[A spur-of-the-moment decision by
the president to escape the country, based on apparently incorrect information
supplied by his advisers, was the most consequential. Later, the United States
had one last chance to challenge Taliban supremacy in Kabul but opted to focus
squarely on getting its people out from the airport.]
By Susannah George, Missy Ryan, Tyler Pager, Pamela Constable, John Hudson and Griff Witte
The day before, government forces
in the north’s largest city — Mazar-e Sharif, a notorious anti-Taliban stronghold — had
surrendered with barely a fight. The same had happened overnight in Jalalabad, the traditional winter home of Afghanistan’s
kings and the country’s main gateway to the east.
As dawn broke over the misty
mountains that ring the city on Aug. 15, Kabul had suddenly become an island —
the last bastion of a government that the United States had supported at a cost
of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. But it was an island that some
were still prepared to defend.
“Everyone was ready to fight
against the Taliban,” said the Afghan security official, who had spent the
previous evening distributing new uniforms to his officers. “All the security
forces were ready.”
Or so he thought. When he prepared
to reinforce one of the main checkpoints protecting the city that morning, his
commander waved him off. “He told me, ‘Leave that for now,’” the official
recalled. “‘You can do it in a few days.’”
But Kabul didn’t have days.
Within hours, long-haired Taliban
fighters had seized those checkpoints. The president had fled, not bothering to tell U.S. officials or even many
of his own top lieutenants on his way out the palace door. And a country that
has been whiplashed by multiple violent overthrows in its modern history was on
course for a chaotic, destructive and humiliating end to the American era.
That outcome stunned top U.S.
officials, several of whom had been on vacation when the weekend began, having
expected the pro-Western government to hang on for weeks, if not months or even
years longer. Afghans were no less astonished by the speed with which their
government crumbled. Even the Taliban was surprised.
And in both countries, those who
had dedicated themselves to keeping the extremist group out of
power through decades of violent insurgency agreed on one thing: Had it not
been for a few fateful choices that Sunday in mid-August, it all could have
gone very differently.
A spur-of-the-moment decision by
the president to escape the country, based on apparently incorrect information
supplied by his advisers, was the most consequential. Later, the United States
had one last chance to challenge Taliban supremacy in Kabul but opted to focus
squarely on getting its people out from the airport.
This account of Kabul’s fall — the
climactic moment of America’s longest war — is based on nearly two dozen interviews
with U.S. and Afghan officials, a Taliban commander and residents of the city.
Before the fall
In both Washington and Kabul, the
days and weeks leading up to Kabul’s fall were marked by complacency. The United
States was withdrawing its forces. The Taliban was notching gains. But the
prevailing view in both capitals was that there was still plenty of time before
the insurgents might take over in a city of nearly 5 million that had long been
the nerve center of America’s presence in the country.
President Ashraf Ghani exuded that belief, according to Afghan
and U.S. officials who, like others for this story, spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
A technocratic and mercurial former
professor, Ghani told aides that Afghan forces could hold off the Taliban in
the wake of the American departure, and that the government just needed six
months to turn the situation around, according to a former Afghan official.
Even as Taliban attacks intensified in rural Afghanistan and provincial
capitals, his confidence remained unshaken.
“We’re fighting there so we don’t
have to fight here,” he would insist from his perch in the Arg, Kabul’s
19th-century presidential palace.
But reports from the field
suggested that in some cases, Afghan government forces were not fighting at all.
When the Taliban advanced on key
border crossings with Iran and Tajikistan in late June and early July,
government forces abandoned their posts. Hamdullah Mohib — the young,
Western-educated official who served as Ghani’s national security adviser but
who had scant experience in military or security affairs — told others the
government forces would soon retake them.
But no significant attempts ever
materialized, depriving the government of key sources of revenue. Mohib did not
respond to requests for comment.
As the Taliban continued to
accumulate gains, American officials began to see the president’s confidence as
delusion.
Ghani’s lack of focus on the threat
that the Taliban posed mystified U.S. officials, in particular, Marine Gen.
Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, and Ambassador Ross
Wilson.
In a July meeting with Ghani in
Kabul, the two men told the Afghan president that his team needed a “realistic,
implementable and widely supported plan to defend the country” and must drop
the idea of defending all 34 provincial capitals, said an official familiar
with the meeting.
“They had to focus on what they
could actually defend,” said the official. “All provinces are important, but
some were integral to the defense of Kabul.”
Ghani appeared to agree, but there
would be no follow-through, the official said.
