Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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So I think the film that I’d made before was Four Hours at the Capitol and, you know, we really learned that if you have long takes of video it allows you to verify things but also you can really understand how a situation develops. In terms of top level, we approached at the very senior level the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps, and, initially, I mean, we were met with quite a lot of resistance and we were told that was coming from the White House, and we were told that was coming from the White House and the Biden administration didn’t want to share about what happened in Kabul, really, is what we were told, and we were told that quite a few times. 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. AMOS: Can I ask you, Jamie, a question? Did the BBC—were they aware that this would come out around 9/11? Was that the point?

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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. Q: Hi. First of all, well, I’m Fred Roggero, retired Air Force, and thank you all very much for your time, today’s fabulous presentation. ROBERTS: Yeah. I mean, they were at pains to tell me that, some of them, not least because I think, you know, they didn’t come in like some of their fathers may have where they’d taken people’s mobile phones or they’d remove televisions and, you know, they weren’t out there destroying cassette tapes and throwing them around like possibly they had in the past. 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.AMOS: But, Jamie, this was supposed to be Taliban 2.0. You know, they agreed to certain things when the Trump administration was negotiating with them and, you know, when you look at those guys they’re not their fathers. You know, this is a new generation. They were not in Kabul twenty years ago. They weren’t old enough.

Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood | WHSmith

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. 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. Allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific will be the beneficiaries of an overdue strategic realignment.

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So there is legislation that’s sort of wending its way through Congress. It’s bicameral legislation—the Afghan Adjustment Act—which would put these individuals on the pathway to have green cards and to eventually become citizens, and it’s critical that that legislation get pushed through not just for the interests of those Afghans but also for the interests of our country. So I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion about this, you know, to include the letter that was delivered to the White House in May and signed by Representatives Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer and a whole—more than two dozen Congress people asking for an evacuation to Guam or at least a contingency plan for an evacuation to Guam like was done at the end of the Vietnam War, and that letter was actually met with silence. The White House never even answered it. And you know, I was speaking with him. They were proud of their victory and they had this video, so he was kind of happy to share it when he understood that we saw this as a historic moment, too. Not necessarily in the same way that they did, but it was documentation all the same. The Taliban were willing to slow their retreat in Kabul to precipitate more space for people to get to the airport more easily and were in active conversations in the lead-up to August 15 when they came into Kabul, and that’s been reported on as well. But did you have a sense from the ones that you interviewed that they were any different from their fathers?