JOHN SIMPSON

It’s a pitiable sight: the twisted girders, the shattered concrete, the swarms of workmen taking the ruins apart. We’re told it will rise again, which is excellent news. But, for the time being, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad has ceased to exist.

Not so its memories. To be honest, I don’t much like some of these glistening modern five-star hotels, many of which are pretty much exactly like every other, right down to the layout and furniture. In those first bleary waking moments in the morning, you look round and can’t quite remember which country you’re in. Is this Egypt? Or Moscow? Or could it perhaps be Johannesburg? Exactly the same breakfast awaits you downstairs, and the staff will use exactly the same words to greet you. ‘Basically we’re all the same,’ an advert for a vast hotel chain used to intone on BBC World News. I always threw something at the screen when I heard that.

To be honest, the Islamabad Marriott was rather like that: designed as though it expected all its guests to be Americans. Yet, because this was Pakistan, the people who worked there were charmingly idiosyncratic, and as polite and helpful as any hotel staff anywhere. And sometimes, for instance, during the last three months of 2001, the Marriott became the centre for the world’s press, which makes any hotel the most exciting place on earth to be.

In October 2001, when the Taliban were in the last weeks of their power in neighbouring Afghanistan, and were warning Western journalists that the penalty for entering the part of the country, which they controlled, would be imprisonment or even execution, Islamabad was unquestionably the place to report from. Peshawar, which I love dearly, was much closer to the Afghan border, of course, but all the communications were in Islamabad. If you wanted to satellite a report for television news, that was where it had to be done.

And so you got to know which part of the main dining room the different news organisations favoured, and which little coffee bar down the hotel corridors they slipped away to when they wanted to discuss things privately among themselves. You became accustomed to having your meals at times when your friends, rather than your competition, were likely to be there too. And you found discreet places where you could meet informants or guests for live rooftop interviews, without letting your opposition spot them as well.

Very pleasant, therefore, and mostly very amusing. In those days there seemed to be no danger whatever; not, at any rate from political and religious extremists. It’s true that during one visit to the Marriott I broke a tooth on an apricot stone while enjoying a delicious rice dish, but our excellent Pakistani fixer got me into the chair of one of the best-equipped dentists I’ve ever consulted within about 20 minutes of the breakage, and all was well.

It was from the Marriott that the famous cameraman Peter Jouvenal and I originally set out, with much assumed nonchalance, to drive to Peshawar in order to cross the border into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Peter had made contact through friends with a group of cross-border smugglers, and I had grandiose ideas of getting them to take us all the way to Kabul and look after us there while we reported under cover. The smugglers were full of confidence that they could do it, so we hired them to take us across the border and show us how good they were.

They were tough characters, but my experience in Afghanistan has always been that as long as you pay the agreed amount promptly and in full, you can always trust the men you are with; even though they may look ferocious and are invariably armed. The smugglers made one stipulation: we must dress ourselves in burkas. So we went to the main clothes market in Peshawar, and in front of a large crowd we tried on the biggest burkas in the shop. Since Peter Jouvenal and I are both 6ft 2 we did not make the most convincing Afghan women, but we announced that we were buying them as presents for our wives; and no one was rude enough to ask why, in that case, we needed to wear them ourselves.

It was an unforgettable experience, not least because wearing a burka was like putting on a cloak of invisibility. On one occasion I was talking to the chief smuggler while I put my burka on, and halfway through our conversation he switched to talking to our chief Pakistani helper, because I had clearly ceased to exist as a sentient human being.

The trip was difficult. Initially, Peter and I insisted on riding inside the cab of the truck the smugglers took us in, to shelter from the dust and sun, but someone pointed out that women would never travel that comfortably, and we were getting suspicious looks along the way. So we transferred to the open flat-bed part of the truck, while the guards with the guns travelled in comfort.

There was outrage at the Marriott when our first live broadcast went out from Taliban-held Afghanistan, and many of the journalists staying at the hotel declared that what we had done was dangerous, irresponsible, unethical and stupid. The stupid bit I could agree with; it quickly became clear that our smugglers knew only the border area, and couldn’t possibly smuggle us across to Kabul. Soon, anyway, other ways of getting into Afghanistan opened up, and the crowd in the Marriott began thinning out.

And now all that charm and glamour – because, for all its unspecified, unicultural atmosphere, the Marriott had both – has been destroyed. I shall make a point of staying at the new one, when it is built.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected British Airways flights.