This is an excerpt from my diary. Click here for more information on this series.
October 13th, 2022
A COUPLE DAYS AGO I watched “Escape From Kabul,” a new documentary on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. The filmmakers got their hands on never-before-seen-footage – mostly body cam footage from U.S. servicemembers who were on the ground.
The images on display are hard to fathom. They’re gut-wrenching. Sobering. So so sobering.
Marines and airmen deployed to Kabul for a get-in/get-out operation with a limited focus: to evacuate U.S. diplomats and U.S.-affiliated Afghans before August 31th, 2021 – the no-shit deadline the Biden Administration promised the Taliban it would be out of the country by.
Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had set the wheels in motion on the withdrawal, negotiating the terms with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar a year earlier. The initial deal stipulated a U.S. withdrawal by May 31st, but Biden’s team managed to push that back 3 months once they took office.
Make no mistake, Washington knew that the Afghan Government it had spent so much time and effort propping up stood no chance against a Taliban that would soon be uninhibited by a U.S. military presence in-country. But the Intelligence Community (IC) and the senior-most military leadership assessed the Afghan Government would be able to hold for at least a few months – enough time for the U.S. to conduct an orderly withdrawal and for the news cycle to become distracted with some other juicy controversy before—BAM!—the Taliban toppled Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and we pinned the blame on his ineffectual leadership.
“We did all we could. Sunk 20 years of U.S. blood and treasure into this man’s government…At some point they had to take responsibility for their own security.”
But it was very clear by early August that this was a flawed assessment. The Taliban had begun toppling city after city on Kabul’s periphery in rapid succession as the withdrawal suspense neared.
It took the IC by surprise. Military and political leaders were scrambling. It was surreal to watch. When I wasn’t producing intel products on my own account or reading and digesting intel traffic on X, I was staying up to date on the situation there.
The intel flow really began to heat up by mid-August, which was the tail end of X, an event that required I work night shifts for reasons I can’t get into to. Suffice it to say I had a lot of free time on my hands during those long nights to “get smart” on Afghanistan and whole host of other juicy topics that were out of my wheelhouse.
By the end of X, the Taliban had captured a slew of provincial capitals bordering Kabul’s city limits. It was crystal clear to everyone that the capital was next up.
IC assessments on the Afghan military’s ability to stave off Taliban offensives were dead wrong. Turns out the whole “will to fight” thing is a pretty important aspect of a military. And the Afghan’s, outmanned and outgunned, weren’t willing to risk their lives to contest the Taliban. Most cities fell with little to no resistance. Afghan Military leaders surrendered, leaving whole depots of U.S.-provided weaponry behind. Some fled to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
The Taliban now had Kabul within their sites. They wanted to seize control of the city even as the U.S. withdrawal out of Hameed Karzai International Airport (HKIA) remained underway. It seems they calculated that so long as they didn’t target U.S. troops, we wouldn’t dare contest this. Last thing the Taliban wanted to do was give the Americans a reason to stay by interfering with evacuation efforts, though they were off course ready and able to point their AKs and Kalashnikovs and RPGs back at the Yankees should they miss the deadline.
Reports came in indicating Afghan Government officials were fleeing in droves. Then I see one timestamped mere minutes before I opened it that Afghan President Ghani had followed suit. So much for his Foreign Affairs essay in which he promised to fight to the last stand. The goof hopped on a plane en route to the UAE via Uzbekistan. That same day, August 15th, Kabul officially fell.
I’VE HAD MANY surreal moments during my time in the IC. This was certainly up there.
As the documentary depicts, the scope of the mission for those brave men and women on the ground at HKIA quickly expanded. And the security environment became a thousand times as dire and fragile, as hundreds of thousands of Afghans, mostly residents of Kabul, descended on the airport.
Thousands breached airport walls in those first couple days after the Taliban took Kabul – something the U.S. military hadn’t planned for.
It’s right about now when that video of a handful of young Afghan men clamoring to hold on to the outside of a C-130 as it takes off circulates around social media and appears on the front pages of newspapers around the world. The gruesome footage of those men falling to their death is emblematic of the terror the Afghan citizenry felt once they’d recognized that it was a return to Taliban rule. Why would someone be so stupid to hang onto the outside of a plane? Terror makes one do irrational things, I guess.
A military commander overseeing airlift ops remarks that the visual of those men splattered on the tarmac was sobering for all. An eerie quiet came over the airport, and the boisterous crowds settled. It provided a window of order, however brief, that allowed military brass to get their shit together.
That night the U.S. military managed to get Afghan Military Special Forces to help re-secure the airport and push back a new clamoring crowd. One servicemember told the documentary crew that they did so in part by shooting many of the more rambunctious Afghan men dead on site.
