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Inside the Fall of Kabul: A Firsthand Account from the Last UK Ambassador to Afghanistan

• Michele McAloon

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What happens when the fate of an entire nation hinges on a series of critical, split-second decisions? Sir Laurie Bristow, the last UK ambassador to Afghanistan, pulls back the curtain on the frantic final months preceding the fall of Kabul in August 2021. From the ramifications of the 2020 Doha Agreement to the chaotic evacuation scenes, he offers a gripping narrative of the UK’s exit from Afghanistan, sharing unparalleled insights and personal anecdotes that bring this pivotal historical moment to life.

We dissect the complex decision-making processes and coordination efforts among international allies and NGOs that occurred within the Green Zone, navigating through the murky waters of unpredictable intelligence. Sir Laurie vividly recounts the rapid collapse of Afghan regional capitals, the logistical nightmare of transitioning to Camp Taipan, and the hair-raising ordeal of the evacuation operation. The emotional toll, strategic decisions, and sheer bravery involved in these efforts paint a vivid picture of the human side of diplomacy and military operations.

Finally, we reflect on the extraordinary courage displayed by young soldiers and officials during this crisis, spotlighting personal stories of resilience and sacrifice. Sir Laurie’s book, "Final Call Kabul," encapsulates these intense moments and offers a broader analysis of the strategic implications of the withdrawal. For those looking to understand the profound impact of these events on global politics and the socio-political landscape of Kabul, this episode promises a compelling and deeply informative journey. Tune in and join the conversation on one of the most significant geopolitical events of our time.

Speaker 1:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhune, your host. Today we are interviewing Sir Laurie Bristow, who has written a fabulous book about his experience as being the last UK ambassador in Afghanistan, and he was there for the three months prior to the fall of Kabul and the massive evacuation that took place and the massive evacuation that took place. Lori Bristow was the UK ambassador to Afghanistan from June to November 2021. Prior to this, Sir Lori Bristow has been a regional ambassador to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia. Previously, Sir Lori was Her Majesty's ambassador to the Russian Federation from January 2016 until January 2020. Currently, he is the president of Hughes Hall University of Cambridge.

Speaker 1:

He has written this fabulous book about his experience in Afghanistan and it is called Final Call Kabul, published by Whittles Publishing, and although it is now available on Amazon, it will be available and be promoted this week in the United States. I really hope you enjoy this interview because it's really interesting. Sir Laurie Bristow, welcome to the show. Welcome to Crossword.

Speaker 2:

Hello, good morning Good afternoon, wherever we are.

Speaker 1:

It's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. You have written a fabulous book. It is a book that is so human and it's so absorbing in detail, and it's probably not just the book alone, it's the story in itself A 30-plus year ambassador closing down Kabul as Kabul falls. Can we start with let's set up a timeline of exactly what happened, because the timeline in a lot of ways tells the story too, and if we can go back to February of 2020 in the Doha Agreement, which you actually include as an appendix to the book, could you please walk us through that timeline and why that is so significant?

Speaker 2:

As you said, michelle. I mean, I was the UK's last ambassador to Afghanistan. I was there through the fall of Kabul, exactly three years ago now, in August 2021. And it fell to me, I'm afraid, to close down our mission there, and that's a large part of the reason for writing the book. I mean, the timeline, I think, needs to go back a bit further than that. I mean, you really have to pick your moment. Of course, the key one is 9-11-2001. So the attacks on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, the flight that was brought down by the passengers somewhere over the United States that, of course, was an attack on the United States by al-Qaeda operative militants who'd planned and executed that attack out of Afghanistan, and what happened, as we all remember and I was in Ankara at the time, in Turkey it changed everything and I think it's always worth just bringing this conversation back to what we thought we were doing there in the first place over that 20 years, what took the US and its allies into Afghanistan, and that, I think, helps you to situate a discussion about how it became so difficult to extricate ourselves from there. So, if you fast forward to 2020, as you mentioned, it was the Doha Agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban. I mean, it's really important just to recognize that that agreement was between the US administration of the time and the Taliban. The government of Afghanistan that we all recognized and supported were not part of that agreement. They had obligations under it but they weren't part of the agreement. And essentially what the agreement said is that all US and other foreign forces will leave Afghanistan on a timeline. That timeline would have taken us towards the middle of 2021.

