Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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First of all, they want to know if you’re a spy but after that they want to know why you’re there and why you’re interested, and I think they could see that, you know, we—not just me but HBO, BBC, were genuinely interested in what happened and they were the people there that could tell us. Because we wanted to hear from the Marines but also the people on the other side of the gates that was them, and a lot of them understood that. AMOS: Jamie, I was curious, where did those Marines come from? It was one of the reasons I watched it a second time because I thought, I don’t know where they were. It looks like they’re coming in from a desert. But they get called up, a hundred and fifty of them. Go to the airport. Did they feel like they had been thrown—let me put it this way. When did they know they had been thrown into this maelstrom? We saw the collapse of a whole number of cities early in August with the eventual collapse in Kabul. So, you know, we can look at the—you know, the equipment the Afghan military had, the numbers that they had. Q: Hi. First of all, well, I’m Fred Roggero, retired Air Force, and thank you all very much for your time, today’s fabulous presentation. 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.

BBC Two - Escape from Kabul Airport BBC Two - Escape from Kabul Airport

Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. So there is legislation that’s sort of wending its way through Congress. It’s bicameral legislation—the Afghan Adjustment Act—which would put these individuals on the pathway to have green cards and to eventually become citizens, and it’s critical that that legislation get pushed through not just for the interests of those Afghans but also for the interests of our country.

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So I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion about this, you know, to include the letter that was delivered to the White House in May and signed by Representatives Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer and a whole—more than two dozen Congress people asking for an evacuation to Guam or at least a contingency plan for an evacuation to Guam like was done at the end of the Vietnam War, and that letter was actually met with silence. The White House never even answered it. 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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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. Did you have any sense from them that they are different, a different ideology, that there are still—obviously, there is somebody who—I mean, they just closed down a bunch of schools again, I think, last week.And then you have other people who maybe want their children educated. They might have even sent their daughters over to Pakistan—some of the leaders have—and now they’re kind of having difficulty reconciling these different sides, and you’re seeing factions and fights. I think even in the first days there was a shootout in the palace between some of the different sides about these differences. And the events that followed came from that announcement and there were many people warning along the way that this was going—this was how it was going to end up to and including, as I mentioned, you know, the number of legislators pleading for just some type of process to get people moved to Guam or to at least have a process to expedite the SIV process so you get people moving out to Guam. You know, I don’t really see—they’ve got—it’s hand in glove. There’s complete control. I can’t really see how it can change. But the pandemonium at the airport—I mean, getting to the front of one of these crowds to signal a Marine to get waved into the airport it was like the equivalent of telling someone to go to see—you know, you’re going to go to see the Rolling Stones at Altamont and you need to wave to the band on stage and get them to call you up onto the stage. You could be a student, a female newscaster, a government minister on behalf of women, a family member of someone who assisted the US military, faced with an impossible choice – “we could die trying to leave, or we could be killed”, says Malalai Hussainy, a female student in her first year of university who stood for four days in sewage water, oppressive heat and crushing crowds for one of the 124,000 spots on an aircraft out of Kabul. A handful of Taliban commanders who were also surrounding the airport in the final days of the evacuation have their own justifications; one recalls how US forces slaughtered two of his family members. Others have fought the Americans since they were children.