“Advice would be given, the right
things would be said, and nothing would happen,” the official said. “They never
did it. They never came up with that plan.”
Even as a cascade of provincial
capitals fell — starting with Zaranj in the far southwest on Aug. 6,
and continuing through two dozen others over the nine days that followed — the
president appeared distracted.
“Ghani would want to talk about
digitization of the economy,” said the official, referring to the president’s
plan for a government salary payment system. “It had nothing to do with the
dire threat.”
As late as the Saturday afternoon
before Kabul fell, Ghani did not suggest any urgency around departure
arrangements or the safety of senior staff.
Receiving one adviser in the palace
gardens, and speaking in his characteristic soft tones, he made arrangements to
shore up the country’s economy. He was supposed to address the nation later
that night. But he never did.
The Americans, meanwhile, were
suffering their own delusions.
In June, U.S. intelligence agencies
had assessed that the Afghan government would hang on for at least another six
months. By August, the dominant view was that the Taliban wasn’t likely to pose
a serious threat to Kabul until late fall.
American officials may have been
urging Ghani to show greater urgency. But their own actions suggested no
immediate cause for alarm, with officials surrendering to the customary rhythms
of Washington in August.
On the Friday afternoon before
Kabul fell, the White House was starting to empty out, as many of the senior
staff prepared to take their first vacations of Biden’s young presidency.
Earlier in the day, Biden had arrived at Camp David, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was
already in the Hamptons.
But by Saturday, the fall of
Mazar-e Sharif — site of furious battles between pro and anti-Taliban forces in
the 1990s — convinced U.S. officials that they needed to scramble. How quickly
was a subject of dispute between the Pentagon and State Department.
In a conference call with Biden and
his top security aides that day, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called for the
immediate relocation of all U.S. Embassy personnel to the Kabul airport,
according to a U.S. official familiar with the call.
Wilson’s embassy colleagues had
been racing to destroy classified documents and equipment in the compound since
Friday. An internal memo, obtained by The Washington Post, implored staff to
destroy sensitive materials using incinerators, disintegrators and “burn bins.”
The directive also called for the destruction of “American flags, or items
which could be misused in propaganda efforts.”
Wilson said U.S. personnel needed
more time to complete their work. But Austin insisted time had run out, the
official said.
Saturday evening Kabul time, Ghani
and Blinken spoke by phone. Hoping to avert a showdown in the capital, Blinken
sought Ghani’s support for a U.S.-brokered arrangement with the Taliban in
which the militants would remain outside Kabul if the Afghan leader would step
aside as an interim government took charge. The aim, said a senior U.S.
official, was to buy time for negotiations aimed at forming an inclusive
government that involved the Taliban, as well as others.
The president reluctantly agreed.
Precarious as it may have been,
there appeared to be a path to a peaceful, political transition — a way for
Afghanistan to avoid the sort of violent takeovers that have characterized so
much of its recent past.
The fall
The news that Kabul awoke to that
Sunday morning was ominous: The overnight fall of Jalalabad had left the
capital isolated. Many shops remained shuttered, and people stayed home from
work. But there was no sense that a takeover was imminent.
Nader Nadery, a former human rights activist, was flying
out to Doha, Qatar, that morning to participate in negotiations with the
Taliban. He knew the group’s fighters were nearing Kabul, but he believed that
diplomacy could still spare the country from outright Taliban control and a
return to the dark days of the 1990s.
When he reached the traffic circle
just before the airport entrance, a police officer manning a checkpoint opened
his vehicle door and recognized him. The officer radiated exhaustion.
“I will never forget his eyes,”
Nadery said. “He had not slept in a long time. He seemed hopeless, and he said
the situation was getting bad. But he also told me, ‘You are going to Doha, and
we need you to bring peace. Please try to find a way.’”
At the presidential palace — set in
the heart of Kabul, but behind a maze of blast walls that cut it off from much
of the city — the morning unfolded with a bracing normality.
There were the usual meetings. Even
as some senior officials grew increasingly panicked, asking about contingency
plans to evacuate Ghani and others, the president’s personal secretary insisted
he didn’t know of any, according to a former Afghan official. The government
had until U.S. troops left on Aug. 31, the secretary said, as a result of the
deal Ghani had struck the night before.
“A lot of reassurances were given.
The American and British troops were still there. We were living our lives
normally,” said Marjan Mateen, 28, who was a senior communications manager in
the palace.
She was on her way into work late
that morning, being driven through central Kabul in an armored car, when she
began to realize something was very wrong.