Speaker 2:

The military withdrawal was underway when I was appointed to be ambassador in Afghanistan, so what was on my plate at that time was doing the preparations for keeping an embassy actually one of our largest UK embassies in the world open, but in an environment where the military support to that embassy, everything that enabled it to be there and operate would no longer be there from about the time that I arrived in the middle of 2021. In the middle, of course, you had the US election November 2020, and then the scenes on the Capitol Hill in January 2021, and then a new administration. So it was a very, very brief pause and President Biden came into office a review of the policy. The review came back saying we're going to press ahead with the military withdrawal on a slightly slower timetable. So what was then happening was that I was in London doing the preparations for reconfiguring our embassy at the same time as all of our military after that 20-year campaign withdrawing.

Speaker 2:

And there was a particular moment in about the middle of June where we were trying to decide. We needed to decide whether we can actually continue to run this embassy once the military are gone, and to answer that question, you know, we needed to know things like who's running the airport, who's providing security, who's providing the medical facilities, what happens if this all goes wrong? And so in about the middle of June, we took our decision that we'd keep the embassy open. We still had a big job to do there, so I got myself on a plane, got out to Kabul, and then what happened in the weeks after that?

Speaker 2:

Inside the space of less than three months, the whole thing fell to pieces, and so by the 15th of August I was in Kabul airport. At the time, you know, we were watching in the morning President Ghani broadcasting to the nation, pulling levers of power. Those levers weren't attached to anything. Middle of the afternoon, ghani fled the country with some of his closest aides and, for a short period, absolutely nobody was in charge, and that was the point at which, you know, we were all sat in the airport thinking, well, you know what happens now.

Speaker 1:

Laurie, let me ask you a question, and I'm asking you, I think as more of as an ambassador here, as a former ambassador why was the decision to leave, to not include the government of Afghanistan in the Doha agreement and what was the implication of leaving them out of that decision? Because that really did have an overarching effect on the extrication process.

Speaker 2:

So what I try to do, michelle, in the book is to keep the tone as neutral as possible. When I was thinking of writing the book, a very, very good former colleague of mine in government said well, if you're going to write it, just get the tone right. What your readership, what the audience is interested in here is why did any of this happen? What does it mean? And I think it was very, very good advice. What I'm not trying to do in the book is assign blame Plenty of people have done that but to help the reader understand what happened and why and what it means at a personal level as well as at a political level. So, in terms of the Doha deal, again, you need to go back a few years. So I worked on the post-conflict planning for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. And then, of course, I went out to Azerbaijan, which is where we knew each other from. What we were seeing during that period was, I think, the effects of that huge trauma in the US, of the attacks on the US, on New York City, on Washington, playing out in public policy, domestic as well as international, and it's really really important to understand that before starting to get into who's right and who's wrong and who called it right and who called it wrong. What we had in Afghanistan, I think partly as a result of the invasion of Iraq, was no good answers to some really fundamental strategic questions. I mean, first of all, we're here to eradicate al-Qaeda and to push its hosts out of power. Well, we'd push the hosts out of power, but we hadn't completely eradicated al-Qaeda, and of course, what was then happening was the al-Qaeda and what became Islamic State were starting to pop up in other places all over the world, and my generation of diplomats a lot of us worked on this over two decades. Second, the costs of the Afghanistan campaign were starting to spiral out of control. I don't just mean the monetary costs, you know the human costs.

Speaker 2:

So for the UK, we lost 457 soldiers in Afghanistan, and one of the things that it was becoming increasingly hard for our politicians to do was explain to the public why. What are they there to achieve? Because they haven't achieved it yet. The place is still not pacified, the Taliban have not gone away, we're fighting a counterinsurgency war. So the really big question there for all of us, for successive US administrations, successive British prime ministers, was really encapsulated for me in a question that one of my relatives asked me when I said I'm taking this job in Kabul and the question was why are we still there and how are we going to get out? And it was the absence of really good answers to those questions that came back to haunt us.

Speaker 2:

My take on the Doha deal well, I've said it in the book, I've said it publicly. I think it was an absolute case study in how not to do a deal, because what it did was essentially to say to the opponents of the US and of the Afghan government that we were trying to support, that our military support for that government is leaving. You know, there aren't really any conditions for this. There's a timetable. What that does is transfer all of the initiative to the Taliban, but also it's a massive vote of no confidence in the government that we try to support for 20 years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, sure, sure, you know.

Speaker 1:

One of the brilliance of this book, I have to say, laurie, is that it is your neutrality of it. You let the reader kind of decide the story and the facts. And it really is the brilliance of this book that you're telling a story based on events that happened, events that were often out of your control Now, in fact, most of the time out of your control and how, in the drama that developed because of factors that were out of your control, and how, in the drama that developed because of factors that were out of your control, watching it three years down the road, it's really easy to armchair it and to say why didn't this happen? Why didn't they include this? Why didn't they do this, why didn't they do that? And understanding that three years is no time in history I mean we're not looking at this from a 10-year point of view, a 15, a 20, or a 30-year point of view.

