Escape from Kabul through a British Lens
BOOK REVIEW: Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story
By Levison Wood and Geraint Jones / Hodder and Stoughton
Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Nick Fishwick
The Reviewer – Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” said President Joe Biden in July 2021. “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”.
[Ed note: Escape from Kabul offers an inside look at the British experience as troops pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021.]
REVIEW — Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story takes us through the background to the western invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001, as a result of the 9/11 attacks on the US, to the final evacuation of US, allied and (some) Afghan personnel, six weeks after President Biden spoke.
Images of the events at Hamid Karzai International Airport that August are unforgettable: crowds panicking, fighting, pleading, fainting; the exhausted, dehydrated western soldiers trying to keep order; the people clinging to the bottom of US planes as they took off, plunging to their death seconds later; the suicide bomb explosion of August 26, that killed more than 150 people, including 13 American military personnel; ahead of the final departure of US troops on August 30.
Co-authors Levison Wood and Geraint Jones are former British soldiers who know Afghanistan well, at least from the military perspective, and they know the mindsets of the ordinary soldier – not the senior officers who retired to public honours and well remunerated consultancies, but the people who joined the army to earn a basic living through serving their country.
As authors, they do not provide a particularly illuminating analysis of Afghan politics, why we went in in 2001, or why we failed over the following 20 years, to get the Afghan system off western life support. But they rely on personal experience, personal contacts and empathy that enables them to paint a gripping picture of the last days of non-Taliban Kabul, specifically Operation Pitting – the evacuation.
As Wood and Jones illustrate, Pitting was a nightmare, and it was not aided by conflicting intelligence assessments.
Soldiers heading to Kabul just a few days before Afghan President Ashraf Ghani scarpered on August 15, were being briefed that Kabul could hold out for months: “don’t worry about Afghanistan” was what US Marines were hearing; but once they got to Kabul, they could see “the dominoes were falling”. A nightmare, but not a failure.
American and British senior officers coordinated the best evacuation plan they could. The British ambassador and other senior officials stayed as late as they could to help get at least some of the most needy and deserving Afghans out of the country. There was inevitably a bit of bitching by British soldiers against the US and vice versa but generally, it seems that the healthy respect between the fighters of the two countries was maintained and cooperation worked. Under the circumstances it seems almost a miracle that the US got 124,000 people out through the airport and the British 15,000 – 17,000.
It could have been a lot worse. And perhaps western troops never displayed greater heroism in Afghanistan than when leaving it. They brought physical and psychological scars back home with them, as Wood and Jones graphically show. Some troops spent the weeks after they came home trying to drown their traumas in alcohol. “The first month or two, you put it to the back of your mind…around Christmas time, it started to play on my mind a lot more” one British paratrooper recalled. Or as British minister Johnny Mercer, who has served in Afghanistan, put it, “A lot of veterans are like, ‘What was the f—ing point?’”
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As I say, this is not a politically sophisticated book, but the authors are smart enough to avoid the glibness of some commentators. Many westerners have shrugged their shoulders at the final failure of the Afghan security forces despite decades of western training, pay and equipment. Wood and Jones don’t fall for this. “For an Afghan soldier, the war was not the few weeks that it was on western television sets in 2021, but year after year of bloody fight after bloody fight…The Afghan forces did not ‘collapse in a few weeks’. They gave up after years of battle, when their allies had left the field.”
Nor do the authors see the Afghanistan that we abandoned in 2021, as a basket case. True, corruption was shocking, the narcotics trade booming and people were getting killed as the result of violent Taliban resistance. But the economy and the population were growing. People lived longer. Civil society grew. Elections were held despite Taliban sabotage and intimidation. Above all, girls went to school, and women went to university, ran businesses, held public office.
Two years on, where is Afghanistan?
Western soldiers, officials and politicians have other things to worry about. Indeed, a senior British politician last month, was telling us that “security has vastly improved” since the Taliban took over. A profound lesson: no doubt “security” would be “vastly improved” in eastern Ukraine if President Zelensky were to let Putin have his way. But western leaders might reflect on the 90s, after the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, the west declared “job done” and found other things to worry about. While we washed our hands, hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in a brutal civil war. Kabul and other cities were smashed apart. Taliban 1.0 took power and 9/11 was planned in Afghanistan.
The west owes Afghanistan more than to pretend that things have improved, and it is no longer our problem. Wood and Jones show that while the Kabul evacuation got perhaps 150,000 Afghans out of the country, huge numbers whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, did not get on a flight. More than that, this country of 40 million suffered corruption, crime, terrorism and botched air strikes, only to see all these sacrifices lead to Taliban 2.0.
Today, international terrorists are back in the country. Afghan security is run by killers. The country is skint and malnutrition endemic. 50% of the population are given no access to education, are sexually harassed or marginalised. Former British prime minister Gordon Brown recently described the Taliban treatment of women as a “crime against humanity”.
I would suggest then, that we have no right morally to turn our backs on Afghanistan. It is also, in the long run, stupid to do so. South Asia is a rough neighbourhood, with three nuclear armed countries on Afghanistan’s borders. The Taliban, by accident or design, are dangerous destabilisers – through terrorism, extremist ideology, repressive counter-ideology, crime, refugees – in Pakistan and the region more widely. International terrorism is not, whatever some may pretend, defeated.
The western pullout in 2021, pleased all the wrong people and continues to do so. I am with those who do not see it as unrelated that Putin should invade Ukraine within six months of the fall of Kabul. But there is no need to abandon Afghanistan to its fate and we will regret it if we do so once again. Meanwhile, anyone wanting an eye-watering account of what an unnecessary surrender feels like, should read this book.
Escape from Kabul earns an impressive 3.5 out of four trenchcoats.
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