True horrors of the flight from Kabul

Afew years ago, I was deployed to Afghanistan on a six-month tour to lead a small team of analysts providing ‘on the ground’ assessment of the ongoing campaign against the Taliban. This was after the Nato-led international coalition had stepped back from combat operations and the focus had shifted to a ‘Train, Advise and Assist’ mission, intended to ensure that Afghan defence and security forces could take the lead in the fight.

About halfway through the tour, a member of my team conducted an informal survey among the advisers to see how they thought the mission was going. The results were bleak but unsurprising: even the most optimistic advisers held out little hope for an improvement in the situation without ongoing high levels of coalition (ie, US) support.

But international support for the Afghan government was beginning to peter out.

Donald Trump was elected US President in 2016 with a mandate to end the ‘forever wars’ in Afghanistan and

Iraq, and in the case of Afghanistan this is what he did, by initiating talks with the Taliban in Doha (which excluded the government of Afghanistan from the process) and which led to an agreement in early 2020.

President Biden’s refusal to renege on Trump’s deal with the Taliban made an Afghan collapse inevitable, notwithstanding ludicrous levels of optimism among coalition politicians and military leaders.

Escape From Kabul is an account of how this unfolded and, specifically, how the US, Britain and other coalition powers sought to evacuate their own nationals, together with some of the Afghans who worked alongside us over 20 years of fighting.

‘Protected evacuations’ are an established part of the repertoire of the UK’s rapid deployment forces – of which the Paras of 16 Air Assault Brigade are the most visible element – but what this book makes clear is that nothing could have prepared the British military for the situation they encountered when they arrived at Hamid Karzai International Airport in

Kabul in August 2021.

As Afghan resistance collapsed and the Taliban closed in on Kabul, hundreds of thousands of Afghans besieged the airport in the hope of getting away to safety outside Afghanistan. Suffering was intense in the summer heat, compounded by lack of food, water and shelter, but the rapid appearance of the Taliban made the situation immensely more volatile.

Although an uneasy truce developed – the Taliban were as keen to get the evacuation over with and Western troops out of the country as the troops themselves were – other malign actors were in position too: a suicide bomb detonated by Islamic State at one of the airport gates on August 26 killed and wounded hundreds, including 13 US service personnel.

Levison Wood and Geraint Jones’s book is based primarily on interviews with some of the key players and focuses largely (though not completely) on the British part in the evacuation, and no doubt historians will have to wait some time before they can get access to contemporary documents that will allow us to understand the wider background.

The ‘first draft of history’ is never going to be definitive, particularly when the history it is describing is as chaotic as Operation Pitting (and the parallel allied evacuations) turned out to be, but Wood and Jones have done an excellent job of translating that chaos into a powerful narrative, replete with human drama and – to some extent – horror.

It is certainly compelling and disturbing reading.