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you like to drink?”–“Orange juice.” The paratrooper argued with consular
officers who wanted to send people back out of the airport for lack of paperwork. “SIV to me meant nothing, because that thing will take 24 months,” he said. “What, are we going to expect them to get on Wi-Fi and fill out a quick application on State.gov while they’re waiting outside
the gate? ‘You washed dishes at the embassy—you’re in.’ ”

Most of the paratrooper’s activity was unofficial. The chain of command almost certainly knew, could have stopped it, and would have done so if
the troops had made serious mistakes. So they were careful not to
venture too far outside the gate—less out of fear for their safety than
worry that a firefight with a Talib would shut the whole thing down.

Just inside the perimeter, consular officers had to make instant
decisions about whom to admit, torn between their fluctuating rules and
the human faces in front of them. Though State Department officials from
around the world had volunteered to go to Kabul, only 40 consular
officers were on hand to deal with the huge flow at the airport. On
August 19 John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, arrived to
oversee the evacuation. His top priority was getting American citizens, green-card holders, and Afghan embassy staff into the airport. Talibs
kept blocking entry for some evacuees and shutting down gates when the
crowds became unmanageable; the Americans also closed gates when they
received intelligence about terror threats. Bass resorted to using
unmarked gates to avoid the crowds at the public ones; at times, to keep
this official evacuation going, he had to refuse entry to groups of
Afghans who were part of the unofficial effort.

When Representatives Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer made an unannounced
visit on August 24, two senior diplomats broke down in tears and told
Moulton they were “completely overwhelmed.”

Children and parents lost each other. Troops saw children trampled
underfoot. A Marine saw a Talib knife a boy who was climbing over a
wall. A tear-gas canister struck the side of an 8-year-old girl’s face, melting her skin. A new mother staggered through the gate with her baby,
who had just died, sobbing so hard that she threw up on the shoes of a
consular officer checking documents. By the East Gate, a stack of
corpses baked in the sun for hours. Outside the North Gate, the crushed
bodies of four babies floated in a river of sewage.

To avoid the besieged gates, U.S. troops brought women and children over
the 16-foot blast wall using ladders under cover of darkness. They paid
Afghan paramilitaries and even American Marine guards in cigarettes to
let people through. They had to make up their own priority list and find immediate grounds for saying yes or no to the immense volume of equal desperation on their phones: military women, then interpreters, then
male commandos, then embassy staff. Women, but not men; families, but no children over 15. “It’s an awful thing to make a decision about,” one soldier told me.

A man carrying a small child and looking down at a flip phone walks
quickly next to children, one reaching for his hand, with other families
in the background
An Afghan family hurries to join a group awaiting access to the
northwestern gate of the Kabul airport on August 24. (Andrew Quilty /
Agence VU’)
Many of the troops quickly realized that escorting a newly orphaned
child onto a plane to a new life would be the most important mission of
their lives. “This is going to be our legacy,” the paratrooper said, “whether we do two years in the Army, or 20 years, or 40 years.”

Khan was expecting a State Department email that would tell him when to
go to the airport and where, but it never came. (No SIVs received
specific instructions like this throughout the evacuation.) Kornfeld was
trying to get him on a flight, military or commercial. On Monday, August
16, he went with Mina and their son to the North Gate. They spent all
day in the sun, unable to get past the Taliban fighters and the crowd of thousands. Khan saw that all kinds of people were trying to
escape—ordinary shopkeepers, young men without even a national-identity card—while Afghans like him, who had checked every box, couldn’t get inside. At one point Mina was pushed to the ground. She was afraid she
would miscarry.

The next day Khan returned by himself, but Talibs with guns and
horsewhips kept him from getting anywhere close.

Before dawn on August 18, the family tried again. Khan had all of 500 afghanis—about $6—in his pocket. They left small travel bags with a food peddler and, with just biscuits and water, their documents hidden under Mina’s clothes, they waded into the crowd at the North Gate as the sun
was coming up over the Hindu Kush mountains. They decided that they
would stay at the airport until they got out or died. Talibs were firing
in the air, and several of them kicked Khan and beat him with rifle
butts and a lead pipe. His son screamed at the sight of the men with
long hair and beards. Mina kept encouraging her husband, telling him not
to lose hope.

They abandoned the North Gate and walked for almost an hour along the
airport perimeter to the Abbey Gate, on the southeast side. Here the
troops were British and Canadian, and the family wasn’t allowed through.

“Say you have a pregnant wife!” Kornfeld texted. “Say she’s in labor!”