Speaker 1:

The details that you do provide actually show a story that is factual and neutral and I really encourage readers to pick up this book if you want to understand the closing days of Kabul. Readers to pick up this book if you want to understand the closing days of Kabul, you and, I think, other embassies and other ambassadors were trying to decide whether you would continue a presence after the withdrawal of the NATO troops. That was really kind of operative until the very last moment, am I correct?

Speaker 2:

That's right. So let me break it down into a few parts. So the decision had been taken in the Doha agreement between the Trump administration, the Taliban and then in the Biden administration's review of the policy which came out in the middle of April. So the decision had been made that the US and international military were going to withdraw. Of course there was a few nuances in that, in that actually I think about 600 US Marines I think they were were going to stay, you know, to provide the sort of bottom line security for the US embassy in the green zone, you know, the fortified city within a city in the middle of Kabul. So we never really got to find out. The Taliban thought of that, but it clearly wasn't compatible with the Doha agreement, strictly speaking.

Speaker 2:

So there was the political decision for us, taken in London, that we would keep the embassy open. That, of course, rested on a sufficient level of assurance that we could keep the people there safe. I mean, the word safe doesn't have much meaning in a war zone like this, but obviously you're trying to manage down a set of really high-end risks. I mean having staff killed or captured. It's pretty damaging not only to the staff concerned but to the government. So there was that part of it. Why? Because we had a job to do. I mean, the job really came down to about four things for the UK embassy. One was to support the government that I was accredited to. A large part of the reason for that was so we could pursue our national security objectives in Afghanistan. So, going after the bad guys or supporting others to go after the bad guys, we had this huge tale of Afghans who'd worked with us over the previous 20 years policy that, for the UK, was called the Afghan Resettlement and Assistance Program. So what do we do about the military interpreters and so on? You know we were in the process of bringing quite a lot of them to the UK even before Kabul fell.

Speaker 2:

And the final, most important bit of all was contingency planning. What happens if this all falls to pieces? It was really the set of tasks that my embassy was there to perform when it came to it. As I suggested earlier, if this is actually not possible, I mean, the first things that you need to do is recognize that it isn't possible.

Speaker 2:

So we had to put in place a set of what are called indicators and warnings, things that are telling us now is the time to leave.

Speaker 2:

But it's not quite as simple as that because, of course, for the UK we're the second biggest embassy in Kabul US is the time to leave. But it's not quite as simple as that because, of course, for the UK, we're the second biggest embassy in Kabul, the US is the biggest embassy. The effect on both the Afghan government and on our allies, including the US, of the UK deciding to leave would have been, again, a massive vote of no confidence. So what we're trying to do there, all through these indicators and warnings and assessments and judgment calls, calls, is answer day in, day out should we still be here and when the time comes to leave, leave at exactly the right time so that you don't pull the whole Jenga pile down is this kind of embassy dependence on each other in the green zone, as you say, when Australia pulled out, that was a significant event, when I guess it was the French too, but everybody kind of had a dependent relationship, with sort of the US being an indicator.

Speaker 1:

If they actually pulled out, then actually it was a house of cards. At that point In all of that decision making, were the ambassadors talking to each other, saying you know this, this, were you coordinating closely with the different donors, the different NGOs that were there, the different embassies that were there?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the coordination is incessant. It's day in, day out, I mean, if necessary, hour in, hour out but the thing you need to come back to, though, is that these are always judgment calls. There is never going to be a piece of intelligence that says you must leave now. I've never seen anything that remotely fits that description. Bear in mind also that I mean you touched earlier on what people call the fog of war, so it's the paucity, the lack of really really good, hard information I would hear from time to time. The Americans are leaving tomorrow. A couple of phone calls, and I've checked clear the Americans are not leaving tomorrow. I don't know how the rumor took that form, but it does does.

Speaker 2:

But what I've also got is to try and get my political masters back in London and we all had this in different forms to understand, first of all, what is our best take on what is actually happening here? What are the actual facts where we don't really have access to all the information? Second, what are we going to do with that information? And there are a couple of things here that I try to bring out a bit in the book, and I've done a fair amount of work since leaving government on. It's the effect of cognitive biases.

Speaker 2:

So, if you look back over the lessons learned on things like the Iraq campaign, the Afghanistan campaign, what I advise my students to do is always study failures.

