TRANSCRIPT: The Inside Story: The Fall of Kabul (Episode 01, August 19, 2021)
Voice of Katherine Gypson, VOA Congressional Correspondent:
Afghanistan’s capital falls quickly to the Taliban, creating chaos and concern for those desperate to leave the country. And criticism for its execution.
U.S. President Joseph R. Biden:
I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for president that I would bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. While it’s been hard and messy and, yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment.
Katherine Gypson:
A first-person account of America’s messy departure from Afghanistan and its impact on those left behind. Next on The Inside Story: The Fall of Kabul.
((Inside Story Show Open Graphics))
Katherine Gypson:
I am Katherine Gypson, VOA’s congressional correspondent. The fall of Afghanistan happened quicker than most U.S. officials anticipated and publicly stated. And that created an atmosphere of chaos and desperation in Kabul --- captured by these incredible images from the week.
U.S. forces have been sent back into Afghanistan to secure the airport and evacuate tens of thousands of people. But they will not be staying long. The United States’ longest war ending in fear and chaos….as the Taliban overtook Afghanistan’s capital city…prompting an evacuation of personnel from the U.S. Embassy and dangerous last measures by Afghans desperate to leave the country.
Despite those scenes, the president of the United States said he stood behind his decision to withdraw U.S. troops.
U.S. President Joseph R. Biden:
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So, what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war, that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
Katherine Gypson:
Republican and some Democratic lawmakers swiftly condemned Biden for failing to anticipate the speed of the Afghan government’s collapse and the potential damage to U.S. credibility worldwide.
Aaron David Miller, Carnegie Endowment for Peace:
This will be a permanent scar in the Biden administration's presidency. It doesn't mean it'll be a failed presidency. It doesn't mean that in the end, most people won't come to accept the fact that withdrawal was inevitable, was the right decision.
Katherine Gypson:
As the Taliban takes over governance of Afghanistan, analysts say the U.S. still has economic leverage in a country that has depended on international assistance, as well as traditional counterterrorism operations.
Michael O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution:
Our options now include making sure the Taliban understand that if they get in cahoots with al-Qaida or ISIS, or if they even indulge the worst of their own misogynistic and sectarian behavior and retaliate severely with violence against other Afghans, that we have options. We have military options to make them pay a price.
Katherine Gypson:
But the State Department confirmed Monday the U.S. no longer had a presence at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul — and the Pentagon said 2,500 U.S. troops were supporting efforts at the airport to evacuate personnel — including thousands of Afghan allies who helped the United States but are still awaiting U.S. visas to escape Afghanistan and almost certain torture and death at the hands of the Taliban.
Major General Hank Taylor:
The U.S. military remains focused on the present mission: to facilitate the safe evacuation of U.S. citizens, SIVs and Afghans at risk, to get these personnel out of Afghanistan as quickly and as safely as possible.
Katherine Gypson:
An uncertain end to a war that cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and often lacked a clear definition for victory.
U.S. President Joe Biden:
I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past, the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely when the conflict is not in the national interest of the United States. Of doubling down on the civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces.
Katherine Gypson:
Since 2001, four U.S. presidents — two Democrats and two Republicans — have struggled to end the influence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Biden said he would not hand over the United States’ longest-ever conflict to a fifth commander-in-chief.
Katherine Gypson:
America’s war in Afghanistan began after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. U.S. forces drove out the Taliban that harbored the al-Qaida terrorists. 20 years later, U.S. troops are leaving, and the Taliban are back in power. What is America’s legacy? Here’s our senior diplomatic correspondent Cindy Saine.
Cindy Saine, Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, VOA:
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four American jetliners, crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon and one into a Pennsylvania field. A total of 2,997 people were killed. Then-U.S. President George W. Bush was quick to respond.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush:
I can hear you; the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
Cindy Saine:
Bush ordered the bombing of al-Qaida training facilities in Afghanistan and a combination of U.S. air power and Afghan tribal alliances ousted the Taliban regime within weeks.
Kabul residents danced in the streets and men shaved off their beards, which were then required by the Taliban.
Bush decided to invade Iraq, and to widen the mission in Afghanistan, seeking to rebuild the country in the model of an American-style democracy.
U.S. troops and aid workers helped rebuild Afghanistan, focusing on empowering girls and women, who were not allowed to attend school or work outside the home under Taliban rule.
But the Taliban quickly regrouped and began their years of armed resistance, including suicide attacks on Afghan civilians.
Some experts say the unclear U.S. goals from the start in Afghanistan may have been the “original sin” in America’s 20-year involvement.
Jonathan Schroden, CNA:
President Bush at the time felt compelled to leave Afghanistan better than he found it. And while he certainly wouldn't call it ‘nation-building,’ he was willing to engage in some degree of that in order to try and again make Afghanistan a better place than it was before. But his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld absolutely wanted to just get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan as quickly as he possibly could. And that tension really had a lot of deleterious effects early on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan that arguably the U.S. mission there never recovered from.
