Andrew Quilty

August in Kabul: America’s Last Days in Afghanistan

A decade or so ago, the online magazine

Slate launched a feature series called “If it happened there”, in which correspondents described United States politics through the tropes usually reserved for overseas stories. A pre-covid story on America’s anti-vaxxers, for example, used the headline, “Traditional beliefs and distrust of authority fueling disease outbreak”.

The series highlighted how often Western journalism expresses an unconscious disdain for the kinds of nations that Donald Trump once dismissed as “shithole countries”. Andrew Quilty, by contrast, seems to genuinely love Afghanistan, a place from where he’s reported since 2013. In August in Kabul, he depicts the victory of the Taliban through a mosaic of individual experiences, so that we see a major historical event in terms of ordinary men and women struggling to choose between the few options available to them. As the US poured vast sums of money into the supposed reconstruction of Afghanistan, it transformed the lives of a privileged class in Kabul but led to quite different results in the countryside where most people lived.

Quilty describes how: “Wealth and power were garnered through nepotism and patronage in Kabul: government ministers could charge for allocating high positions in their districts; governors could demand commissions for permitting development projects in their provinces; district police chiefs could take a cut from opium profits; border guards could extort money from traders; and army officers could pocket the salaries of nonexistent ‘ghost soldiers’.”

Meanwhile the American presence meant constant violence, especially through drone strikes and night-time house raids that often killed entire families. That brutality radicalised men such as a Taliban fighter Quilty identifies only as Abudjanah, who, like so many others, blamed the foreign occupiers for civilian deaths – some 70,000 civilians died in Afghanistan in the first two decades of the 21st century – and became even more committed after he was detained and tortured by the security forces.

Though “punitive neglect of the rural class … created an increasingly unbridgeable gap between rural Afghanistan and the central government”, the Afghan regime could maintain itself as long as it received ongoing American air support. The book illustrates how the withdrawal of that air cover changed the strategic situation via the battle over “Antenna Post”, a hilltop entrenchment in Dasht-e Langar.

Captain Jalal Sulaiman, the officer defending the position, found himself entirely surrounded by Taliban but could no longer receive supplies because the helicopters he relied on wouldn’t land without American support. The belligerents engaged with heavy weapons but they also fought a parallel diplomatic struggle, with both sides wooing the local farmers who just wanted to be left alone. While Sulaiman phoned his personal contacts at the Ministry of Defence pleading for reinforcements, the Taliban texted his soldiers promising them amnesty if they surrendered – as they eventually did.

“We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” US president Joe Biden told the world. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately and safely.” None of that was true.

August in Kabul follows Hamed Safi, a press officer to Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, whose experiences within the regime’s inner sanctums have more than a whiff of Downfall, the much-memefied

Oliver Hirschbiegel feature about the last days of Hitler’s administration. “I’m ready to die in the palace,” declares Ghani at an August 10 press conference. “I’ll never leave the country.” Five days later, as the Taliban approach, the president and his entourage fly out of Kabul on helicopters so overloaded that the soldiers must throw their body armour out the window to reach a safe altitude.

As Safi worries about his family, the staff at the US embassy frantically burn passports, flags and framed photographs of Donald Trump, in an atmosphere marked by “the ‘bang, bang, bang’ of hammers smashing computer hard drives, and the echo of embassy loudspeakers calling for groups to proceed to the helicopter landing zone inside the international military mission’s headquarters next door”.

At Kabul airport, the arriving Taliban and the departing Americans form a tacit alliance to manage the crowds of desperate people. Men, women and children huddle on the tarmac; planes ignore instructions from air traffic control as they race to leave; spent bullets fall like rain on soldiers and civilians alike.

Perhaps the most affecting sequence pertains to a young woman named Nadia Amini. Her father fought for the communist regime in the 1990s, marking the entire family for Taliban repression. Nadia struggles to fulfil her educational potential, increasingly pitted against relatives who compensate for their own sense of powerlessness by asserting their control over her. She’s forbidden to take the courses she wants, she’s beaten for her academic success, and, as the insurgents approach, her father promises her to a Taliban fighter in marriage.

“After my youth,” she says, “I have no good memories.”

This awful story is an illustration of Afghanistan’s complexities. The resourceful, courageous Nadia, who eventually escapes the country, is no passive victim. But she’s also – perhaps surprisingly – sympathetic to her father, who she sees as desperately trying to protect his family in the face of impossible obstacles.

August in Kabul jumps from character to character, moving backwards and forwards as it details their experiences. The kaleidoscopic method sometimes makes the overall narrative difficult to follow. But it succeeds brilliantly in providing a human perspective on a country that Australians too often think of exclusively through foreign policy clichés.

MUP, 304pp, $34.99