Speaker 2:

You learn a lot more from failures than you do from successes, and almost always in a political or a strategic failure of this sort, there are going to be things like optimism bias and confirmation bias, so believing that things are better than they really are because you need to, or believing that, or filtering out the things that tell you things you don't want to hear, because that's the only way you can really operate as a leader in this type of situation. I think the most important thing of all is to create an environment, a culture where people around you can say actually, you know what? It's worse than we think. We saw this really starkly in the last week or so of the government of Afghanistan. So you know the speed of the collapse at the end. Over the previous years, the Taliban had taken control of large parts of the country rural areas, small towns, the main roads, the border crossings but when it came to it at the beginning of August, they didn't control any regional capitals.

Speaker 2:

First regional capital to fall to the Taliban was Aranj, on the Iranian border, on the 6th of August. Kabul fell on the 15th. So the whole thing, you know all of the main towns and the capital fell to the Taliban inside nine days. That's the problem that you're dealing with here, where things are moving too fast for you to even to understand what's happening, let alone come up with good responses to that.

Speaker 1:

Let alone come up with good responses to that.

Speaker 2:

What was the exact decision point where you, london, realized we're not staying city? I mean, anyone who hasn't worked in a green zone in somewhere like Kabul or Baghdad, I mean it's really hard to describe it, but it's a fortress with gigantic concrete walls and you know gun towers and emplacements and all the rest of it. And, of course, for the UK, part of the problem about our decision to leave was that we controlled the security of a big quadrant of that. So if we're going, we're taking our people with us and somebody else has got to pick that up. We also had a military base out at the airport on the civilian side of the runway, probably I don't know 200 yards from the main runway. I mean, literally you go out of the airside gate and you're on the aircraft taxiways. So the plan for us had been that when the time came, we'd close our embassy you know this sort of huge place spread across three sites. You know that one stage had actually been our biggest embassy in the world bar none and fall back to this military base that we had on the airfield called Camp Taipan. Pretty basic, pretty Spartan military base, but it had this great advantage of being on the airfield called Camp Taipan Pretty basic, pretty Spartan military base, but it had this great advantage of being on the airfield next to the runway, so we just needed to hold on by our fingernails and that would be the place to do it.

Speaker 2:

The problems arose around the speed and totality of the collapse. So what we were seeing through about the 12th of August, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Afghan army was collapsing. The governmentth of August, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Afghan army was collapsing. The government was disintegrating. The US and the UK both announced that we'd be deploying large numbers of troops into the region to facilitate an evacuation if needed. Those troops were still flowing into the region and then onto Kabul on the 15th, when the government fell. What we also had, though, was a couple of other things going on.

Speaker 2:

So, as the army was collapsing, the Taliban were massing around Kabul, and, of course, we had essentially no insight into what the Taliban were going to do. They said lots of things, but they hadn't actually stood by any of the commitments any serious commitments they'd made since the Doha Agreement the Doha Agreement, you know. They said they would negotiate power sharing with government. They didn't do that. They fought. So there's not much usable information there about the Taliban. The other thing that we were seeing was I mean, I was tracking this with one of our one of my senior military colleagues Essentially essentially came down to WhatsApp exchanges how many Taliban are in this prison? That's about to be overrun. How many Islamic State are in this prison? That's about to be overrun, because I know where they're coming next. The Taliban are rejoining the Taliban military on the battlefield. Islamic State guys are probably coming our way and, of course, this is what we saw at the end of the evacuation. So we needed to be getting a really firm grip on what were the risks to our people and our operation.

Speaker 2:

Going back to my earlier point, not what we want to be happening, what is actually happening.

Speaker 2:

So on the 14th, 15th, the assessment from the US military commander was that if the Taliban attack from the US military commander was that if the Taliban attack so we didn't know their precise intentions if they attack, the Afghan military will not be able to hold that attack back, and we haven't yet got enough forces in Kabul to hold them back ourselves.

Speaker 2:

For a foreign ministry having military advice that says your position is becoming untenable, that actually makes your decision for you. That's the point at which you have to go to your political masters and say look, actually the civilians should not be here. So that was the decision that our government took on the 14th that the time had come to close the embassy in the green zone. The closure plan was due to last a week we got it down to nine hours and that we would then pull all the civilians out of Afghanistan, apart from me. It turned out the military would go into a defensive posture while we tried to get more military in to position ourselves to run an evacuation. It's what we ended up being able to do.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I'm going to ask probably a stupid question at this point, but it was at that point that you absolutely knew that there was no keeping anything in Afghanistan. There was going to be no kind of embassy or consulate in Afghanistan. It was done as soon as August 15th and 16th. You realize it was over with, right.