It was no use. The family continued their odyssey until they arrived at
the South Gate, the main entrance. Here there were U.S. Marines, but
also thousands of Afghans. “Less than 300 have valid docs,” Khan texted. “All the looters and others came.” It was almost noon.

His phone rang. When he answered, an unfamiliar voice spoke his full
name. “We found your number on your work desk. You supported the
Americans. You distributed weapons and ammunition.”

“You have the wrong number,” Khan said. “I’m a university student in Khost.”

“No. We know who you are.”

There was no time to be unnerved, with the gunfire and tear gas and
people running and falling. Mina kept getting squeezed, but she wanted
to hold their position and refused to let Khan pull her out of the
crush. Their son, in Khan’s arms, was so traumatized by the Talibs that
he kept flailing at his father.

Suddenly the Marines were firing warning shots and flash-bangs to
disperse the crowd; people ran in every direction, and the way to the checkpoint was clear. Khan saw his chance and rushed forward. Mina cried
out not to be left behind, but he kept going.

Through the smoke Khan saw the figure of an older man in civilian
clothes and body armor. He was pulling in people with dark-blue U.S.
passports. Seeing Khan’s blue-green Afghan passport, the American pushed
him aside, but Khan refused to be turned away. He opened to the page
with his Special Immigrant Visa. The American looked it over. All the
years of application forms and background checks and
employment-verification letters and death threats and anxious waiting
had brought Khan to this moment. Everything was in order. He asked to go
back for his wife and son, 20 meters outside the gate. Did they have
visas? They did. Khan ran out and waved them forward.

“How much luggage?” the American asked.

“About 300 grams of documents,” Khan said.

They were inside the airport.

From hawaii, captain Spence and her American compatriots spent the days
after Hawa’s successful escape trying to save the other FTPs. They
needed an interpreter and seldom had one, relying instead on broken
English and emoji. They had to persuade the women to go out after dark,
despite a curfew enforced by Taliban checkpoints, because that was when
they had the best chance. Spence relied on one particularly resourceful
trooper in the airport who made the Afghan women his priority, bringing
them in over ladders, darting outside the fence to grab a husband
separated from his wife, a son from his mother. An attempted helicopter
rescue that Spence helped arrange through a Pentagon contact failed on
two successive nights. A few women gave up trying and fled by car to Mazar-i-Sharif or Pakistan. And all the while hundreds of others Spence didn’t know, regular army women who had heard about her from the FTPs,
were imploring her through her phone.

Everyone sensed that the window was closing. The evacuation of Afghans
appeared to be ending after just one week.
“At first I said yes to everyone,” she told me. “Then I started to say
no to men; to people without docs; to people with docs but not for their families; to people writing me really long messages, because I didn’t
have time to read them. If it was a single woman, I would be more apt to
talk to them. And then it was, honestly—it’s really terrible—if a photo spoke to me, if their words spoke to me, if their English was good, if I
sensed this person would be responsive and could get their stuff
together.” She called it “a really terrible Sophie’s Choice situation.”

Spence’s Army boss allowed her to stay off the base until August 31. She
sat in her living room alone with her phone, sleeping one or two hours a
night, eating whatever she had in the cupboard, losing 15 pounds. When
Hawa was trying to get into the airport Spence threw up from exhaustion
and stress, then felt annoyed because she didn’t have time to throw up.
Once, she looked outside and was startled to see a palm tree. She had
thought she was in Kabul. Others working on evacuations around the clock
from a Washington suburb or upstate New York had the same hallucinatory experience.

Everyone sensed that the window was closing. On August 24, the Taliban announced that only U.S.-passport and green-card holders would be
allowed near the airport. The U.S. government was going to limit its
efforts to the same group. The evacuation of Afghans appeared to be
ending after just one week.

The difference between the damned and the saved came down to three
factors. The first was character—resourcefulness, doggedness, will. The second was what Afghans call wasita—connections. The third, and most important, was sheer luck.

Najeeb Monawari possessed character and connections, but his ordeal
suggested that a malign fate was working against him. He tried to get
into the airport with his family four times through four gates and
failed each time. Many of his relatives worked for the Afghan security
forces, which controlled a “hidden” gate on the northwest side, but Panjshiris had lost their power overnight, and his relatives were unable
to do anything. At the North Gate, Afghan guards—Pashtuns from an intelligence unit in Jalalabad—were letting in their ethnic relatives
while jeering “Traitors!” at northerners like Monawari. At the Abbey
Gate, when he took a picture of the crowd to show his Green Beret
friends, an armed Talib grabbed him by the shirt and began dragging him
off. Other Talibs whipped his back and yelled, “Take him to the boss!” Monawari was carrying printed email correspondence and the useless
“emergency visa” PDF. If he uttered a word they would know he was
Panjshiri and kill him on the spot.