Unconscionable.
Also, what came of these U.S.-trained elite forces? Certainly nothing resembling justice for those indiscriminate killings. But are they now part of the Taliban? Why did they even ‘help’ the Americans on the tarmac in the first place? Did they not grasp that the government they worked for had just been toppled? Or were they trying to prove their ruthless chops to their new rulers?
With some semblance of security re-re-restored, the mission morphed into defending the airport gates and processing remaining U.S. diplomats and Afghans that had already attained their Special Immigrant Visas (SIV).
The scenes the filmmakers next depict, and which participating servicemembers describe, are straight out of Hell. Apocalyptic.
Mothers holding dead babies that were stampeded over, crying out, pleading for asylum. Men dropping dead from heat exhaustion after standing outside the gates for 3 days straight, not having an ounce of water. Elderly gentlemen, having nowhere to relieve themselves, going right then and there on themselves. Afghan teenagers standing in pools of raw sewer, struggling to inch to the front of the crowd so they can try and make their case to U.S. Marines their own age, who themselves are frightened for their lives.
The scenes are indescribable; images I can only compare to those depicted in The Last Judgement. And mind you I’m merely watching them play out on a screen.
It’s right about now when the IC begins to receive a slew of credible threat reporting. ISIS wants to take advantage of the chaos to bloody Americans one last time before they’re out of Afghanistan for good. They may even be motivated to attack under the supposition that it will prompt America to remain in Afghanistan, which would be great in their eyes because it would allow them to continue to murder westerners and it would undermine the Taliban’s ability to govern (yes contrary to what one might think, ISIS and the Taliban are sworn enemies, though I’m not sure if that’s changed in the year since).
Suicide bombers have been mobilized to Kabul.
I saw the threat reporting. Everyone in the IC did. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when—and what gate. Everyone in the IC is now intimately acquainted with a schematic of the airport, including all ingress and egress points.
Main entrance. North Gate. East Gate. Abbey Gate.
Overwhelmed by the number of Afghans clamoring to get into the airport—and worried about the stream of credible intel warning of an imminent attack—General Mackenzie of CENTCOM and General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reached out to Taliban interlocutors. Their message:
“If you want us out by the 31st we’re going to need your help securing the airport.”
The Taliban complied.
Imagine that. Marines manning the gates were now within ten, twenty feet from Taliban operatives, their sworn enemy for twenty years – men who’d killed their friends, and so many other Americans, and vice versa.
These poor Marines, in a state of panic and dis-ease (understatement), watching the most inhumane, Hell-On-Earth spectacle they will ever witness, standing mere feet away from a Taliban soldier whom they just watched shoot an innocent civilian in the head out of apparent anger that he wanted to leave their new Islamic fundamentalist state, unable to pull the trigger themselves because it could endanger the evacuation.
The cognitive and emotional dissonance. I will never be able to grasp what it was like. This is the stuff that generates psychosis: a trauma so insurmountable the human body will be forced to shut down to preserve its host from further torture.
War is not an abstraction. I must remember that in those moments I get all high and mighty about geopolitics and grand strategy.
Attack imminent. That’s what intel’s warning. Those poor Marines knew it. But they still had to man the gates and process the evacuees.
They’re told to keep an eye out for a man wearing a black backpack. It’s just a matter of which gate.
BANG.
Abbey Gate. ISIS-K. Suicide vest. Ball bearings blasted in all directions. It happened.
170 Afghan Civs killed. 13 Marines killed. 28 Taliban operatives killed.
A surreal moment, but unfortunately not a shocking one. Terrible. Gut-wrenching. The largest single loss of life for the U.S. since 2011.
No time to dwell. Evac ops must continue. Nearing deadline. 100k processed and airlifted so far. 50k to go. Quickly approaching the 31st.
CENTCOM doesn’t want a repeat detonation. Drones are employed in full force. They take out a man in a Kabul suburb whom intel believed was gearing up for an attack.
A New York Times after-action investigation published months later will prove he was an innocent civilian. A total of 10 civs, according to reports, died in the strike, 7 of which were children.
DOD thought he was an ISIS facilitator transporting explosives. Turns out he was an aid worker, loading large jugs of water into his car. Bad intel. Made a mistake – an understandable one, it pains me to say, given the body of threat reporting and the risk to troops.
Violence begets more violence.
THE U.S. MILITARY managed to get 125k people out before the 31st. It was the largest airlift in human history. Most who had proper clearance got out.
