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At the White House, Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser,
held meetings on Afghanistan with the No. 2 officials from relevant
agencies at least once a week. The subject of SIVs was also discussed at meetings of Cabinet principals led by Jake Sullivan. These discussions
focused largely on ways to improve the visa program—adding staff in
Kabul and Washington, identifying choke points, speeding up processing.
But bringing all the SIV applicants to safety would still take at least
two years. And it would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of other
Afghans, who had American affiliations but were ineligible for the
visas, with no hope of getting out. Advocates pressed the administration
to create a new program that would give these Afghans priority access as refugees to the U.S.

It was too late to rely on fixing a broken bureaucracy. A catastrophe
was coming. But April turned to May, American troops began to leave Afghanistan, and still the fate of endangered Afghans remained unclear. “Studying a problem for too long is an excuse to do nothing,” Becca
Heller, a co-founder of IRAP who is now its executive director, told me.
“You don’t study a problem in an emergency.”

IRAP and other groups created an unusual coalition of veteran,
humanitarian, and religious organizations called Evacuate Our Allies.
They were given meetings with mid-level White House officials who
listened and took notes, saying little. At one meeting, when an advocate mentioned that some NATO allies were already bringing Afghans to their countries, an official suddenly perked up: “Which countries are willing
to take people?” The official had misunderstood—the allies were taking their own Afghan partners, not America’s.


By late May, American troops were leaving Afghanistan so quickly that
the last ones—except for a force of about 1,000 to protect the embassy
and the airport—would be out by early July, far sooner than Biden’s September 11 deadline. The pace caught the administration’s top policy
makers by surprise. “Speed is safety” was the Pentagon’s mantra, and the withdrawal was a superb example of military planning and logistics.
Bases across Afghanistan were efficiently packed up, closed down, and
handed off to the Afghan army without a single American casualty, and
C-17s made hundreds of flights out with the remaining matériel of the
American war, computers and coffee makers all accounted for, leaving the Afghans who worked on the bases behind.

On May 26, a small group of senators from both parties met with senior
White House advisers in the Situation Room. The senators argued for mass evacuations—not just of SIV applicants, but of other Afghans at risk
because of their association with the United States. Senator Richard
Blumenthal of Connecticut later told me, “I remember our expressing the
sense very directly that there had to be an evacuation, beginning right
then, of thousands of our Afghan partners to Guam. The response
basically was ‘We’re on it. Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing.’ ”

That same day, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, told reporters, “There are plans being developed very, very
rapidly here” to bring out “not just interpreters but a lot of other
people that have worked with the United States.” Asked about an airlift, Milley replied, “That is a way of doing it.”


But the White House immediately shut the chairman down. “I can tell you
that we have no plans for evacuations at this time,” a National Security Council spokesperson said. “The State Department is processing SIV applications in Kabul. They are focused on ensuring that the system
functions quickly and consistent with U.S. security and other
application requirements.” There would be no more talk of airlifting
Afghans to safety.

As troops departed, the Taliban launched a spring offensive and closed
in on provincial capitals throughout the south. Insurgent checkpoints
blocked the roads to Kabul. “I’m gravely concerned for a very
precipitous dissolution of the security environment,” Crow, a member of
the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, told me last
March. “We are underestimating the timeline for what would happen for a post-U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan. I think it would be far quicker and
more devastating than our current assessments indicate.”

Alex mccoy of common defense, the progressive veterans group, viewed the
Biden administration as the best hope for a new U.S. foreign policy of restraint, based on human rights, not militarism. This meant not just
ending the war but also saving the Afghans whose lives would be
jeopardized by an American departure. McCoy was seen as an ally by the
NSC; he spoke frequently with a senior official in the White House. On
May 24, McCoy texted the official asking to talk about the lack of
progress on SIVs. The official called him late that night as she was
driving home from the White House.

The official told McCoy that Guam raised legal problems as a U.S.
territory. This confused McCoy—the whole point of Guam was to house
Afghans somewhere on U.S. territory that was safe for them and that
would allay American fears of terror on the mainland while their cases
were processed. The governor of Guam, where 8,000 hotel rooms stood
empty because of COVID-19, would soon put out a welcome mat. But the
State Department was concerned that setting foot in Guam would give
Afghans a legal right to claim asylum in the U.S. even if they didn’t
pass security vetting. This was a risk that might involve a tiny
fraction of refugees, and by law those found to be potential threats
would be sent back.


