Because my concern was we were never going to be able to meet the demand in the short time that we’ve had till the end of August. So the American Civil War, the construct was, if you look, the blood—the first ever draft in the United States comes out of the American Civil War.

Escape from Kabul - Rotten Tomatoes Escape from Kabul - Rotten Tomatoes

The whole writing of the script and story which was almost accurate was very good, the way the documentary was made it was brilliant and I believe the credit goes to everyone involved but specially The Production and The Producers which made so much effort for collecting and analysing the data.

So it might not have made the film but it allowed us to actually make sense of it because especially for the first few days after the Taliban rolled into the city there weren’t really many journalists down at the airport. The compartmentalization is clear – as one marine puts it in the film on forcing back crowds with every good reason to leave, “It wasn’t pleasant for them, it wasn’t pleasant for us. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. The commanding officer of that MEU, who’s a full bird colonel so one rank senior to Chris Richardella, was my commanding officer when he was a major in Afghanistan in 2008.

BBC iPlayer - Escape from Kabul Airport BBC iPlayer - Escape from Kabul Airport

I think there were a lot of Taliban that had come into Kabul and stayed there a little while and actually started changing themselves. So the American public has been completely anesthetized to the—you know, the war in Iraq and now the war in Afghanistan for twenty years and because of that if you—you know, if you were to ask me how did America wind up fighting a twenty-year war, it’s because of this construct. I think that maybe that a lot of them felt like the story of their experience people outside hadn’t really understood and understood the kind of cards they’d been handed. In a matter of days, the Afghan government – and a fraught, nearly two-decade war by western countries to uphold it – collapsed. But there was a lot of—you also had the conundrum that beginning to do that planning—to make that decision, do that planning, and begin to execute on it would have triggered a crisis in Afghanistan with even more certainty than the crisis that did unfold when the U.What we didn’t anticipate was the sheer desperation and fear and willingness of the people to put themselves at tremendous risk to get themselves and their families out of Afghanistan,” says Maj Jordan Eddington, one of the marines maintaining control of the airfield, though it seems unthinkable how, given the promises made by western forces, that that couldn’t be foreseen. Instead, the 77-minute film assembles a visceral collage of archival footage (often shot on cellphones) and recollections from three main parties: the US marines tasked with keeping the airfield clear, Taliban commanders encroaching upon the airfield and complete takeover of the capital, and Afghan women and students who endured harrowing conditions for a shot at leaving. But there was definitely a lot of frustration with, I think, the Biden administration, the situation they were put in, and maybe also the credit that they were given or not given. 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.

Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story - Hachette Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story - Hachette

And by construct I mean, really, in terms of two factors—blood, who’s going to fight it, and treasure, how are we going to pay for it. There is, I think, a need on the part of Afghans, certainly, for support and help from the international community. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. I’d like to introduce our discussants: Laurel Miller, director of the Asia Program at the International Crisis Group; Jamie Roberts, director and producer of the HBO documentary Escape From Kabul; and Elliot Ackerman, author, The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan.Their priorities on how they govern the country, these policy choices they’re making, are driven by factors that have nothing to do with financial support for the people of Afghanistan. I’m very grateful to have had the chance to see it and I’m looking forward to sharing it with others when it becomes—I think it goes public next week, if I’m correct. Levison Wood is an award-winning author, explorer and photographer, whose books and documentaries have won critical acclaim around the world. And I think that as we walk away from these wars, if there was one lesson that I would like to, you know, put up in lights for America as we go forward it would be, you know, be very leery of a political class that as it goes to war tells you that this is a war where you’re not going to have to feel the cost, where someone else is going to fight and you can just go about your life as usual because you’re probably going to wind up getting a very, very long war that leaves the nation in a position in which it is morally compromised, as we are now with regards to Afghanistan at the end of it. Also, with members of the Taliban, who, especially near the end of the film, you’ll see they go into the airport and that was filmed by the Talib special forces member himself.

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

You know, during—particularly during those last two weeks of August, I think just about everybody I knew who had either, you know, served in Afghanistan in uniform, worked there as a journalist or as an activist was in some way, shape, or form trying to get out Afghan interpreters or Afghans who had worked for the government or for our government. All in all, a good book with a critical perspective on both the evacuation as well as the 20-year period since the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Drawing on a wide range of first-hand accounts – the politicians and officers who planned the trans-continental rescue, the young soldiers who were faced with the unenviable task of keeping a crowd of thousands of desperate people at bay, former interpreters and soldiers of the Afghan Special Forces who made it out – Escape from Kabul is the harrowing true story of Operation Pitting and the Kabul airlift.