Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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But there were some—you know, I can’t put a number on it but some—I think, significant number of Afghans who got out who would never have been eligible for that visa. There were people who worked for nongovernmental organizations, not even current employees but former employees in various capacities, who got out and then others who didn’t. But, Jamie, I do have one question about the film. We got access to the Taliban, which was fabulous, and it was the in-the-trenches viewpoint, which really gives it a lot of credibility. My hat is off to those Marines that you talked with. You know, these wars were not generationally defining but for a small segment of America they were defining and have been the—they’ve been the defining experience of the last twenty years of my life and many others’. And we all know each other. So Chris Richardella, who’s the colonel in that film, he and I actually went to—through Quantico together when we were twenty-four years old.

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That’s a huge amount of money. A huge amount of lives have gone into this war and it doesn’t feel like it’s being covered enough. It’s a, you know, three- to four-year effort to do that and that’s because there’s a lot. If you’re going to be serious about examining in depth what happened, why it happened, what lessons to learn, then it takes time to do that. 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. 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. There was no regard for all those people who lived on that thin crust of westernized existence in Kabul,” he added. “They were the people who bought into the dream that we sold them and then they were the people that we abandoned. There’s no other way of looking at it.”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. 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. But the images in the film of just the chaos outside the gate, just people waiting for days, the families being torn apart, and then the number of deaths that happened, it’s just—and the stories from the Marines on the ground were, really, just very scary and disappointing. 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. But I guess one thing I would say is that one of the serious issues with there having been an evacuation which wasn’t planned to happen was that there was no prioritization, really, of who got out. I mean, there was a little bit in the sense of—you know, of current employees of embassies, for instance, or for—of the U.S. military having access to getting out early.

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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? 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.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. 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. And then the Marines—as you see in the film, we have a hundred and fifty of Richardella and his men, and then as days go on more managed to get in. But the airfield had to be just—that was why the mission was to keep the airfield open because it was the only way you were going to be able to get people out but also more Marines and more military personnel in to be able to actually enact the evacuation, which was spiraling. It was many more people than they thought it originally—it was originally going to be. 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.

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

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?What you can’t do is provide support for the Afghan people with any expectation that you’re going to get something from the Taliban in a political sense in return. They are not engaging in a transaction with the United States or the international community whereby if you provide certain number of dollars of support they’re going to change their views about girls’ education or about having a more inclusive, much less a more democratic form of governance, in the country.

Escape from Kabul by Levison Wood | Hachette UK

So I wondered if you can talk about just the process of gathering those cell phone videos and how you went about doing that. But did you have a sense from the ones that you interviewed that they were any different from their fathers? 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. Now, with the international partners, I mean, we—I met up with the British military. We spoke with other international agencies, but the British military—I’m based in London, so I had lots of meetings with the MOD and we did use some of their footage. 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.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. 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. The interesting story that is now history, shows how the faith of an individual can provide considerable strength.