The official moved on to the larger problem. National-security officials
were in favor of evacuations, she said—but the president’s political advisers worried that the right would hammer Biden for resettling
thousands of Muslims while historic numbers of Central American refugees
were already overrunning the southern border. The Afghan evacuees would
become part of one giant immigration disaster, exploited hourly on Fox
News, when the administration still had to pass a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. “Remember, this kind of crisis was coming at the
worst possible time,” a senior administration official told me. “In the spring there was wall-to-wall coverage of the border—‘Who are these
people coming into our country?’—and at the same time we’re
contemplating bringing in tens of thousands of Afghans. I feel
passionately about it, but politically it could be risky.”

The administration countered every urgent proposal with objections so unconvincing that they suggested a deeper, unexpressed resistance. The
Guam option—already suspect because of the notional Afghans who might
fail screening and need to be returned—was downgraded to highly unlikely
by the approach of typhoon season. When, in mid-June, I asked another
senior administration official about Afghans who lived outside Kabul and
were quickly losing any exit route, he replied, “The vast majority of
SIV applicants, based on the work that could be done on this, are in or
around Kabul.” This was untrue. Using a Facebook group that his
white-paper co-author, Kim Staffieri, had created, Matt Zeller polled
SIV applicants and received 4,000 responses: Half of them were outside
Kabul, with little or no way of safely reaching the capital with their
family; hardly any international flights were taking off from provincial cities.


Vietnam was the nightmare scenario that no one wanted to discuss. In
July, when a reporter asked Biden if he foresaw any parallels in
Afghanistan, the president retorted the way he had when he’d answered
the question about his moral responsibility for Afghan women’s rights: “None whatsoever. Zero.” The Taliban had nothing like the strength of
the North Vietnamese army, he insisted. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an
embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” But the Vietnam
precedent was inescapable. On a trip to Kabul in 2016, I had heard that American diplomats were studying old cables sent between the Saigon
embassy and Washington in the last days of South Vietnam. In 2015 the
Obama administration had conducted a secret analysis of a potential
final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, and Vietnam always lurked in
the background of discussions, according to a former White House
official who took part. The analysis showed that, if the U.S. reduced
its troops to a reinforced Kabul embassy, there would be two dire
consequences. First, the former official told me, the ability to gather intelligence on the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State would “drop precipitously.”

Second, any evacuation of thousands of Americans from a landlocked
country with poor or nonexistent infrastructure would come down to “a
single point of failure” at the Kabul airport, and it would be
“dangerously vulnerable” to attack. “This was extremely risky short of paratroopers coming in,” the former official said. He added that the disturbing evacuation analysis was likely “a major factor” in Obama’s decision to keep almost 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

From the April 2010 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on the U.S. in Afghanistan


The Vietnam analogy raised the specter of what Washington insiders call “optics.” Mass evacuations would evoke images of one of the most vivid humiliations in the history of U.S. foreign policy, and those images
would conjure an impression of chaos and defeat. It would make the
reality all too clear: America had lost another war. The September 11 withdrawal date was an effort to blur that fact, suggesting the
honorable completion of what had started exactly 20 years before—not its tragic failure.

“Every week, someone was using the word optics to me,” Chris Purdy, the director of Veterans for American Ideals, a project of Human Rights
First, told me. “ ‘We have to be concerned about optics.’ I’m thinking,
They’re going to be murdered in the streets—that’s pretty bad optics.”

Bearded man with gun sits on hood of Humvee with 2 others standing
behind with a machine gun, with other cars and crowd in background
Taliban fighters on top of a Humvee they seized from Afghan forces when
they took Kabul (Jim Huylebroek)
Most efforts to avoid bad optics avoid the truth and result in worse
optics. In Vietnam, the last American ambassador in Saigon, Graham
Martin, and his boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believed that
early evacuations of South Vietnamese, when the fall of Saigon might be
weeks or months off, would cause the government’s abrupt collapse. Biden-administration officials made the same argument about Afghanistan.
“The combination of two things—our belief that we had more time, a lot
more time, and that we didn’t want to precipitate a crisis of confidence
in the government—that’s what led us to the pace at which we were doing this,” Antony Blinken told me. A senior White House official argued that
if early evacuations and the announcement of a priority refugee program
had been followed by the collapse of the Afghan government, “the charge
would have been that we undermined them.” (No White House official would speak with me on the record about Afghanistan.)