Speaker 2:

So you're testing those judgments really by the hour, right, okay, the best advice I have from a senior military colleague was you know you need to think in six hour blocks.

Speaker 1:

Yes, you do.

Speaker 2:

First, of, all in terms of who needs to be here, why. What are they here to do? What will you wish you'd done in that second or third or fourth six hour block, when your options may actually have narrowed? But I think the defining point was on the 15th, where it was absolutely clear that the government had collapsed, the army had collapsed, this was all over. There were last-minute attempts, of course, going on to broker some kind of peaceful transfer of power to the Taliban, but by that stage there was nobody on the Afghan government's side really to negotiate with.

Speaker 1:

They're gone. So you started with, I think you said, in May. You started with an embassy of about 115, right, and you brought it down to 75. And then in August 15th, how many were you there now? What was your level then at that point?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So again go back a few years. As I mentioned earlier, for some years, particularly at the height of the military action in Afghanistan, it was actually the UK's largest embassy in the world because of that national security mission that we had and the amount of resource and support and other things that we were putting into the government of Afghanistan by the middle of 2021, I mean, really, the calculation for us was what do we absolutely have to do in Kabul? There's a first order priority, and who needs to be there to do that? Anyone who doesn't fit that description needs to be gone.

Speaker 2:

Bear in mind also that in this environment, you have maybe 115 diplomatic staff in the first, second quarter of 2021. We've also got maybe 400 others. So you know, guard force, cooks, maintenance people, you name it, and it sounds a bit flippant, but you know, the calculation in all of this is if we have to get everyone out in a couple of hours, what's the number look like? By the time we were closing the embassy, we had come down from about 70 UK-based staff and about another 400 of those support staff and guard force around it the job of and actually you just listed, you know what is the role of the US British ambassador or any ambassador in the world.

Speaker 1:

Three different things carrying out the mission of the country, but one of the things was keeping people safe, making sure that people are safe, and you really took this to heart. This seemed like this was always on your mind. How am I going to keep these people safe? How am I going to get them out of this country as soon as possible? And you start something called Operation Pitting. Talk to us about Operation Pitting and why that name too. I was curious.

Speaker 2:

Operation Pitting was the military-led non-combatant evacuation operation. I think the UK US military have the same jargon for this. It's basically when you need to evacuate a lot of civilians out of harm's way. The name Pitting has no significance whatsoever. Our military, I think, a bit like yours you just use a random code name for the operation. Everybody knows what it is.

Speaker 2:

So for the UK, there were various categories of people who we knew were going to need to get out if the thing fell to pieces. One, of course, was our own staff. Going back to what you were saying earlier, this is a point I try to make in the book. These things aren't just about geopolitics or grand strategy, they're about people. And one of the things I really do not envy my military former military colleagues for is having to explain to the families of soldiers quite often young soldiers lost in combat, killed in combat why their son or daughter was lost. And my intention was I did not ever want to be in that position for our own staff. So, beyond our own staff, of course, uk nationals, a lot of British nationals of Afghan heritage. Of course, quite a few of them have families back in Afghanistan. We knew we were going to need to evacuate a lot of people. People don't take notice of your travel advice when you say, well, it's time to leave. There were also those categories of Afghans who'd worked for us over all those years. So people like military interpreters, military who we trained and worked alongside as part of the common endeavor that the US and the UK and our allies our Afghan allies had had over those 20 years, but also people who'd worked with us. A couple of examples here people like journalists.

Speaker 2:

The UK shipped out a whole group of female counterterrorism judges. So just imagine this you know a woman who sent a member of the Taliban to prison. The very first person who's going to be killed when that Taliban comes out of prison is that female judge. So there was a lot of effort put into trying to get those people out. There were just other things going on here as well, though, which were thinking about. It's both the human cost and the political cost of what happens if things go wrong.

Speaker 2:

So we had this period from the 15th through to the 17th where we actually lost control of the runway. There were just not enough US and UK forces in Kabul airport to keep control of the runway. Everyone's seen the pictures, you know people holding onto the side of a USC-17 falling off as it took off. You know great crowds of people all over the runway. But also you know, as the evacuation was closing down, I mean coming into its final days, that awful realization that there was going to be a terrorist attack. We knew it, we could see it coming. We didn't know where or exactly when or exactly how, but we knew it was coming and when it did? I mean just try to imagine the situation where, in the last couple of days of that 20-year campaign, you know, 170 Afghans and 13 US servicemen and women are killed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, just a tragedy, Just horrible. I'm going to ask you something and it's political on this side but what I want to ask is the effect that it had on you, and this is still very hotly contested, so I don't want to debate about whether it was a good idea or not idea, a bad idea, but how it affected you when the decision was made to close Bagram.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's a lot of debate around this and I describe it as a lot of sort of armchair generaling going on, but the fact is that the decision was taken in Washington by two successive administrations to pull US-led forces out. One of the things I try to get across in the book is to let the reasons, particularly for the Biden administration following that through, to speak for themselves, because I think there were some pretty clear reasons for that. You know, the need to bring this campaign to an end and to refocus on other issues. Other threats, other challenges that were looming large are looming large things, like you know competition with other great powers. These are real things. There are real decisions and dilemmas in there for political leaders and I don't think we should just brush those away.

