Kabul: Final Call: The Inside Story of the Withdrawal from Afghanistan August 2021
Laurie Bristow
Whittles, £18.99

IN February 2020 Donald Trump signed the Doha Agreement to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan but, like everything else he has said or done, it failed. The Taliban were invited, the Afghan government was not.

Laurie Bristow was the last British ambassador to Afghanistan and his book details the Kabul evacuation. It is part diary and part grim countdown to the inevitable as he attends ambassadorial drinks, lunches and dinners. 

In 2021, the British embassy had over 800 staff and 130 buildings (including a grand piano) and was forced to downsize, keeping only essential staff.

For Bristow the terrible decisions involved people and necessitated having “to tell people you knew and had worked with that they and their families did not qualify for relocation.” This left many people vulnerable to Taliban violence and particularly professional women and girls. And, as if things couldn’t get any worse, all of this happened during the Covid epidemic, an additional absurdity.

The desperation to escape as the Taliban get ever closer is the undercurrent of the book  and creates narrative tension. Bristow writes that they “did not seem to be in the least bit serious about agreeing a negotiated settlement” and were looking for a decisive military victory. As other cities fell, the Taliban released prisoners who strengthened their number. At the same time the government refused to allow anyone to leave without a legitimate passport, something which many people lacked. 

The evacuation process was overwhelmed: there were no sea or overland routes and Kabul airport had a single runway that was continually blocked by people fleeing. As commercial aircraft, chartered flights and military planes took people out, flights into the country stopped, which meant that Afghanistan was effectively cut off from the world.

The government, which was estranged from the working class and peasant majority, fled the country as the police and army abandoned their posts having not been resupplied or paid. When Kabul fell on August 15 2021, the airport became dangerously overcrowded, and on August 26 a suicide bomber killed over 180 people. That night, the British military operation closed down. 

Bristow reports the financial cost, that “billions of dollars in foreign aid and trillions in military expenditure” were thrown at a problem that refused to be solved.

He gives little or no consideration to the fact that the Afghan occupation was an imperialist enterprise, and that he was one of its custodians. What did he expect?

Between 1979 and 1992 the US had funded the mojahedin to undermine the Soviet presence but they turned against their sponsors; then, after September 11 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, citing links between the Taliban and al-Qaida.  

The Afghan government had done little to improve the lives of the working class and peasantry, the economy and infrastructure were failing, and war and poverty created a refugee problem, but the Taliban are an untidy coalition with no executive experience or expertise in agriculture, infrastructure, or manufacture, or how to reconstruct a damaged economy. So the question remains: as other occupying forces have been forced out of Afghanistan, how long will the Taliban last?