In June, Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, came to the White House and
asked Biden to hold off on evacuating Afghans, to avoid initiating mass
panic. Afterward, Ghani met with a few members of Congress. Jason Crow
used his time to make the case for evacuations. “I know what you’re
trying to do, Mr. Crow,” Ghani replied with some heat. “It’s undermining what we’re trying to do in creating some stability and security.” Ghani didn’t move Crow, but he gave the administration another reason not to
do what it already didn’t want to do. Biden later made Ghani’s plea public.

The spectacle of airlifts out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, of
Afghans from civil society crossing borders to take advantage of a new
American refugee program, would indeed have signified a lack of
confidence in the Ghani government, and perhaps induced something like
the chaos that would come in late summer. But Afghanistan’s fate was
sealed the moment Biden gave his speech in April. No one in Washington
or Kabul honestly believed that the Afghan government could survive the Americans’ departure. “They were done with us,” Hamdullah Mohib, Ghani’s
national security adviser, told me. “The allies were fed up with us, and
the Afghan people were also fed up with us.” The pretense of supporting
a stable government gave everyone in power a chance to save face at the
expense of ordinary Afghans.

David Frum: The one thing that could’ve changed the war in Afghanistan

The Biden administration thought Kabul wouldn’t fall before 2022. Most outside experts agreed. “I can tell you, having sat through every single meeting that took place on this topic and having read every single
intelligence assessment, military document, State Department cable,” the senior White House official told me, “there was nobody anywhere in our government, even up until a day or two before Kabul fell, that foresaw
the collapse of the government and army before the end of our troop
withdrawal at the end of August, and most of the projections were that
there would still be weeks to months before we would face the very real prospect of the collapse of Kabul.”


But while waiting for Kabul to fall, the administration could have timed
the military withdrawal to support evacuations, rather than pulling out
all the hard assets while leaving all the soft targets behind. It could
have created an interagency task force, vested with presidential
authority and led by an evacuations czar—the only way to force different agencies to coordinate resources in order to solve a problem that is
limited in scope but highly complex. It could have assembled
comprehensive lists of thousands of names, locations, email addresses,
and phone numbers—not just for interpreters like Khan, but for others at risk, including women like Hawa. It could have begun to quietly organize flights on commercial aircraft in the spring—moving 1,000 people a
week—and gradually increased the numbers. It could have used the
prospect of lifting sanctions and giving international recognition to a
future Taliban government as leverage, demanding secure airfields and
safe passage for Afghans whom the Americans wanted to bring out with
them. It could have used airfields in Herāt, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad,
and Kandahar while those cities remained out of Taliban control. It
could have drawn up emergency plans for Afghan evacuations and rehearsed
them in interagency drills. It could have included NATO allies in the
planning. It could have shown imagination and initiative. But the administration did none of this.

The VA augmented its mental-health hotline in case Afghanistan veterans
began to see their interpreters beheaded on social media.
Instead, it studied the problem in endless meetings. While studying the problem, the government accelerated visa processing and reduced the wait
time from four years to just under two. The number of SIV holders and
family members reaching the U.S. rose from fewer than 300 a month
through the winter and spring to 513 in June. That month, a COVID
outbreak at the embassy stopped interviews for several weeks. With
Afghanistan visibly collapsing, new applications arrived in record
numbers. The administration looked for countries where applicants could
be flown and housed while their cases were processed. Negotiations with
various European allies, Central Asian countries, and Persian Gulf
kingdoms consumed the State Department’s time and energy, but no firm
deals were made. Why would other countries accept U.S.-affiliated
Afghans whom America regarded as too potentially dangerous to bring onto
its own soil?


These efforts were always several steps behind the deteriorating reality
in Afghanistan. This sluggishness in the face of impending calamity
continued the same self-deception, prevarication, and groupthink—the
same inability to grasp the hard truths of Afghanistan—that had plagued
the entire 20-year war.