Cindy Saine:
In 2009, then-President Barack Obama surged troops and contractors into the country in his first term, pushing the U.S. presence to more than 100,000 before announcing a drawdown years later that left a force about one-tenth of that size.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama:
For many of you, this will be your last tour in Afghanistan.
Cindy Saine:
Obama’s successor, former President Donald Trump, vowed to bring U.S. troops home from “forever wars” - and had his top officials sign a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw U.S. troops in 14 months.
But after Bush, Obama and Trump presided over the war, it is current U.S. President Joe Biden who is ending U.S. involvement.
Defending the chaotic U.S. departure this week, Biden said the U.S. accomplished its goals in Afghanistan many years ago when it pushed the Taliban from power and killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
U.S. President Joseph R. Biden:
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
Cindy Saine:
But for Afghans, both at home and abroad, emotions are raw after the rapid Taliban takeover of the country and amid images of Americans and other foreigners fleeing Kabul.
Nooralhaq Nasimi is the founder of a charitable organization that helps Afghan refugees in London.
Nooralhaq Nasimi, Afghanistan & Central Asian Association:
We have to understand that building a nation and building a democracy is not a matter of time for 20 years. This is a long-term... a long-term solution. A long-term commitment should be made by the U.S. and the international community. Afghanistan just had the opportunity and intervention in 2001, but 20 years is not enough to build a better future for the people.
Cindy Saine:
Professor Samar Ali tells VOA how Afghans view America over the long term depends on what happens next.
Samar Ali, Vanderbilt University:
I think that the past week, the past several days, have been incredibly damaging. I think that the trust has eroded between us in very serious ways. And one of the things that we must immediately do is cut the red tape around accepting Afghan refugees.
Cindy Saine:
The rapid collapse of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is likely to force Washington to think long and hard about sending troops abroad in the future, says Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group.
Ian Bremmer, the Eurasia Group:
The legacy of the past 20 years will be a United States that is much, much, much more reluctant to engage in military led nation-building exercises anywhere around the world.
Cindy Saine:
Other experts say they see a short-term blow to U.S. credibility after troops leave Afghanistan, but add it is too soon to know whether there will be lasting damage to critical U.S. alliances. Cindy Saine, VOA News
Katherine Gypson:
Criticism of President Biden from many here in in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere is because he was much more optimistic about the strength of the Afghan government and its forces ever since announcing the pullout.
U.S. President Joseph R. Biden:
We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it — we’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely. And we will do it in full coordination with our allies and partners,
We’ll continue to support the government of Afghanistan. We will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defenses and Security Forces. And along with our partners, we have trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel today and hundreds of thousands over the past two decades. And they’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost.
Reporter:
Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
President Biden:
No, it is not. Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.
Reporter:
Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
President Biden:
That is not true.
Reporter:
Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?
President Biden:
That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we were still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
Katherine Gypson:
I got to know some of Afghanistan’s women during my time on the ground in Afghanistan in 2011 when I was there training female journalists. They wanted to talk to me about what it was like to be a journalist reporting openly on their government and society and working together to build a new country. I can’t help but think of whether they are on the tarmac at Kabul Airport now waiting to be evacuated out of the country they wanted to help build.
Originally, my colleague Ayesha Tanzeem was supposed to host this episode of The Inside Story.
She insisted on going back to Afghanistan one final time to report and host. She is safe.
And before Ayesha left the country, she gave us a first-person account of the rush to leave.
Ayesha Tanzeem, VOA Middle East Correspondent:
I'm in a safe space right now hiding inside a colleague's house but the last couple of days in Afghanistan have been a little harrowing. Every single night, I woke up with a jolt, thinking, has there been a blast. Is it gunfire, do I need to wake up and check? Sometimes I was just construction nearby, but just the anxiety of being in a war zone and knowing that Kabul could come under attack any day was just was in my subconscious so that I would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, and there was the sporadic gunfire that is not unusual in Afghanistan, you often hear it in the distance, sometimes in the middle of the night. Often when people are celebrating, and they use fireworks, you try to figure out whether it's fireworks or gunfire.
We heard Sunday that the Taliban were at the gates of the city. My colleague was at the passport office, and he called me and said they're telling everybody to rush out and go home. They're here. I was at a clinic, getting a COVID-19 test for my flight. I tweeted the information as all reporters do, and I walked back to the guest house. There was no other way when I walked out to the clinic, it was obvious, I would just have to walk back, because everybody was rushing, no taxi was stopping the cars were speeding up, everybody was, if not running, literally jogging. You could see that they were all rushing to get somewhere. By the time I reached my guest house where, which is where I stay with other journalists, it was very obvious that the Taliban were not entering the city, yet they had issued an official statement that they will stay at the gates of Kabul, that they were looking for a peaceful transfer of power, they were going to negotiate for it.