First she saw university students
hurrying home early with their backpacks, then shops closing and people running
in panic. Taliban fighters had been seen at the city’s main entrances, and
residents were fearing a battle to come.
“It was like a horror movie,” she
said, “and you are a part of it.”
Within the palace, too, the
illusion of calm was being punctured. Around midday, much of the staff had been
dismissed for lunch. While they were gone, according to officials, a top
adviser informed the president that militants had entered the palace and were
going room to room looking for him.
That does not appear to have been
true. The Taliban had announced that while its fighters were at the edges of
Kabul, having entered through the city’s main checkpoints after security forces
withdrew, it did not intend to take over violently. There was an agreement in
place for a peaceful transition, and the group intended to honor it.
Yet that wasn’t the message that
was being delivered to Ghani. The president was told by his closest aides that
he needed to get out — fast.
“It will either be your palace
guards or the Taliban,” the president was told, according to one adviser’s
account, “but if you stay you’ll be killed.”
Mindful of the last time the
Taliban had conquered Kabul — in 1996, when victorious fighters
sought out the former Soviet-backed president, disemboweled him and hung his
body from a traffic light — Ghani agreed to go.
The president wanted to return home
to gather his belongings but was told by advisers that there was no time. Early
that afternoon, wearing plastic sandals and a thin coat, the president — along
with the first lady and a handful of top aides — lifted off from the palace
grounds in military helicopters.
One palace official who fled with
the president said he didn’t know where they were going until he saw the Hindu
Kush — the colossal mountain range to the north of Kabul — rising outside the
window.
The group eventually landed in
Uzbekistan. From there, they boarded a small plane bound for the United Arab
Emirates.
Ghani aides who had not been part
of the hasty evacuation returned from lunch to find the president had vanished,
his office empty.
The president, who did not respond
to requests for comment, later justified leaving as a way to spare his country “a flood of bloodshed,” writing on
Facebook that he faced a choice between being killed or “leaving the dear
country that I dedicated my life to protecting the past 20 years.” But he did
not inform most of the government’s senior ranks, including his two vice
presidents, about his departure. Nor did Ghani contact the U.S. government,
which was left to piece together the absent leader’s movements from rumor and
media reports.
Not knowing Ghani had left, some
senior Afghan officials continued to ask the palace for help. But at some point
that afternoon, Ghani’s secretary stopped responding to messages.
Officials who had been left behind
took the hint and made their own dash for the airport, hoping to get on
commercial flights out that evening.
A handful, including the parliament
speaker, were whisked away to Pakistan. The defense minister, Bismillah Khan
Mohammadi, boarded a military flight to the UAE. Ghani’s second vice president,
Sarwar Danish, and the head of the Afghan intelligence service, Ahmad Zia
Saraj, also managed to leave.
Others were less fortunate. The
hajj minister, a former Talib who had spoken out strongly against his former
comrades, had his flight canceled, forcing him to return to a city where his
friends-turned-enemies were fast becoming the de facto rulers.
Even after they had reached safety,
the president and his party never circled back with senior officials who had
been anxiously seeking their help. Some of those who had worked closely with
Ghani over the years felt betrayed, believing he had left them to die.
Capital in chaos
The senior Kabul security official
who had been waved away from reinforcing checkpoints that morning found out
from a friend that the government he had been prepared to fight for was no
more.
“The president’s gone,” the friend
reported. “I think the government collapsed.”
He rushed to the airport, wanting
to see for himself as an exodus began, with pilots and crews rushing to board
planes and get airborne from a country suddenly confronted with a vacuum.
“Everyone was talking to each other
like ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? What’s going on?’” he said.
U.S. officials were as surprised as
anyone. The Americans had expected Ghani would stay for an orderly transition
to an interim authority, as the agreement that negotiators in Doha had struck
promised. News of Ghani’s departure, received secondhand, meant that hope had
been crushed.
“He not only abandoned his country,
but then unraveled the security situation in Kabul,” said a senior U.S.
official. “People just simply melted away, from the airport to everywhere
else.”
In the void, law and order began to
break down, with reports of armed gangs moving through the streets.
In a hastily arranged in-person
meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha — including McKenzie, the
commander of U.S. Central Command — spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.
“We have a problem,” Baradar said,
according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the
United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to
allow us to do it.”
Throughout the day, Biden had
remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The
collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind.
McKenzie, aware of those orders,
told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens,
Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed
the airport to do that.
On the spot, an understanding was
reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have
the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city.