Speaker 2:

The issue, as I saw it, around Bagram was twofold. First of all, go back to that decision about the plan to stay, to keep the embassies in Kabul. That was underwritten by a US force of about 650 soldiers, marines, with some other capabilities around it. My understanding from our military, from the US military, was that that's great. As far as the Green Zone is concerned, a force of 650 will not allow you to hold Bagram as well. So if you want to hold Bagram, you need to answer two questions. One is why and the other is how, and the how comes down to numbers and capabilities, but the why is really important. You've taken the decision to leave militarily. Why do you keep Bagram?

Speaker 2:

I know there are plenty of arguments that it would have made a better evacuation point from Kabul airport. You know I'm not a military logistician, I can't really call that one way or the other, but once the decision was taken, the military forces are being withdrawn. You can't hold Bagram. The political thing, though, I think was extremely important. I would say that the withdrawal from Bagram over the weekend of the 4th of July, the holiday weekend in the US that was the moment at which I think it was no longer possible for anyone to believe that this decision is reversible, and I think that had a quite profound effect on the Afghan government and the Afghan forces. As the penny dropped that, you know what. We are actually on our own now.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it still resonates in public discourse today and, like you said, there's probably a lot of armchair journaling and logistics and all of that kind of stuff. But that one is, you know, I feel like that one hasn't hit the history of time or the flow of history yet and is still very debated. The okay, so let's. So. The 15th, the 16th, you guys, you decamp to Taipan, camp Taipan, and you start a massive evacuation process. You had been evacuating people more or less before this, but this is when the crush really comes. One of the things that was when I was reading the book and I had to look up on several different maps to understand the configuration of what you were actually dealing with, because I did not serve in Afghanistan, so it was hard for me to imagine the setup and exactly how close you were located to Abbey Gate the infamous Abbey Gate where the suicide bombing happened, and why Abbey Gate was so influential in your operations of getting your people out on your A-Route program.

Speaker 2:

So our evacuation model, our non-competent evacuation operation, was as we always do. It was based on a couple of things. One was having a central point where we would process people leaving the country. That, for us, was the Barron Hotel. And the other was having what was called a temporary safe location, which is a transshipment point in a third country. So you can get that air bridge going with the C-17s and the A400s and the C-130s and so on, on a sort of shuttle basis out of Kabul airport. Then you can process those people onto wide-bodied airliners to get them back to the UK and deal with them there.

Speaker 2:

So back in the early part of 2021, we, as part of our planning for an evacuation if it was ever needed, put down an enormous deposit on the Baron Hotel. It was quite an impressive sum of money, basically saying can we have first refusal on your hotel please, if falls to pieces? I mean one of those deals that gets made. So what we had was this very, very large, well fortified, defend defendable hotel complex just literally across the road from the the airport perimeter. You know, you come out of the abbey uh, not the abbey out of the gate of the Baron Hotel and cross the road, there's the airport perimeter, so that's what you want. In these circumstances, abbey Gate was maybe 200, 300 yards up the road, you know. Further along that perimeter, I mean, the US were using a number of gates, you know, to process people. Abbey, of course, was the one, as you said, where the attack took place right at the end of the evacuation.

Speaker 2:

The problem for all of us in the early days in particular of that evacuation was just the sheer number of people who descended on the airport trying to get out, as you or I would. You know, really anyone, whether they had a claim to be evacuated to the US or the UK or anywhere else, wanted to get out. And the problem that we all of us had was, first of all, just how to keep order in this humongous mess of people. I mean, this wasn't just a queue, it was a violent, enormous crowd stretching back as far as you could see, in every direction. But also, how do you get the people that we want to evacuate out of that crowd? It's very, very easy to say, much harder to do, and one of the things that I still really can't talk about very much is that the easy answer is you send soldiers out into the crowd to find them. You have to be aware of the possibility that if you send soldiers into that crowd, you might never see them again, and you know that's a thing for the operational commanders, but it's also a thing for the politicians back home. Are you prepared to lose people on this operation? Because you know obviously nobody wants to lose people, but you need to understand the risks that you're dealing with, and the risks were enormous dealing with and the risks were enormous.