As the advocates’ desperation grew, some of them began to harbor a
suspicion that they were being played by the administration—that all the meetings in the Situation Room and the backgrounders with mid-level
officials were meant to give an impression of movement that would never
result in action.

From the May 1980 issue: Afghanistan, crossroads of conflict

“What they thought they were going to do was pull all the U.S. assets
out, and the Afghan government would hold on long enough so that, when
it collapsed, there would be no photographs of the evacuation,” Mike
Breen, of Human Rights First, told me. “There wouldn’t be a Saigon
moment, because there wouldn’t be any Americans around and any American helicopters to hang off. They thought the Afghan military was going to
die in place to buy them time.” This scenario recalled the “decent interval” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had sought between the
end of the American war in Vietnam and the demise of the South
Vietnamese government, to avoid the optics of an American defeat. As
Biden had put it to Richard Holbrooke, this was how Nixon and Kissinger
tried to get away with it.

Read: “This is not Saigon. This is worse than Saigon.”


Steve Miska, a leader of Evacuate Our Allies, concluded that the main
obstacle must be the president. Nothing else made sense. Miska, a
retired Army lieutenant colonel, thought that if he could just find a
way to reach Biden, the president would understand the issue’s
importance to veterans. If only Beau were alive, Miska thought, he would
have been able to get through to his father. Miska approached Denis
McDonough, the secretary of veterans affairs, who immediately grasped
the implication for his constituency. The department augmented its mental-health hotline in case Afghanistan vets began to see their
interpreters beheaded on social media.

Sam Ayres, a law student and former Army Ranger who had served three
tours in Afghanistan as an enlisted infantryman, sent a letter to
several people he knew in the administration, explaining why the issue
mattered so personally to many veterans. He wrote that the faces and
voices of individual interpreters stayed with American troops long after
they returned home. He described driving past Dover Air Force Base,
where the caskets of two of his Army teammates had arrived in 2018 and
2019. “For the next couple hours of my drive, I was thrust back into the ongoing debate in my mind about whether our service—and the loss of teammates, American and Afghan—was all a waste,” Ayres wrote. “Many of
us veterans will spend the rest of our lives grappling with this
question. At the very least, I hope we’ll be able to feel we did
something honorable over there in our small corner of the war. That
would provide some solace. But coming to that conclusion will be even
harder if the Afghans who went out on missions with us are left to die
at the hands of our onetime enemies.” The letter received a pro forma response.

During the final withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden’s main—at times, it seemed, his only—focus was on keeping the number of American casualties
as close to zero as possible. He didn’t reckon with the invisible harm
of adding moral injury to military failure.


Within the administration, a few indicators were starting to flash red.
By July the CIA, which had given the Afghan government a year back in
April, now judged that it might fall in a matter of weeks. As it moved
out of its bases around the country, the CIA decided to keep open a base
called Eagle, near the Kabul airport, as a transit point in the event
that the agency’s counterparts in the Afghan National Directorate of Security, along with their families, had to be evacuated quickly.

On July 13, Secretary Blinken received a “dissent-channel cable” from
the embassy in Kabul, written by diplomats who disagreed with official
policy. The cable warned that the Taliban were making rapid advances,
and that the collapse of the Ghani government could happen within weeks.
It urged the Biden administration to begin emergency evacuations of
Afghan allies. Around the same time, the Atrocity Early Warning Task
Force, an executive-branch committee, began drafting an assessment of
how to prevent massacres in Afghanistan after a Taliban takeover.

Throughout the summer, the National Security Council held weekly virtual briefings for friendly groups like Common Defense, to enlist their help
in amplifying the administration’s message and defusing criticism. Alex
McCoy attended the briefings, but by July he had become so skeptical of
what he was hearing that he began to secretly record the sessions. The
briefing official was Carlyn Reichel, the White House speechwriter who
had phoned him with the good news in advance of Biden’s speech in April.
Week after week, in answer to increasingly pointed questions about SIVs
and evacuations, Reichel kept offering the same vaguely positive
phrases, which had the effect of deflating any hope of action: “We are exploring all options and planning for every contingency”; “I can assure you that we are working on it and that it has very senior levels of
attention in this building.”


