Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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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. 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. I thought the sort of grinding on fight for the urban areas was somewhat more likely. I mean, it was the sort of the—you know, the problem with this kind of analysis and projection is that it’s always easier to predict a continuation of a trajectory that you’re on than a dramatic change to that trajectory. 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.

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

You know, I had lunch with the Taliban almost every other day and it was just for the means of trying to get access because they want to hear you out. They’re interested. There wasn’t many Westerners around. They want to know your story. AMOS: Can I ask you, Jamie, a question? Did the BBC—were they aware that this would come out around 9/11? Was that the point? AMOS: Thank you very much. I would like to welcome you to the Council on Foreign Relations, a screening I hope all of you had the chance to watch and today’s discussion of the HBO film documentary Escape From Kabul. I do hope you had a chance to watch it over the weekend because it is a remarkable documentary. It’s so compelling that I watched a second time. 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. But no, really, it was a year after or thereabouts we were putting the film out and I was actually delayed by about a month and a half because it was impossible to get our kit over there at the time because there was barely anybody there. And, as Laurel says, there are some brilliant journalists there working with very small means. You’re talking about just people on their own—I think Charlie Faulkner at The Times and some excellent people at the New York Times.MILLER: I mean, just to jump in. You know, I don’t have the specific answer to your question of how—you cut out a little bit. I think you were asking about how many are still there, and I think that’s—I don’t know if anyone has the real answer to that question. There was no regard for all those people who lived on that thin crust of westernized existence in Kabul,” he added. “They were the people who bought into the dream that we sold them and then they were the people that we abandoned. There’s no other way of looking at it.” 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. 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.

Escape from Kabul : The Inside Story: Levison Wood

ROBERTS: Yeah, very much so. I mean, there’s talk a lot about resistance happening up in Panjshir and different areas. But, you know, the Taliban have got complete control. They control the police. They control—every street there’s an armed Talib. There’s American-funded ANA tanks outside the airport. So their immigration status is in no means certain. They will be, if their immigration status is not changed, deported from the United States, and their path to work here is also uncertain. So the Marines that were sent in to the airport were part of the 24 th Marine Expeditionary Unit. So at any given time the Marine Corps in the United States have two Marine Expeditionary Units. These are regimental size units of about two (thousand) to three thousand deployable Marines that, basically, just float. 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? But there were some—you know, I can’t put a number on it but some—I think, significant number of Afghans who got out who would never have been eligible for that visa. There were people who worked for nongovernmental organizations, not even current employees but former employees in various capacities, who got out and then others who didn’t.

Escape from Kabul by Levison Wood, Geraint Jones - Waterstones

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. And so it was the U.S. that unilaterally decided what the date certain was going to be. It wasn’t the Taliban that set those terms. And, in fact, the whole reason for the negotiation with the Taliban was that the U.S. wanted to withdraw. I mean, there was a political decision to withdraw. So if you’re going to do that, at some point you have to set a date and it was the U.S. that set that date and changed it over time.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. And, likewise, was there a deliberate determination not to go out and to take a look at our international partners who were also there on the airfield to sort of see if their experiences were similar, the same, or how they handled those? The conundrum is how does the United States and others in the international community provide support in ways that lead to no benefit for the Taliban. That’s really impossible.

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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. I mean, you know, these people are—you know, they might not hold blue passports but in my book they’re American heroes, so many of them, because they fought alongside us for twenty years. One thing I would just—I think it’s sort of just culturally maybe germane to bring up, and Jamie and I were talking a little bit about this before the session started, is—and maybe why the Marines want their story told—is, you know, these wars have been waged increasingly out of sight for most of America. But they don’t know what’s going to happen and I wondered if you thought that there was—there could have been another path—there could have been another way to talk to them early to deal with this issue of how they were going to treat women. The Taliban were willing to slow their retreat in Kabul to precipitate more space for people to get to the airport more easily and were in active conversations in the lead-up to August 15 when they came into Kabul, and that’s been reported on as well.At the same time, I think it’s kind of well-known that there’s a schism in the high level of the Taliban and actually within the whole Taliban as a structure. Was there an attempt by you at the start to go any—to senior ranking people in the Department of Defense or in the Marine Corps even of itself? Or is that something that just happened or did you say, no, we’re going to cut it off at this level?