Speaker 2:

So what then happened in the first few chaotic days after we'd regained control of the runway and the airfield and were able to bring flights in and out, was to try to get some sort of order and process going out in that street. And there's a lot being said. There was a lot of noise at the time about frictions between US and UK military. I would advise your listeners to take all that with a pinch of salt. I mean, these are very, very stressful situations. Everyone is trying to do the best they can with what they've got. What they've got is horror. You wouldn't wish anyone to be in that situation.

Speaker 2:

Know from where I was watching this. I mean, you know it was uh, it was what you would expect it to be. But the us and uk soldiers in particular, alongside the turks and others, were doing the best they could to get those, those crowds, under control. Bring the people through. That needed bringing through. Of course you know you're dealing with people who are handing children over barricades to you. You're pulling dead children out of crowds. I mean, I just can't overstate how awful it was. This is all, by the way, 35 degree heat in the middle of a war zone. So I think the most important thing here is just be really careful about criticizing the people whose job it was to do that.

Speaker 1:

Right, right. Yeah, I mean the picture that you paint your book is it was a human nightmare. It was, and the fact that you, the British and the US, were able to get so many people out is, I think, a testament to really the will to get those people out in the work, that the men and women under you working these 24-hour ops just trying to get people out. And you said that the health conditions are horrible. People had stomach flu. I mean you know it was COVID. I mean you cannot probably get a worse mix than what you guys. You cannot probably get a worse mix than what you guys went through. One of the questions I have always wondered when the crowds were coming into this complex, where was the Taliban? Were they pushing the crowds in? Were they keeping the crowds out? What were they doing? Were they closing?

Speaker 2:

in on Kabul Airport at this point. So this is one of the curious things about it. I can't speak for the American operation, obviously, but I doubt that it was different from ours. How close were the Taliban? Right in front of you. So when our soldiers were dealing with people on the gates, you know, are they coming in? Are they not coming in? You might be eyeballing a Taliban. Bear in mind that. You know these are people who we had fought for 20 years. One of the really incredible things about that operation was this kind of almost unspoken truth that on the Taliban side, we've won. You're leaving, this is ours now we'll let you do what you need to do, but you are gone by the end of August, and that was perfectly clear all the way through. But bear in mind also, you're dealing with quite volatile people. On the Taliban side, you're dealing with very, very volatile crowds. One mistake, one mistake could start off something really, really unfortunate.

Speaker 2:

This is where I come back to a point that I've talked about a lot. It's about the courage and the maturity of judgment of quite often very, very young soldiers and officials. So, to spell that out, the youngest of our soldiers was 18 years old, that's younger than my sons. The youngest of my civilian staff was 25. She was fresh out of university and you know they're doing this thing day in, day out. I think it says a lot about actually public service, the public service ethos that we try to inculcate in our organizations. There's one other thing which I mention in the book the parachute regiment. Commander on the ground, a guy called Dave Middleton, said to me quite early on in our evacuation you know, the parachute regiment is our equivalent of the 82nd Airborne.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

We train these young men and women for combat. This is harder.

Speaker 1:

Just think about that. That really struck me. That absolutely really struck me. I talked to a young soldier just recently a US soldier. You know what? He had a child dropped in his arms. Somebody threw their baby over a wall to try to get their kid out and he, you know he had to live with that of how to you know of what eventually happened to that child. He lost that child, lost contact with that child, and he was 21 when I was talking to him. So he was 18 when this happened and that's a real world thing and I think a lot of I mean anybody who was in that situation. That was a lifetime event that affects you for the rest of your life. Right, you don't just walk away from something like that. How many people did you eventually get out? How many people did the British get out?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we got probably about 2,000 out before the evacuation even began. We'd been processing people through ARAP, the resettlement program, since probably the early part of 2021 and managed to get a plane away, I think on the 15th, before the airport shut down. During the 11 or so days of Operation Pitting it was over 15,000. So half, you know, twice, three times our planning assumption. I don't know what the US figures were, but I mean obviously commensurately bigger than ours.

Speaker 1:

Tell me about your flight out of Kabul. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, all. I think every single person in that evacuation operation left knowing full well that there were people that we needed to get out, that we hadn't. In fact, a colleague who'd done evacuations from other countries warned me of that about two months beforehand, I mean. Her advice was get ready for that. You know, it's always going to happen. It doesn't make it any easier to deal with.

