Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

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At the same time, I think we lose sight of the fact that, like, you know, we are the United States of America and NATO. Many of those first-person accounts were filmed in Kabul during the early months of this year, when Roberts and his team negotiated meetings with Taliban leaders when it was “a stage where it was open country a little bit”, he said.

BBC iPlayer - Escape from Kabul Airport BBC iPlayer - Escape from Kabul Airport

S. military ceded parts of Kabul in which they collapsed around the airfield in a way that wasn’t necessarily a fait accompli. Hearing from people who were at the center of a big, important story that changed their lives and changed world history, just speaking to you about what it was like – at the heart of it, it’s ‘that could be me. You know, my impression of why the American public has been disengaged with the wars, I think, it’s rooted into the way these wars were constructed.

I mean, I guess, you know, the one thing I would point out is that I think it’s unfortunate that many Americans involved with Afghanistan over the last twenty years strayed in their—in what they were saying to Afghans from the reality, that the United States did not invade Afghanistan to free the women of Afghanistan and was never going to stay in Afghanistan to keep the women of Afghanistan free. In a matter of days, the Afghan government – and a fraught, nearly two-decade war by western countries to uphold it – collapsed. ROBERTS: Well, this—I wanted to actually say it was actually HBO were by far the lead partner in this and we make films at the—Amos Pictures, the production company I work out with HBO a lot, and HBO are very willing to do deep dives into difficult subjects like this like nobody else. Obviously, that is around the 9/11 anniversary, which is a huge date that foreshadows this whole event.

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

So you’ve got the hardliners want to remain as they were and they think, you know, that’s why they fought jihad.

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 the—and the effort got pretty large, and in my own case the Afghans whose cases, I think that I was working on, you know, at first were ones that I knew but very quickly went outside of the purview of people that I knew and we were making lists and manifests for flights, you know, and it was very much sort of—we talk about Taliban 2.

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

The First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment is the battalion that I fought in as a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in Iraq. 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.I think you were asking about how many are still there, and I think that’s—I don’t know if anyone has the real answer to that question. 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. As the crowds grew increasingly desperate to leave, a tragic sequence of events unfolded, including a devastating suicide bomb attack that the Islamic State group said that it had carried out, killing 13 U.