Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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I mean, you know, these people are—you know, they might not hold blue passports but in my book they’re American heroes, so many of them, because they fought alongside us for twenty years. So over in Kabul, made lots of links with people, with citizen journalists, and kind of pulling things in that way. 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. And so I think—and what he gets at in the film is that one of the huge challenges the Marines faced was, you know, Kabul International Airport was barely a functioning airport, and Jamie has amazing footage of showing what the Marines were having to do to keep the runways clear of people, at one point using Apache gunships for crowd control. I mean, literally flying helicopters about five feet off the ground just to move people off the airfield.

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What I most enjoyed about this account was the insight we got into the lives of the Afghan people that these aid workers met during their capture and time at various prisons. Without a doubt, the Afghans experienced horrors on a whole other level. Yet, what I’ve taken away the most from this book is the camaraderie between the aid workers and the other prisoners–the little ways they would help each other out, be it through moral support or something else. Whilst this book is understandably focused on the aid workers because it is their story, I think it’s important in this current climate that the book doesn’t shy away from emphasising the innate goodness and kindness that the aid workers received from the Afghan people they met along the way, particularly from those much less fortunate than themselves. So we didn’t expect the Marines to come out like they did and we were really happy that they did because that really gave us a view into the story that we would never have seen otherwise. So we did go.

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And, you know, it’s not to say that people weren’t in—I mean, people were desperate to get out and people who were—you know, it’s not for me to judge who is more deserving and who is more desperate to get out, and I think that would have been a hard judgment to make. AMOS: Jamie, I was curious, where did those Marines come from? It was one of the reasons I watched it a second time because I thought, I don’t know where they were. It looks like they’re coming in from a desert. But they get called up, a hundred and fifty of them. Go to the airport. Did they feel like they had been thrown—let me put it this way. When did they know they had been thrown into this maelstrom? Jamie Roberts, Director of Escape From Kabul Airport, says: “When the images of the chaotic Kabul airlift flashed across the news I immediately wanted to know more about what this historic moment looked and felt like on the ground, through the eyes of the people who were there. 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.

Escape from Kabul by Levison Wood | Hachette UK Escape from Kabul by Levison Wood | Hachette UK

And so it was the U.S. that unilaterally decided what the date certain was going to be. It wasn’t the Taliban that set those terms. And, in fact, the whole reason for the negotiation with the Taliban was that the U.S. wanted to withdraw. I mean, there was a political decision to withdraw. So if you’re going to do that, at some point you have to set a date and it was the U.S. that set that date and changed it over time.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. So I think that—you know, that’s an indictment that the mentality just wasn’t even there for the types of contingencies that could have changed the reality on the ground, and I would just encourage people to watch Jamie’s film because it shows in really visceral terms what happens when those types of worst case scenarios are not planned for.

Escape from Kabul : The Inside Story: Levison Wood

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.

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And so I want to thank everybody and congratulations to you, Jamie, for an astonishing film. Really astonishing. It could have been worse is the thought I came away with. Could have been a lot worse. 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, the one thing that could have been different was that, you know, a decision—I mean, there was never a decision to execute a massive evacuation. Ultimately, a massive evacuation is what happened and it—the decision-making caught up with the reality as it unfolded. But they don’t know what’s going to happen and I wondered if you thought that there was—there could have been another path—there could have been another way to talk to them early to deal with this issue of how they were going to treat women.

Escape From Kabul” Preview Screening and Discussion of “Escape From Kabul”

Q: Well, first of all, I missed the first couple minutes of your presentation. I apologize. I want to thank all of you for your attention to an incredibly important topic. We’re looking for a lively discussion about the film, about policy a year after Kabul was taken over by the Taliban. We’re going to talk for thirty minutes, as you heard. 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. 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. It was just a huge mass of people and then, obviously, journalists start to arrive. So any material that allows us to really make sense of what was happening amongst the chaos was really valuable. We have one Marine Expeditionary Unit that’s typically in the Pacific, one that’s in the Mediterranean. So the 2/4 MEU—I actually deployed with the 2/4 MEU about fifteen years ago. They’re—and they’re like a rapid contingency force.

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ROBERTS: With the Marines, I mean, I think a lot of them are extremely proud of what they did. 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. They see incredible weakness. They see an America acting in a way that was hereto untold and unforeseen and, yet, we have to turn to the BBC for at least what sounds to be, like, an amazing coverage.