On July 14, Reichel informed McCoy and others that the president was
about to announce a new initiative, called Operation Allies Refuge. The
U.S. government would soon begin bringing SIV holders on flights to
America. Reichel called them “relocation flights for interested and
eligible Afghans.” The phrasing was curious; it avoided the word
evacuation, and it suggested that some visa holders didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. On July 8, Biden had claimed that “fewer than half” of SIV holders had chosen to leave. This became a persistent talking point, and
a false one: Almost all of the remaining Afghans with visas were in
official limbo, waiting for the United Nations to put them on flights to
the U.S., or for family members to receive passports and visas. The
president, echoed by his officials, was trying to blame the Afghans for
their own entrapment.

Still, with a presidential speech, a named operation, and planned
flights, the administration finally appeared to be taking action. “It
seemed like they were belatedly meeting the concerns we were raising,”
McCoy later told me. But nothing happened until July 30, when one
charter flight brought 221 SIV holders and family members to Fort Lee,
outside Richmond, Virginia. These were Afghans whose visas had already
been approved; the U.S. government was simply accelerating their
arrival. McCoy began to think that Operation Allies Refuge was a “performative stunt,” intended to convince ordinary voters in, say, Michigan and Pennsylvania who might have seen something on TV about
endangered Afghans that the administration had it covered.

After the military’s lightning withdrawal, the embassy was still moving
at the pace of a mission with months to go. “From our perspective, the
State Department was relying on a lot of hope that things weren’t going
to fall apart in the face of increasingly bleak intelligence reports on
a daily basis,” a soldier who remained in Afghanistan throughout the
summer told me. “The military was just waiting for a decision point or guidance from the State Department, and it never came until things fell apart.”


On August 2, the administration finally announced a priority refugee
program, which it had been discussing since the spring, for several
categories of vulnerable Afghans who didn’t qualify for SIVs. But no
Afghan could use the program—it existed only on paper, because there was
no infrastructure for processing refugees in the neighboring countries
to which they might flee. More relocation flights brought more
interested and eligible SIV families to the U.S.; by mid-August the
total was just under 2,000 people. The administration continued to
explore all options and plan for every contingency. Major cities across Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. The Atrocity Early Warning Task Force
finished its assessment on potential massacres and was about to start
planning for ways to prevent them. An official who worked on the
assessment later told me, “It was finalized the week before everything
went to shit.”

IV.
FLOWERS
When Hawa, the Afghan special-forces lieutenant, learned from the media
that her U.S. counterparts were about to leave Bagram Air Base, she was stunned. “Really?” she asked the American women on the base. The
Americans apologized—they hadn’t believed it would happen either. To
Hawa the Americans were still needed, and the future looked dire without
them.

The shock in the Afghan army was widespread. The departure of foreign
troops, contractors, technical support, and military intelligence dealt
a fatal blow to morale. The Afghans’ job was now to hold out for a few
months and then die in place.


Hawa was transferred to the Afghan special forces’ base in Kabul. A few
days later, in the predawn darkness on July 2, the Americans packed up
Bagram, switched off the electricity, and flew out of the nerve center
of the war without telling the new Afghan commander.

In Kabul, Hawa trained new Female Tactical Platoons and awaited word on
her visa application from Captain Alice Spence. On July 15, Spence
texted her about Operation Allies Refuge: “Hi sweet Hawa, USA has good
news and will evacuate many Afghans soon. I am still working on your application. Please stay safe and we will get you out.”

“That’s really good news,” Hawa replied. “Thank you so much my kind azizam.” She asked if her younger sister could be included in the
evacuation. Spence said that she would try. By July 31 she and her group
of U.S.-military women had completed paperwork for several dozen FTPs
and sent it to the State Department.

Talibs had a practice of killing any female troops they found. In early
August, as the Taliban conquered province after province, Hawa’s
commander told the FTPs to take 20 days’ leave and go home for their own safety. Hawa knew that this was the end of her service. “That day was
the bitterest day of my life,” she told me. And yet she still didn’t believe that the men with beards, long hair, and AK-47s would be able to
enter the capital. Kabul was reinforced with the Afghan army’s best
troops, including commandos she had fought alongside. Hawa thought they
would keep the Taliban out at any cost. The foreign forces wouldn’t
allow it, either. They would return and defend the Afghan government—or
what had all the fighting and suffering been for?