Speaker 2:

It was pretty clear, though, that the evacuation would have to come to an end by the end of August. That was the deal with the Taliban. I know that the Americans tried to get the timetable extended. We discussed it as well. There was no way that they were going to agree to that, and for all of us, I think it came down to you can fight the Taliban or you can run an evacuation. You can't do both, and why would you fight the Taliban at this stage, once it was clear that the evacuation would close down by the end of august? What you then need to do is work with the military planners to collapse.

Speaker 2:

The thing, and and you know the place to start that discussion is what's the most dangerous flight of all? It's the very last one out, the very last one out. So then you work backwards from that is leaving in what order? You know who, literally, who is on which plane going out.

Speaker 2:

I think for me at least, as the plane took off, a huge amount of relief, going back to something we discussed earlier that we didn't lose anyone along the way, but knowing full well it could that attack on the Abbey Gate a few yards in a different direction it would have been us conducting a ramp ceremony, you know, with all of the, you know the sort of human tragedy and loss involved in that. Quite a lot of sense of unfinished business, quite a lot of bewilderment. I mean, one of the reasons I I wrote the book actually is to make sense of what happened in terms of, first of all, what happened but then why, to try and get clear in my own mind some answers to those questions and then maybe to try and help others to think through this enormous strategic failure and human tragedy that we were involved in.

Speaker 1:

Your conclusion is probably in a book of extreme poignancy, is probably the most poignant, laurie, because your conclusion you reach it with a certain degree of really humility. That was what, in reading through of you know what was, what could have been done, how was it done? What does this mean for the future? What? What is the lasting impression on you and how? Not just on you, but on basically your 30-year career and everything that you contributed to the 30-year career. Actually, in some way you can see how it came down to the last two weeks of your career.

Speaker 2:

Really, I left the Foreign Service to go into academia.

Speaker 1:

But your impressions now, as you're talking to me, as you have written this book, is it still something that is developing in you? Is it, I mean, any final conclusions?

Speaker 2:

There are lots and lots of things going on here, and I think they all fit together in some quite important ways. One is what are the big strategic challenges of our time? Where did Afghanistan fit into that? This is why I produce, in their own words, political leaders saying what they were doing and why. Because it's really important that we understand that it wasn't just a random decision to leave Afghanistan, or to leave Afghanistan militarily. There were reasons for it. It's important that the public understand at least what those reasons were, even whether we agree with them or not. That's life in a democracy. Second, it's about the sort of overall trend.

Speaker 2:

So I joined the UK Foreign Office in the year the Cold War ended 1990. I'm a Russianist. That's what I've spent large parts of my life working on. We're now back in a period that we never thought we'd see again, which is great power competition, a Russia that's gone very, very badly wrong, and it's a relationship between the West and China that's becoming more difficult with every passing day. It's also about things like technological change and things that we hadn't really thought seriously about before, like pandemics and food security and these sorts of things. Those questions interact with each other, but right at the heart of all this is people. How is it that, when a country asks its people, often its young people, to go into a place like that, why do they say yes?

Speaker 1:

or future generations, that they continue to serve, that they engage in self-sacrificial behavior for the greater good, for the common good. And that really is the question. Afghanistan, I think, will cast a long shadow over a lot of people personally for a long time. It is only three years out. I see the effects of it on a personal level almost every day with some of the men and the women that I deal with. That, Brendan, deals with my husband who, as we work with the US Army, and one thing that I always, as a mother of two active duty Army officers, is before you go to war, make sure you really need to go to war and make sure you win. That's what I ask.

Speaker 1:

So, Laurie, I can't thank you enough for this book because I think it is going to allow a lot of fruitful discussion both in the UK and the United States. And the manner that you wrote it in, again I think, is humble. It is truthful, it is factual and kind of lets the reader decide on what happened. You tell what happened, but maybe helps the reader decide why it happened. And that is. It's short, it's really a good book and it's just a great read. It's an absorbing read, it really is. And one last thing, and I'm probably not one to do this, I mean I'm nobody, but thank you, thank you, thank you so much for 30 years of trying to contribute to the peace of the world, of Europe, of Britain and, by some way, the United States too.

Speaker 2:

Thanks very much, Michelle Pleasure talking to you, thank you.

Speaker 1:

You've been listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. My name is Michelle McElwain and we've been interviewing author Sir Laurie Bristow on his book Final Call Kabul by Whittles Publishing. I hope you've enjoyed this interview. I hope you've read this book. As always, I hope this book engages a lot of discussion. Stay tuned. I've got a new website coming out. I've got a new Twitter account so you can get more of Crossword. When you want to get Crossword, as always, like and subscribe. Thank you, have a good day.