Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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I’d like to open it to questions. I wouldn’t like to. I would like to keep doing this. (Laughs.) But we are going to now open this from the audience. So if you can, you can see some instructions down at the bottom of your screen and we will open the questions to you. And, you know, just to emphasize what Laurel said, the—you know, the evacuation itself—and Jamie really captures this visually so and in such an amazing way in the film—is so much of the messaging was, well, you know, if you have the paperwork or if you are an American citizen go to the airport and you will be allowed in. 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. It was—you know, they didn’t have the weapons they needed, the vehicles they needed. The situation wasn’t as it should have been. My own view—and I don’t think I was alone in this—but my own view at—in the months and, really, in the few years leading up to the final collapse was that there were really only two possible scenarios once the U.S. decided finally to pull out and began to pull out.

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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.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: The Inside Story by Levison Wood | WHSmith

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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But in the end, it was not an evacuation, you know, specifically and exclusively of people who worked for the U.S. and NATO. I think there—you know, there is an ongoing effort to continue to get people out. My understanding is that does continue to be a high priority of the U.S. government. But it is more difficult. 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. 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. Escape From Kabul Airport is an Amos production for the BBC, in association with HBO and in collaboration with ARTE France. It is produced by Emmy and Bafta-winning Dan Reed (Leaving Neverland), and directed by award-winning Jamie Roberts (Four Hours At The Capitol). This immersive and emotional feature-length documentary examines the largest airlift in US modern history which despite the chaos and suffering, evacuated 124,000 people. 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.

Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New ‘Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New

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. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. And then, finally, was—maybe it’s a sequel in there but a trenches view of the State Department and their workings because they have a huge role, of course, in a noncombatant evacuation typically. Is that going to be something that we’ll ever see or get looked at later on? But the pandemonium at the airport—I mean, getting to the front of one of these crowds to signal a Marine to get waved into the airport it was like the equivalent of telling someone to go to see—you know, you’re going to go to see the Rolling Stones at Altamont and you need to wave to the band on stage and get them to call you up onto the stage. At the same time, I think it’s kind of well-known that there’s a schism in the high level of the Taliban and actually within the whole Taliban as a structure.AMOS: So I want to talk about this. As a viewer you are catapulted into the action. You know, you’re almost immediately taken to August 15 when the Marines say all hell breaks loose and so you don’t have any chance to get used to how rapidly this whole thing is falling apart. 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?

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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.After September 11 happened America went to war again and the question was, OK, what’s going to be the construct to sustain these wars, and we—our construct that we put in place now through four different presidential administrations, Republican and Democrat, has been the following. And then, finally, there was—there were U.S. servicemen who—servicemen and -women who had filmed. And there was one in particular that I’d come across early on, and it took a long time of discussion but we—I think we got about ten hours of material from him. And we didn’t use it all in the film, but some of those visceral moments are from his bodycam, and also what it allowed us to do was really understand, again, the run of events. So, you know, you’re really to be commended. It’s a great piece of cinema and an important documentation of what happened so I hope people watch it. As the Taliban went door to door to execute ‘collaborators’, a small international task force set out on a daring mission to evacuate as many Afghans and their families as possible. Have you seen any credible estimate of the number of immediate and extended family members of the Afghan translators and other assistants to the U.S. who wanted to get out? What is the bottom of the iceberg? 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.