In southeastern afghanistan, Khan was closely following news from
Washington. The announcement of Operation Allies Refuge raised his
hopes; so did a bill passed by Congress at the end of July that
increased the cap on Afghan SIVs by 8,000 and allowed applicants to
defer their medical exam until they reached the U.S. But the sound of
fighting kept getting closer to the center of his town, and the
electricity kept going out in the rented house where he, Mina, and their
small son were hunkered down. When the Taliban announced a new policy of clemency for interpreters who confessed and asked for forgiveness, Khan
saw a trap to keep Afghans like him from trying to escape, so they could
then be slaughtered. The murder of his family members and the
threatening letter at his back gate had made the Talibs’ views on interpreters clear enough.

Khan’s family’s interview at the U.S. embassy, one of the last steps
before visas would be issued, was canceled in June because of the COVID outbreak. They were given a new appointment on July 29. The Taliban had
set up several checkpoints along the road to Kabul, where they had
beheaded an interpreter in May. Khan and Mina decided to hire a more
expensive ambulance taxi to the capital rather than risk a regular one.
Her pregnancy gave them a good cover story, backed by a copy of her
ultrasound and a bottle of prescription medicine. She hid their
documents and a USB flash drive under her robe. Khan had grown his beard
out, put on ragged clothes, and wiped his phone clean—the Taliban looked
at everything, even Google search histories.

On the road they encountered two Taliban checkpoints. They were allowed
through the first without being stopped; at the second they were stopped
and insurgents glanced inside before letting the ambulance continue. But
Khan saw them questioning passengers in other vehicles, mostly young men
in their 20s and early 30s with no turbans or beards. “I think they were searching for people who worked with U.S. forces,” he told me later.


In Kabul the family had to keep changing their lodging as each place
began to seem unsafe. Khan heard accounts of targeted killings of
government workers that went unreported in international media. The city
was filling up with refugees from the fighting in other provinces. He
finally found a room in a cheap hotel, near the international green
zone, that was a way station for Afghans like him—interpreters and
others hoping for a flight out.

Children looking out a bus window at night
A bus convoy full of Afghans seeking to flee the country drives through
the night toward the Kabul airport on August 22. It navigated
checkpoints manned by both Taliban fighters and CIA-backed
paramilitaries before entering the airport via the northwestern gate.
(Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
The interview at the U.S. embassy lasted no more than five minutes. Khan mentioned Mohammad’s death, the threatening letter, Mina’s pregnancy—a few more weeks and she would no longer be allowed to fly. They had
barely left the embassy when Khan received a text with instructions for
their medical exams. Ordinarily the wait would have been months, but the
exams took place on August 2, at a cost of $1,414 for the family. Khan
was running out of money.


Everything was moving quickly now. The office of Jason Crow, the
Colorado congressman, brought the family to the attention of the State Department, which expedited Khan’s case (I had alerted Crow’s office to their situation and provided Khan’s family with other help). His lawyer
from IRAP, Julie Kornfeld, was trying to obtain plane tickets with the
help of an organization called Miles4Migrants. Khan went to a travel
agency and found a scene of panic. Seats were going at famine prices.
“If you do not book tickets soon, they will not be available, because
people are leaving,” the travel agent told Khan. The visas might still
take weeks to be issued, and Khan was down to his last $50. But if he
returned to his hometown he might never get out. All of these clocks
were ticking against him and his family: money, visas, tickets, Mina’s pregnancy, the Taliban.

Khan decided to stay in Kabul and wait.

Even with the scenes of chaos at travel agencies and banks and passport offices, even with the Taliban just 20 miles away, a paralyzing denial
settled over people in Kabul. It was possible to know that the city was
in imminent danger and at the same time to believe that it couldn’t
fall. A surprising number of Afghan Americans traveled to Kabul in the
summer of 2021 for weddings or family visits. The same denial prevailed
in Washington: On the weekend of August 14–15, most of the senior
leadership of the Biden administration was away on vacation. The fall of
Kabul would always happen sometime in the future.

From the November 1985 issue: The Soviet invasion and the ordeal of Afghanistan



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