hostile territory. It was printed on something like silk, so that it could be folded tight and concealed. It bore a legend, in six central Asian languages and English, indicating that the bearer came in peace, help in returning him to friendly forces would be handsomely rewarded.
We stood round, peering at the map, trying without success to find the hamlet, Shah Kariz, in which Mullah Salam had his compound. This was how the supreme command of the war operated.

Cowper-Coles and his boss, David Miliband, began to champion a change of course towards the pursuit of talks with the Taliban, first privately and then publicly in a speech at MIT in March 2010.

That policy has since been adopted by the Obama administration. For some months, Marc Grossman, the US special envoy has been looking for an authentic Taliban representative to talk to, and may or may not have found one in the form of a former aide to Mullah Omar, Mohammad Tayyab Agha.

It is still far from clear whether this road will lead anywhere, but there seems little doubt it is worth a try. It also seems clear that a deal would have been easier several bloody years ago. The Cowper-Coles memoir is a chronicle of at least some of that wasted time.