It was a bitter end to the twenty-year war – America’s longest to date. There was absolutely no time for saving face. The minute the U.S. started the withdrawal was the minute the Taliban began to fill the vacuum. In retrospect, we should have kept other major transpo bases like Bagram open. Evacuation ops should have started much sooner too. Military planners will learn from this mess of a retrograde.
So much blood and treasure poured in the Afghan Government, just for officials to flee the second things got hairy.
I guess it was a fitting end to a war with an ill-defined mission.
That doesn’t, however, make it any less of a bitter pill for Americans—especially those in uniform—to swallow.
Surreal to look back and ponder the fact that my interest in joining the IC came during the “Global War on Terror” (GWOP) and the two hot wars that became the major battlegrounds for this fight against a tactic. Iraq – the unjust war. Afghanistan – the just war that ultimately suffered severe mission creep.
Look at the world now. We’re back to a world that is not the exception but the rule: great powers jockeying on the international stage. We fucking squandered our moment of “unipolarity.” It’s back to a world of Cold War dick swinging, this time with two near-peer adversaries whose interests are aligned: China and Russia.
It was a bitter, yet fitting bookend for my career in the IC. Just three months after the withdrawal, I closed this chapter in my life.
AT A BAR this past weekend I met a guy named Alex. He’s an Army brat. His dad was Army. His dad’s dad was Army. And now he’s Army.
Alex graduated from West Point last year. His first posting is at some base in Georgia whose name escapes me.
He’s a genuine guy. He’s funny – the type of person you feel like you’ve known your whole life after just 2 minutes of talking with him. Of course, alcohol usually helps push that feeling along.
His girlfriend just up and approached Sarah and Christine and asked if they wouldn’t mind talking. She’s trying to make new friends. And Sarah and Christine—the affable Midwesterners that they are—were touched by this gesture and eager to talk.
Alex, hobbling around in a black cast on his right leg, was now part of the boys’ circle, which consisted of myself, Nick, and now him.
“What happened to the foot, man?” I asked.
“Broke it at my buddy’s wedding. Came down on it hard after doing jumping picture with the wedding party – I was one of the groomsmen,” he said.
“Hurt like a bitch. But I hid my limp for like two days because I didn’t want to take attention away from the Bride and Groom’s big day,” he added.
I burst out laughing. He’s the funny, wear-his-heart-on-his-sleeve-guy anyone would want to be friends with.
We get to talking.
He fills me on what West Point was like. I tell him about my intel background. We exchange names of people we think the other might know.
Then I ask him about Afghanistan – the withdrawal.
It’s the first time he’s at a loss for words.
“It wasn’t…” he begins, hesitating.
“It wasn’t right. The way it was handled. Wasn’t right to the military. I know it was a political decision, and I respect that, but—”
I fill in the gap.
“Your dad serve there?”
A head nod – a slight one.
I begin to ask him about how he envisions his life playing out – his goals.
“You gunna be a lifer?”
“Nah, man. I’m gunna serve my time. A few years. Then I’m out.”
He looks to his right as he conjures up the next words.
“I lost so much growing up in the structure and discipline of a military family. The expectations…”
The thought hits a dead end. He continues with a new one.
“I don’t want this for my kids. I don’t have any regrets. But I want them to be creative, free to pursue anything they want to do,” he says.
“There will be no judgement from me.”
I WAS TAKEN by this interaction– something I chronicled in a drunken stupor in voice recording on my iPhone® while Sarah (bless her sober little heart) drove us home. It’s cringe for me to listen back to. But everything I said drunk, I concur with sober.
Alex impressed me, like so many men and women in uniform I met at INDOPACOM.
There was almost no time to mourn or process the end of this twenty-year bloodbath and its botched close.
Russia held one of their semi-regular, largely routine, military exercises, known as “Exercise Zapad,” one month after the Taliban took Afghanistan back. Only, when the live-fire drills and the staged maneuvers had all been done and completed, the forces didn’t retrograde back to their home stations. They stayed in their positions, mere miles from Ukraine’s eastern and northern borders. And then more troops and tanks and missile launchers joined them. And then fresh blood supplies—an antidote for many casualties—were hurried to their positions. We all know what happened next…
The White House got its distraction—and a fresh, clamoring news cycle—in the form of another calamity.
May those who perished in this no-longer-FOREVER WAR rest in peace. This includes all who lost their lives – U.S. servicemembers and the Afghans that fought by their side; Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire, reduced to the phrase “Collateral Damage”; the Taliban—yes, it pains me to say, the Taliban—misguided as they were by a book written thousands of years ago that wasn’t intended to be interpreted literally.
War, even one with an apparent “just cause,” must never be applauded.
Humans killing other humans. What a pity.