Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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To echo the previous questioner, the film was so compelling. 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. So the question becomes: How did that happen? Every war the United States has fought since the Revolution has needed a construct to sustain it. 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. So people are covering it. I mean, from my perspective, maybe the—it’s not being covered that much, as much as maybe it should because there is anathema towards it. There is this—it was an attritional war. Access was prevented to get into the British military and the U.S. military. It was difficult for journalists for a long time. 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. When there was no decent interval, there was no contingency plan for a mass evacuation of Afghan nationals and partners, and what I think the film documents so well is just how visceral that collapse was. I mean, you see—you know, you see children, babies, being passed over the gate. You hear accounts of very small children being trampled to death, of people passing out from exhaustion and dying. I mean, I would encourage people to watch the film. It was visceral.

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

So I—you know, I thought contingency planning for rapid collapse was, certainly, warranted, given the plausibility but, you know, unpredictable likelihood of that scenario. The movie lays out a clear timeline and is good at conveying the conflicted feelings that Afghans had about leaving their homes and that American troops had as they tried to maintain control of the situation. Still, “Escape From Kabul” is a short-term recap. A more robust movie, following these witnesses over several years, is still waiting to be made.So the challenges the Marines had to just get enough of their people in to manage the situation was one of the foremost tasks in the days after August 15. Eventually, two Marine battalions were at the airport in addition to a number of Army soldiers. So their numbers start to swell and they are able to kind of get greater control of the airport. Our all-volunteer military will fight this war and we will pay through it through our national deficit. About—between a quarter and a third of our national deficit right now comes out of the wars on terror and there’s never been a war tax. Unless you know someone who’s served in uniform or served yourself you’ve, basically, been—you’ve been insulated from these wars. You know, I participated in some of the evacuation efforts myself this summer with my Afghan colleagues, you know, coordinating things. But even I until, frankly, I watched Jamie’s film didn’t have a sense of just how visceral it was up against the barricades and I thought I knew until I watched this movie. 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.

Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood - Goodreads Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood - Goodreads

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. You know, I had lunch with the Taliban almost every other day and it was just for the means of trying to get access because they want to hear you out. They’re interested. There wasn’t many Westerners around. They want to know your story. A major ground campaign in the Gaza Strip will display Israel’s overwhelming military force, but the country faces a steep challenge in its goal of eradicating Hamas, as well as in finding a workable post-combat plan for the territory. 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.Was there an attempt by you at the start to go any—to senior ranking people in the Department of Defense or in the Marine Corps even of itself? Or is that something that just happened or did you say, no, we’re going to cut it off at this level?

Escape from Kabul (2022) - IMDb Escape from Kabul (2022) - IMDb

I think there were a lot of Taliban that had come into Kabul and stayed there a little while and actually started changing themselves. When I was there, people would say they’d softened their view on certain kind of ways of life in the city. So the Marines that were sent in to the airport were part of the 24 th Marine Expeditionary Unit. So at any given time the Marine Corps in the United States have two Marine Expeditionary Units. These are regimental size units of about two (thousand) to three thousand deployable Marines that, basically, just float.Escape from Kabul, directed by Jamie Roberts, embeds in the chaos, blending horrific images familiar to news consumers – crowds crushing toward a closed gate, children pushed against barbed wire, anguished people clinging to the wheels of a moving plane – with first-hand accounts of the evacuation. As with Roberts’s previous film Four Hours at the Capitol, which used first-hand accounts and archival footage for an on-the-ground accounting of the January 6 insurrection, Escape from Kabul trains specifically on a discrete event: the 15 days at Kabul airport before the US withdrawal deadline of 31 August 2021. Featuring unseen footage and exclusive interviews, this dramatic film tells the inside story of the largest airlift in modern US history, marking the end of America’s longest war. More There is, I think, a need on the part of Afghans, certainly, for support and help from the international community. The country is in very dire humanitarian and economic straits, and humanitarian aid alone is not going to solve that problem and it’s not really sustainable. You could be a student, a female newscaster, a government minister on behalf of women, a family member of someone who assisted the US military, faced with an impossible choice – “we could die trying to leave, or we could be killed”, says Malalai Hussainy, a female student in her first year of university who stood for four days in sewage water, oppressive heat and crushing crowds for one of the 124,000 spots on an aircraft out of Kabul. A handful of Taliban commanders who were also surrounding the airport in the final days of the evacuation have their own justifications; one recalls how US forces slaughtered two of his family members. Others have fought the Americans since they were children.