“This motherfucker took a picture of women!” the Talib told the boss’s bodyguard.

“The boss is busy now,” the bodyguard said. “Take his phone.”

Monawari tried to open his phone, but his fingers kept mistyping the
passcode. He finally managed to get it open. He deleted the picture. And
then he took off, into the crowd, away from the gate, pulling off the
white scarf that made him noticeable, soon losing his pursuers. He found
his family and said, “Let’s go home.”

By the morning of August 19, Monawari and his wife and three kids were exhausted. His mother was alternately praying and berating him for
coming back to Kabul. His phone rang: It was Larry Ryland, the Green
Beret weapons sergeant. Ryland, who lived outside Houston, where he ran
a military-contracting business, was in a rage at the failure to get his interpreter into the airport and out of Afghanistan. He was considering traveling to Qatar and appropriating a small turboprop plane to
personally evacuate Monawari. “If anybody deserved it, it was him and
his family,” Ryland told me. “Dude, he was probably one of the top-five people in the world I’d trust.”

Ryland was calling with a new plan. It depended on his contacts in the
Special Forces world, who had eyes on Monawari from a “satellite
country.” They set up a route for him to get to the airport, with
Afghans positioned along the way to create a diversion in case there was trouble at a Taliban checkpoint. The Special Forces operators connected
Ryland with a U.S. soldier on the inside, who would come out for
Monawari at a specific moment.

The plan also involved congressional letterhead. One of Monawari’s
colleagues in Doctors Without Borders was the niece of Jim Coyle, the
president of a New Jersey chamber of commerce, who in turn knew
Representative Malinowski. Coyle asked Malinowski to sign a letter of
support for Monawari’s entry into the airport. “This letter is
completely irregular and contrary to established procedures,” the
congressman replied. “Therefore I will be happy to sign it!” The letter
and Ryland’s word were enough to make Monawari—a rejected SIV applicant—the priority for the soldier inside the airport.

But the gate names were confusing, and the grid coordinates were
slightly off, and Monawari and his family showed up in the wrong spot.
There was no American looking for a letter from Malinowski. Then the
soldier called Monawari and told him to go as fast as he could a mile
east to another gate and look for a soft hat held high on a baton. A
mile! They ran, and with the running and his children crying and a
dehydration headache coming on he was too tired to answer the calls that
kept coming—if he answered, he feared, he would take his last breath and
die. At the second gate there was no phone signal, and no soldier
holding a soft hat high on a baton. Then the hat and the soldier were
there, 50 feet away, across the concertina wire, in front of the Hesco
bags, and Monawari pushed his family through the crowd that grew denser
and denser near the wire until he reached the barbed coils and his kids
were gone—they must have fallen underfoot, trampled, if they weren’t
crying it meant they were dead, and he opened his mouth to yell but he couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t say that he’d come back to Kabul and
done everything in his power to reach this place and now it had all
turned to shit, they were gone, there was no reason to leave, and he
started punching wildly to get people off his children.

“Your kids are here,” a Marine said.

Another Marine was carrying his 9-year-old girl over the wire. Monawari
grabbed her younger sister, and as he lifted her, a Marine pulled him
forward and he fell, the wire making a deep cut in his thumb. Then they
were brought through an opening between the Hesco bags into the airport.
Planes were waiting on the runway, with people standing in long lines. Immediately the pain of his headache and gashed thumb disappeared, and
he was overcome with happiness.

In July Monawari had applied for Canadian immigration. At the airport he discovered that he had a choice: He could fly out with most of the other departing Afghans on a U.S. C-17 to Qatar. Or he could board an earlier Canadian military flight through Kuwait to Canada. He had waited 10
years for a U.S. visa—would his family have to wait another year in
Qatar? He had always wanted to be an American. He now owed his life to
American friends and strangers who had used every means to bring his
family to safety. But Monawari didn’t want to wait any longer. He would become a Canadian.

On August 25, in Toronto, he received an email from a U.S. State
Department official. “I want to apologize for the delay in response time
and process,” it said. “I want to assure you that we are working around
the clock to help address these delays for applicants such as yourself
during this very difficult time.” The official reported that the U.S.
embassy had approved him for a Special Immigrant Visa. It was welcome vindication, and it was too late.

On the afternoon of August 26, outside Abbey Gate, an Islamic State
suicide bomber detonated a vest with 25 pounds of explosives, killing
nearly 200 Afghans and 13 American troops who had left the protection of
the wall and waded into the sea of desperation to bring people into the airport. After that, the chance for Afghans to get out dwindled quickly
toward zero.

