The Dubai Decompression Loop

The mountains always felt close when the aircraft lifted out of Kabul. During the Afghanistan war, Dubai became a strange airlock between two worlds—where the conflict seemed, briefly, to stop.

That illusion has grown harder to sustain. After savage US and Israeli strikes on Iran, followed by vicious retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the Gulf, airlines have had to redraw flight routes, parts of regional airspace have closed, and Dubai International has had to briefly suspend operations.

For now, Dubai finds itself inside the war rather than suspended between its edges.

I flew in and out of Dubai at least eight times during Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO mission in Afghanistan. I was a one-person filmmaker with special access working out of Kabul. For a while the arrangement felt strangely permanent, as if wars could simply be sealed off from where people preferred not to think about them.

During the Afghanistan years Dubai became the mother of all stopovers—a decompression chamber for those rotating through Kabul, Kandahar, Bastion or Bagram.

Or so it felt.

One or two people who did this longer than me became mental wrecks. I struggled too. At least flying out of Afghanistan to Dubai had a completely different emotional temperature from flying into it. On one occasion flying to Kabul, I had to help a travelling government employee who was having a panic attack. Leaving Kabul, you could always feel the tension bleed away. Given how disastrously it all ended, it is uncomfortable to remember now just how casual it all was.

Michael Herr, writing about Vietnam in Dispatches, once observed that soldiers were always looking for “a place where the war couldn’t get at you for a while.” Dubai was exactly that place. This was for soldiers, contractors, diplomats, intelligence officers, aid workers, journalists, and filmmakers alike. A kind of artificial pause between rotations.

Regrettably, conversations seldom reached the notable depths of James Woods in Salvador: “You pour a hundred and twenty million bucks into this place, you turn it into a military zone, so what, so you can have chopper parades in the sky?”

The seeming effortlessness of Dubai helped. The hospitality was second to none. After the unpredictability of conflict, its glossy simplicity worked almost like an antidote. Glass towers, air-conditioned malls, identical hotel rooms. Nothing improvised, nothing chaotic.

Over time, something only half-seriously called the ‘Dubai decompression loop’ developed. Between roughly 2002 and 2014 an array of characters had ‘cycled’ through the city for short breaks between rotations in Kabul, Kandahar, Bastion or Bagram. Not to mention the many contractors in Iraq.

Two or three days of beach, alcohol and sunlight, then back home to London with gifts from the airport—or straight into the war zone again, as if someone had flipped a switch. It was seen as best to lower your stress levels before flying home.

Certain hotels quietly became the unofficial geography of that expat circuit—Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Le Méridien and the Westin at Mina Seyahi among them.

The bars themselves became classic decompression venues. Barasti Beach Bar was probably the most famous expat beach bar in the city. The Observatory looked out knowingly across the Marina skyline. Downtown were Monday nights at Zinc nightclub.

On any given session, you might find yourself talking to a Canadian helicopter pilot from Kandahar, an aid worker finally out of Uruzgan, an Afghan Brit from Essex working for the UK government, a journalist filing copy on a beer-sticky laptop, even an Elton John fanatic claiming to be a member of Hamas. Not forgetting the private contractor who never quite explained what he did.

Herr once described the off-duty spaces of Vietnam as places where “everybody looked like they’d been temporarily released from something.” The bars of Dubai were like that.

The advantages were obvious: a three- or four-hour flight from Kabul, easy visas, alcohol in hotel bars, beaches and luxury hotels. It was pretty awful, in fact.

I once asked someone why al-Qaeda had never attacked it.

“Probably because everyone has an interest in keeping the place stable,” said a cynic.

By the late 2000s, many contractors referred to Dubai as “Kabul-on-Sea.” The nickname sounds rather different now.

Looking back, the whole thing feels surreal. Online feeds today fill with expats insisting Dubai is safe. Governments offer carefully calibrated statements. Politicians hedge their language. Arguments about proportionality flicker briefly across TV studios. But wars have a way of rippling outwards into places that once believed themselves insulated.

Emirati businessman Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor has slammed Trump over the strikes. “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran? And on what basis did you make this dangerous decision?”

Former deputy supreme allied commander of Nato, General Sir Richard Shirreff has said: “We should not in any way, shape or form, be involved with the Americans closely because they are being led by a couple of gung-ho nutters, like Trump and Hegseth, without a proper strategy, without serious thought about what end-state for this war is.”

What I actually find myself most wondering now is how much the expats from the previous war really think about this now.

Perhaps wars always feel inevitable while they are happening, and strangely improbable once they are over.

One translation of Persian poet Saadi reads: “Human beings are members of a whole/In creation of one essence and soul/If one member is afflicted with pain/Other members uneasy will remain…”

In short, what Dubai once offered was the illusion that wars could be insulated. You could fly out of Kabul in the evening, land among the glass towers and hotel bars, and behave case-hardenedly for forty-eight hours or so as if the conflict existed somewhere else entirely.

It was always the aircraft door closing that became the psychological airlock between the two incompatible realities.

I still think about those selfishly gleeful departures from Kabul—the mountains rising beyond the runway as the aircraft climbed southwest towards the Gulf. Impending Dubai was always a place where the war could not quite reach you.

In reality, it was only ever a missile away.

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