Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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I think there were a lot of Taliban that had come into Kabul and stayed there a little while and actually started changing themselves. When I was there, people would say they’d softened their view on certain kind of ways of life in the city.

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But in the end, it was not an evacuation, you know, specifically and exclusively of people who worked for the U.S. and NATO. I think there—you know, there is an ongoing effort to continue to get people out. My understanding is that does continue to be a high priority of the U.S. government. But it is more difficult. How difficult is that? Do we hold them—do we keep their money until every Afghan dies of starvation? I mean, what happens, going forward? Drawing on a wide range of first-hand accounts – the politicians and officers who planned the trans-continental rescue, the young soldiers who were faced with the unenviable task of keeping a crowd of thousands of desperate people at bay, former interpreters and soldiers of the Afghan Special Forces who made it out – Escape from Kabul is the harrowing true story of Operation Pitting and the Kabul airlift.So the challenges the Marines had to just get enough of their people in to manage the situation was one of the foremost tasks in the days after August 15. Eventually, two Marine battalions were at the airport in addition to a number of Army soldiers. So their numbers start to swell and they are able to kind of get greater control of the airport. At the same time, I think we lose sight of the fact that, like, you know, we are the United States of America and NATO. I mean, we have significant military resources at our disposal to change those dates, to bolster our forces. The entire Eighty-Second Airborne Division, for instance, out of Fort Bragg, one of their key divisional tasks is air fort seizure. That’s what they—that’s why they are parachute qualified. AMOS: So—well, I’m going to sneak in one more question—I have two minutes—and that is going forward, you know, we fought—we, the United States, the Americans—fought the Taliban for twenty years. Now we have to recognize them as a sovereign government. What I most enjoyed about this account was the insight we got into the lives of the Afghan people that these aid workers met during their capture and time at various prisons. Without a doubt, the Afghans experienced horrors on a whole other level. Yet, what I’ve taken away the most from this book is the camaraderie between the aid workers and the other prisoners–the little ways they would help each other out, be it through moral support or something else. Whilst this book is understandably focused on the aid workers because it is their story, I think it’s important in this current climate that the book doesn’t shy away from emphasising the innate goodness and kindness that the aid workers received from the Afghan people they met along the way, particularly from those much less fortunate than themselves.

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AMOS: Laurel, I wanted to ask you, there’s something about the film that is very chilling when you watch it as a woman. You can see the fear in so many young women and it’s mostly because of the unknown. There’s a phone video of a woman who looks like she’s just come out of The Handmaiden’s Tale and she’s terrified. You know, she’s in white and she’s running and she’s saying the Taliban have come. The original departure date, I believe, was September 11. That was then pushed up by about two weeks. Could this have been a more staggered departure process? Would that have reduced the pandemonium? I think Laurel’s point that that was unavoidable with an exit date is persuasive. And then the Marines—as you see in the film, we have a hundred and fifty of Richardella and his men, and then as days go on more managed to get in. But the airfield had to be just—that was why the mission was to keep the airfield open because it was the only way you were going to be able to get people out but also more Marines and more military personnel in to be able to actually enact the evacuation, which was spiraling. It was many more people than they thought it originally—it was originally going to be. So we didn’t expect the Marines to come out like they did and we were really happy that they did because that really gave us a view into the story that we would never have seen otherwise. So we did go. I think that maybe that a lot of them felt like the story of their experience people outside hadn’t really understood and understood the kind of cards they’d been handed. It was—you know, they didn’t have the weapons they needed, the vehicles they needed. The situation wasn’t as it should have been.In terms of the State Department, we spoke with the acting ambassador at the time and we looked at the State Department’s story. But, again, I think we were drawn, really, to the three factors of the U.S. Marines, who were right there in the gates, the Taliban, and then the evacuees who got out and the evacuees who tried to get out. Have you seen any credible estimate of the number of immediate and extended family members of the Afghan translators and other assistants to the U.S. who wanted to get out? What is the bottom of the iceberg? Because my concern was we were never going to be able to meet the demand in the short time that we’ve had till the end of August.

Escape from Kabul by Levison Wood, Geraint Jones - Waterstones

A major ground campaign in the Gaza Strip will display Israel’s overwhelming military force, but the country faces a steep challenge in its goal of eradicating Hamas, as well as in finding a workable post-combat plan for the territory. As the Taliban went door to door to execute ‘collaborators’, a small international task force set out on a daring mission to evacuate as many Afghans and their families as possible. There’s a lot of—they don’t keep time very well and there’s a lot of messing around. A lot of people wouldn’t talk to us. But, fortunately, some would and I think that, for us, that was really enlightening for the story.

MILLER: Well, I can’t say what was in the minds of policymakers here in Washington. There seemed to be some surprise from what was said publicly. I wouldn’t say that it was a surprise to me. So the American Civil War, the construct was, if you look, the blood—the first ever draft in the United States comes out of the American Civil War. The treasure—the first ever income tax that we have is also from the American Civil War. You know, I participated in some of the evacuation efforts myself this summer with my Afghan colleagues, you know, coordinating things. But even I until, frankly, I watched Jamie’s film didn’t have a sense of just how visceral it was up against the barricades and I thought I knew until I watched this movie. AMOS: And do you think there’s long-term effect on those people? Do they feel like they were thrown to the wolves out there? I mean, any kind of help that the United States provides to support the Afghan people and to restore, you know, even a minimum level of economic activity is going to have some indirect propping up effect for the Taliban regime and there’s just no way around that.

Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New ‘Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New

So I’m just wondering organizationally—putting aside the strategic questions—what could have been done differently? So it might not have made the film but it allowed us to actually make sense of it because especially for the first few days after the Taliban rolled into the city there weren’t really many journalists down at the airport. It was just a huge mass of people and then, obviously, journalists start to arrive. So any material that allows us to really make sense of what was happening amongst the chaos was really valuable.

So I wondered if you can talk about just the process of gathering those cell phone videos and how you went about doing that.