VII.
HONOR
The United States government estimates that it airlifted 124,000 people
from Afghanistan before the last troops flew out on August 30, a day
ahead of Biden’s deadline. This total—which surprised many of those who struggled night and day to get a family of five through a gate—counted everyone who left Hamid Karzai International Airport: the 45,000 on
private and non-U.S. aircraft, as well as approximately 2,000
U.S.-embassy personnel, 5,500 American citizens, 2,000 citizens of NATO countries, 3,300 citizens of other countries, 2,500 SIVs and family
members, and 64,000 “at-risk Afghans,” including the many thousands who found a way into the airport regardless of status or threat. The Biden administration declared the evacuation a historic triumph.

The achievement belonged mainly to the troops and civilians who worked tirelessly at the airport, and to the ordinary people who worked
tirelessly overseas on WhatsApp and Signal, and above all to the
courage, born of mortal panic and tenacious hope, of the Afghans who
lost everything. Without the unofficial evacuation efforts, many of them
funded by private citizens, the number would have been far lower. But no
one who took part described it as a success. The constant emotions of
those days and nights at the airport were frustration and heartbreak.

A frayed white flag with black Arabic writing flies over a dense city landscape, with distant hills in the background
September 11, 2021: A Taliban flag flies atop Bibi Mahru Hill, in Kabul. (Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
Human Rights First estimates that 90 percent of SIVs—including some with visas in hand—were left behind with their families. The number of
Afghans who remain in danger because of their association with the
20-year American presence in their country must be counted in the
hundreds of thousands. By the end of August, Alice Spence and Sam Ayres
and their colleagues had evacuated 145 military women and family
members. They still had a list of 87 people whom they couldn’t get out.
After August 31, the list would continue to grow. “I can’t even
contemplate what I’m going to have to say to these women,” Ayres told
his paratrooper friend.

“Everyone wants to stay, including the leadership,” the paratrooper
texted Ayres on August 27. Many troops felt that they’d left the mission unfinished. During the final hours at the airport, one soldier received
120 calls for help. “People are talking about the greatest airlift in history,” he said, “when in reality it was a complete clusterfuck and a
lot of people died that didn’t need to.” Ambassador Bass, who oversaw
the evacuation, left Afghanistan deeply proud of his colleagues’
efforts, he told me, but also “haunted” by the number of people who didn’t get out. “I really felt just this enormous sense of regret.”

Administration officials told me that no one could have anticipated how
quickly Kabul would fall. This is true, and it goes for both Afghans and Americans. But the failure to plan for a worst-case scenario while there
was time, during the spring and early summer, as Afghanistan began to
collapse, led directly to the fatal chaos in August. The Taliban gave
every indication of wanting to cooperate with the American withdrawal,
partly because it hoped for a continued diplomatic presence. “They’re
still asking us today, ‘Why did you leave?’ ” a senior official told me.
But the administration never tried to negotiate a better way out with
the Taliban, didn’t establish green zones in Kabul and other cities with airfields. Instead, the evacuation came down to 10 days and one runway.

The end was always going to be messy. But through its failures, the administration dramatically compressed the evacuation in both time and
space. It created a panic to squeeze perishable human beings through the dangerous openings of a fortress before they closed forever. It left the burdens to a 20-year-old infantryman trying not to make eye contact with
a mother standing in sewage; to an Afghan woman choosing which sister to
save; to an Army captain alone in her faraway house.

“There are a number of truths about the war that this evacuation
yielded,” Ayres told me, “and one of them is that shortsightedness and failures at the top created slack that had to be taken up by the men and
women on the ground—by the Marines on the perimeter, by the families
that couldn’t get through the crush of the crowds.” Mike Breen, of Human Rights First, told me that the administration “took the life-and-death decisions that should have been at the highest level of the government
and sent them down to the lowest level, which is a pretty good metaphor
for the whole war. It ended as it was fought. Same old story.”

Everyone who joined the unofficial evacuation was struck by its lack of partisanship. George Soros and Glenn Beck both sponsored charter
flights. Trump-supporting veterans worked with Democratic members of
Congress, and liberal journalists sought help from Republican Hill
staffers. The quickest way to get kicked off a group chat was to make a political point. But an event as big as the fall of Kabul inevitably
absorbed the poison of American politics. Early in the evacuation, a
flock of progressive pundits suddenly all flew in the same direction and accused the administration’s critics of using the crisis as an excuse to
keep the war going forever. This same talking point had emerged during
the White House’s messaging campaign earlier in the summer. It shifted
the argument from Afghanistan to the Washington foreign-policy “blob,”
as if the latter were the really important battleground. Those taking
the brunt of the catastrophe were women and girls, members of religious
and sexual minorities, civil-society activists, all of them people of color—groups that progressive pundits are supposed to care about. The
end of the war was the first test of a new foreign policy based on human
rights rather than military force. The administration and its defenders
failed it.

