On 19 August 2011 the unimaginable happened. The most ruthlessly planned and viciously violent direct attack on the British Council in its history occurred over a seven-hour period in Kabul.

At 5.30 am our office compound, where those of us from outside Afghanistan also live, was at peace. Our three currently resident colleagues were asleep in their beds and our night security were quietly patrolling.

At 5.35 am a 500 kg car bomb (the first of two) exploded at our front gate. At the same time a squad of Taliban suicide bombers, each strapped with three kg of explosives, scaled our perimeter walls and gained access through the blasted front entrance. Within 20 seconds of the explosion our three colleagues were racing to a ‘safe’ room, already under direct AK 47 fire.

Seven hours later the attack was over and the scene was one of devastation.

The three had been ‘extricated’ and conveyed to the British Embassy, a welcoming Ambassador and phone calls from the Prime Minister. They were physically unhurt but had endured the most traumatic siege experience conceivable.

Two Afghan police and two passers-by were dead.

Three Afghan officers of our G4S security were dead.

A member of the New Zealand SAS team that spearheaded the counterattack (along with Afghan, UK and US units) was dead.

Three Afghan police and two of our Gurkha security colleagues were in hospital with bullet wounds.

Every attacker was dead, all but one by suicide detonation within our office and bedsits.

Every room of every Council building on our compound was destroyed by fire resulting from grenades pitched into every space. Virtually no assets or belongings survived. The residual inventory list took us three minutes to compile on a postcard.

Since that day our magnificent British Council Afghanistan team has resolved on the spirited reassertion of who we are and why we’re here. Within an hour of the appalling finale of this outrage, British Council staff members were on the compound, clearing debris in the most grim conditions.

Our first priority has been care for everyone affected by the trauma – the prisoners of the safe room, the injured, the families and colleagues of those who died to protect the British Council and its staff. It has been a week of counselling, gratitude and condolences to many individuals and many organisations.

For some of us this has been the most emotional week of our lives.

Our second priority has been getting back on our feet. We must permanently leave this site and will operate for now from within the British Embassy. On 29 August, just a week or so after this cataclysm, every member of the British Council Afghan team will be back in business in our hastily devised temporary office.

We have literally been flattened by this experience – laid as low as one can go. We readily confess to our state of shock.

But the team’s refusal to surrender our values, ambitions or purpose to this attack can be palpably felt here in Kabul. We are determined to restore and grow our impact on behalf of young Afghans within weeks. This dreadful incident simply reaffirms the core need of deeply nurtured cultural engagement, and educational and social solidarity with troubled people in the world’s most fractured places

The cries of outrage, on our behalf, from our Afghan friends and contacts, are accompanied by their pleas for us to stay and to grow.

We’re going to find every way of doing that.

Read other blogs by Paul Smith, British Council Country Director, Afghanistan

Read the blog our CEO, Martin Davidson, wrote about the Kabul attack for The Huffington Post

Find out more about British Council projects in Afghanistan