Our information was that negotiations were going on both in Doha, and in the power circles of Afghanistan, a very senior Afghan leader, were involved. President Ashraf Ghani, of course, but also Dr Abdullah Abdullah who has the High Peace Council for national reconciliation, and former President Hamid Karzai around the airport, the situation was worse. The crowds were in the thousands they were all trying to get to the airport. And when our car got closer, we could hear sporadic gunfire. We could also see when we got close enough, the Taliban were trying to do crowd control, they were beating back people with batons, long batons and sometimes I couldn't tell whether the sporadic gunfire was coming from Taliban trying to tell people to stay away or whether somebody in the crowd had guns.
Anyway, the situation wasn't good, and we needed to get out of there right away which we did. So from then on, I've just been staying under the radar about monitoring the situation both myself and I have other friends or colleagues who are out on the streets. The streets are mostly calm now. And the Taliban seem to be behaving the unsaid or unseen part of the story is those thousands or maybe millions of people who decided to stay home and not get out, because they were anxious. They did not know how Taliban would behave. One thing that I noticed on the streets of Kabul was that women were absent, you know, until a few days ago you would walk out and there were lots of women on the streets of Kabul, in all kinds of dresses from a very conservative worker to a very modern looking jeans Long Tunic and a scarf on their head. No more anybody, maybe three or four was the max I saw walking on the streets, was fully covered with their faces also covered. I had also changed my attire when I went out for the airport I was fully covered and my head was covered and my face was covered, and the men had changed their dresses, you would usually see a lot of men on the streets of Kabul with jeans and T shirts. But now everybody was in the local dress which is called skavij cometh which is again a long Tunic and loose pants. So you saw the change in Kabul, overnight, and the nerves are, you know, at breaking point right now, ethnic minorities that I have talked to in the city are not sure about their future Hazaras they're particularly worried and they think Taliban might come looking for them and kill them, local journalists are worried, activists are worried, you know, artists are worried, the Taliban have announced general amnesty, they're saying, they will not go after anyone they will be no killing no bloodshed, it'll be a completely peaceful transfer what people are waiting and watching, is how disciplined, is their force on the ground, they are fighters will they stick to the leadership orders or will they do their own thing, which can be anything from harassment to killing. So, from Kabul, Ayesha Tanzeem VOA news.
Katherine Gypson:
U-N Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned “the world is watching” as he called on the Taliban to exercise “utmost restraint” to protect lives. A Security Council statement called for a new government that includes the “full, equal and meaningful participation of women. It is Afghan women and children who have borne the heaviest weight of the war and fear what is to come.
Arash Arabasadi, Correspondent, VOA:
The government of Afghanistan collapsed Sunday under the weight of the Taliban’s shock and awe campaign. These images from Al-Jazeera show militants in the presidential palace in Kabul. Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, had already fled the country.
Weeks of intense fighting pushed civilians from their homes. Most of them are women and children.
Five fleeing families found refuge in this small house. Among them are three widows and many orphans with nowhere else to go and for whom school is no longer an option. Displaced widow Guldasta says she lost her husband and three sons to the fighting. She tells VOA her grandchildren now provide for the family as trash collectors in Kabul.
Guldasta, Displaced Widow:
Look at these little kids. They are collecting paper and plastic from the garbage. Is this work for little kids? What did ((Afghan President)) Ashraf Ghani do for us? What did ((Former Afghan President Hamid)) Karzai do? What did Taliban do for us? They widowed our girls. We’ve been here for months. No cooking. No meat. No good clothes or shoes. They are still trying to get medicine.
Arash Arabasadi:
With the Taliban firmly in control of Afghanistan, those bringing humanitarian aid face tough choices.
Eileen McCarthy, Norwegian Refugee Council:
We are aiming to be able to stay and deliver the assistance that is really critical right now, but also have contingency plans for the if the situation continues to deteriorate, how we keep our staff both – both national and internationals like myself – safe.
Arash Arabasadi:
Human rights workers worry most about Afghan girls, who under Taliban rule were not allowed to go to school, and women, who could not go out in public without a full body covering and male escort.
Mary Akrami, Afghan Women Network:
Taliban still have the same attitude, same philosophy for their own self that they have their own world. It’s really not possible, really it is difficult, for all people of Afghanistan, I’m sure, and particularly for women and the youth.
Arash Arabasadi
A displaced man identifying himself as M. Omar tells VOA his family just wants a normal life.
M. Omar, Displaced Man:
Taliban, you have mothers and sisters like us. The government, too, you have families and mothers and sisters. For God’s sake, stop the fighting! For the sake of the holy book, stop the fighting. If there is no war, we can go home and work to provide for our families. We left everything behind.
Arash Arabasadi:
These displaced Afghans say the Taliban set landmines around the homes they fled. They say their children lost limbs. With the Afghan government’s collapse, these families’ dreams of a life free from Taliban rule now seem as bleak as ever. Arash Arabasadi, VOA News.
Katherine Gypson:
That’s all for now. Keep up with the latest developments in Afghanistan and elsewhere at VOANews.com. Stay connected on social media at VOANews on Instagram and Facebook.
Follow me on Twitter at kgyp. I am Katherine Gypson. Come back next week for The Inside Story.
