Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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But the images in the film of just the chaos outside the gate, just people waiting for days, the families being torn apart, and then the number of deaths that happened, it’s just—and the stories from the Marines on the ground were, really, just very scary and disappointing. 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. What you can’t do is provide support for the Afghan people with any expectation that you’re going to get something from the Taliban in a political sense in return. They are not engaging in a transaction with the United States or the international community whereby if you provide certain number of dollars of support they’re going to change their views about girls’ education or about having a more inclusive, much less a more democratic form of governance, in the country. The evacuation of Kabul in August 2021 will go down in military history as one of the most unexpected events in modern times.

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AMOS: Elliot, I wanted to get to one more point before we open it up to the audience and that is, you know, so many of you worked on getting Afghan translators out and in many cases you did not succeed. There are still people there in hiding and afraid for their lives, and I wondered if you can talk a little bit about how big that operation got. 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. 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. 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.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. ROBERTS: Yeah. I mean, they were at pains to tell me that, some of them, not least because I think, you know, they didn’t come in like some of their fathers may have where they’d taken people’s mobile phones or they’d remove televisions and, you know, they weren’t out there destroying cassette tapes and throwing them around like possibly they had in the past. 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. 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.

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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. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t have been better, different planning than there was. But I do think you have to distinguish between what might have been a better plan on paper and what you would have actually still seen on the ground once you start that process and you precipitate the crisis of confidence that there was.You know, they won the war on this kind of hardline rhetoric and now they have peace. They’re in control of the place. So you’ve got the hardliners want to remain as they were and they think, you know, that’s why they fought jihad. That’s why they won the war. That’s how they got control. 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 I’m just wondering organizationally—putting aside the strategic questions—what could have been done differently? 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. But there were conversations that the Taliban were having with American forces as to the pace of their advance into Kabul because they knew that we would need to get our people out, and the decision was made that the only thing we needed the Taliban not to move on was the airport itself.