Fighters were now on the move
throughout Kabul, with the group’s spokesman issuing a revision of his earlier
guidance: The Taliban hadn’t intended to take Kabul that day. But Ghani’s exit
gave the group no choice.
“The government has left all of
their ministries; you have to enter the city to prevent further disorder and
protect public property and services from chaos,” read a message that pinged on
Muhammad Nasir Haqqani’s phone.
Haqqani, a Taliban commander, had
led his forces to the city’s gates that morning and been surprised by what he
found.
“We didn’t see a single soldier or
police,” he said. For several hours after, he had done as he was told,
refraining from advancing further.
But after getting word that the
government had collapsed, he and his men were in the city’s center within an
hour. By late afternoon, they had reached the palace.
“We couldn’t control our emotions,
we were so happy. Most of our fighters were crying,” he said. “We never thought
we would take Kabul so quickly.”
For many others in Kabul, Haqqani’s
source of joy was a cause for profound despair.
[The
Taliban insists it has changed. Afghanistan’s future hinges on whether that’s
true.]
The sight of Taliban fighters
taking up positions in the streets of Kabul accelerated an exodus that had
already begun. The city’s perpetually jammed traffic was even more gridlocked
than usual as people raced home from work or to the airport to try to catch a
flight.
Mateen, the palace communications
manager, was fielding calls from her colleagues as she sat in an armored car
amid the mayhem.
“Don’t come,” they said, according
to Mateen. “All the local staff is leaving. Just help us get our documents.”
She detoured to a relative’s house
and realized she urgently needed to change her clothes: She had been wearing
jeans and a shirt but knew that could now get her in trouble with the city’s new authorities.
“I had just seen my government fall
right in front of my eyes,” she said. “I had this sudden feeling that
everything was gone now. The flag of our country was not going to be there
anymore. We were waking up to a new country ruled by the Taliban.”
Aria Raofi, an Afghan American who
had been teaching photography to Afghan girls displaced by war, had a similar
epiphany when she drove past a tank.
“Those were not Afghan soldiers in
it. They were terrorists,” she said. She rushed home and hid in her apartment,
only to discover that the Afghan security forces at her neighborhood checkpoint
were gone, replaced by Taliban gunmen. She was soon making preparations to
leave.
At the palace, too, the Taliban had
taken control. A lone guard had stayed behind to let the militants in and show
them around. Looking slightly dazed, he told an Al Jazeera reporter how Ghani
had called him and told him to work with former president Hamid
Karzai to coordinate the handover.
The Al Jazeera cameras rolled as the fighters — fresh from
20 years in the shadows — gawked at the gilded trappings of power.
Nadery, who has not returned to
Afghanistan since he flew to Qatar that Sunday, said the news that the Taliban
had taken over felt like the worst kind of failure.
“I just sat there thinking, ‘I lost
my country today,’” said Nadery, 40, who had been head of the country’s
national civil service agency. “I saw everything I had fought for, for so many
years, crumbling before my eyes.”
For the United States, the scope of
defeat was total — and was vividly rendered as helicopters evacuated embassy
personnel to the airport. Before the American flag was lowered one last time,
diplomats engaged in a frenzy of destruction, burning documents and smashing
sensitive equipment.
“It was extremely loud,” said a
senior U.S. official. “There were controlled fires, the shredding of classified
paper documents, and a constant pounding noise from the destruction of hard
drives and weapons.”
By the time they were finished,
what had once been the world’s largest diplomatic mission was “a
strange-looking place,” the official said. “All the signage and photos were
gone. Computers had the guts ripped out of them and the offices looked oddly
bare.”
At the State Department, top brass,
including Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s deputy, and Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of
state for political affairs, were frantically calling foreign ministers to ask
them to help with evacuation efforts and to coordinate a statement signed by
114 countries urging the Taliban to allow safe passage for evacuees. This,
they realized, would be a historic evacuation effort.
[Rush
of Afghan evacuees to Qatar leaves many crammed in hot hangar, facing an
uncertain future]
As darkness enveloped the city,
more and more people swarmed the airport — eventually overwhelming the modest
terminal and spilling out onto the tarmac.
But some had already given up hope
that they would ever get out. That night, instead of going home, the senior
Kabul security official went to a friend’s house. He has been hiding there ever
since but is resigned to the fact that, sooner or later, the Taliban will
probably find him.
His fate was sealed, he said, when
Afghanistan’s president decided to save himself.
“From that moment, everything was
smashed,” he said. “I’ve killed hundreds of Taliban. So for sure they will kill
me.”
Ryan, Pager, Constable, Hudson and
Witte reported from Washington. Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this
report.
