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Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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So somewhere there’s a real hierarchical nature, which I’m sure you know, of the Taliban. So if you spend enough time speaking to people, explaining to them why this story is important and treating them with just regular respect, but a lot of green tea, again, passed up the chain of command, you kind of get somewhere that way. There’s different departments that you can kind of work, as it were. 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. 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.” 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.

Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood - Goodreads Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood - Goodreads

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. You know, these wars were not generationally defining but for a small segment of America they were defining and have been the—they’ve been the defining experience of the last twenty years of my life and many others’. And we all know each other. So Chris Richardella, who’s the colonel in that film, he and I actually went to—through Quantico together when we were twenty-four years old.But I guess one thing I would say is that one of the serious issues with there having been an evacuation which wasn’t planned to happen was that there was no prioritization, really, of who got out. I mean, there was a little bit in the sense of—you know, of current employees of embassies, for instance, or for—of the U.S. military having access to getting out early. 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.

‘This is what it was like’: reliving the devastating US

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. 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 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. The Center for Preventive Action has compiled an accessible overview of the Afghan peace negotiations, including the U.S.-Taliban agreement, the U.S.-Afghan government joint declaration, and the ongoing intra-Afghan process. But there was, frankly, a lot of Afghans who got out who never worked for the U.S. government, didn’t have any claim on getting this—there’s this category of Special Immigrant Visa for which people who did work for the United States were eligible and many were in the application pipeline, which was a long pipeline, at the time of the withdrawal.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.

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