The hypocrisy on the right was worse. Republican members of Congress and
media figures heaped scorn on the Biden administration for a withdrawal
policy that it had inherited from the Trump administration, then
fomented outrage over Afghan refugees on U.S. military bases and in
American towns. Biden’s political advisers had not been wrong to think
that Republicans would try to exploit the issue to stir up xenophobia.

But across the country, ordinary Americans rushed to embrace the
arriving refugees. They left bundles of clothes and baskets of food at
the gates of the military bases where the refugees were housed. They volunteered their communities, even their homes, for resettlement: in
Houston, where Khan, Mina, their son, and their new American daughter
now live; in Spokane, Washington, Hawa’s choice for her new home as she
seeks a chance to enlist in the U.S. military. A woman in Denver wrote
to me: “When we posted on our neighborhood’s [Facebook] page on a
Wednesday that an Afghan refugee family with children would be staying
with us starting in 2 days we had 100s of items of clothes, toys,
toiletries, baby gear, and winter gear show up on our porch, in addition
to a job offer and dental services for the family. People I didn’t even
know were dropping off donations with promises of more to come. People
want to help!” It was as if Americans were seeking some way to feel
better about their country.

The evacuation effort drew on a similar longing. It ran especially
strong in the generation of Americans whose adult lives were shaped by
the 9/11 wars—who experienced a kind of personal crisis at the way the
era ended. “What I wanted out of this was to salvage a little bit of
honor from this whole debacle,” Ayres told me. “Every person we got out, I’d be able to look back on my service and my experience with slightly
more pride.”

Months after the end of the August evacuation, Ayres, Spence, and their colleagues are still working day and night to save Afghan allies, many
of them women. Some are hiding in safe houses and selling their
furniture to feed their children. After years of drought, and the
economic collapse that followed the Taliban victory, Afghanistan has
descended into a winter of starvation. Spence receives hundreds of
messages a day from Afghans telling her that she is their only hope for
rescue from the Taliban and hunger.

One of the women on Spence’s list is Hamasa Parsa, the soldier-writer
who dreamed of dead flowers the night before Kabul fell. A friend gave
her a number for Spence, who responded within 10 minutes. Parsa spends
her days at home caring for her younger brothers and sisters, and limits
the family to two meals a day. When she ventures out she fears being
denounced by a neighbor, or forced by the Taliban into marriage. One day
in November she went out fully covered to buy a phone charger. A Talib
was in the store, weapon slung over his shoulder, playing the video game
Ludo King on his phone. Suddenly he looked at Parsa. “It was my first
time in my life that I looked into the eye of a Talib,” she told me. She gasped, and her hand trembled. The Talib smiled, as if to say, You’re
scared of me, right?

A man keeps calling Parsa’s phone. She knows him from her old office at
the Ministry of Defense. He tells her to bring in the gun that she was
issued, and she answers that she doesn’t have a gun, though her family
has buried it in their yard, along with military documents. The summons
is a trap. She no longer trusts anyone. For the first time, she finds
writing impossible. “I just don’t know what will be the end,” she told me. “That scares me. I want to find a happy ending for my book first.” Recently, Spence told Parsa that it will be at least half a year before
she has a chance to get out.

The U.S. government is not making it easy. It is chartering flights out
of Kabul for SIV holders and others of high priority, but the effort is
so sluggish, and the rules for authorizing passengers so onerous, that
State Department officials have turned to private groups for help
evacuating Afghans they know. At the same time, the department is
reluctant to negotiate landing rights in other countries for private
charters. Before Afghans can apply for the priority refugee program they
must somehow get out of Afghanistan, but the U.S. government won’t help
them leave. The most direct way to bring at-risk Afghans to the U.S. is
through a program called humanitarian parole; at least 35,000 Afghans
have applied, for a fee of $575 each, but the Department of Homeland
Security is processing the backlog neither quickly nor generously.

“The State Department always insists that we have to play by the rules,” Representative Malinowski, who once served in it, told me. The
department celebrates Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who forged passports to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. “But if any State Department employee tried to pull what Raoul Wallenberg did, he’d be
fired in three seconds.” This was the thinking of the period before the August evacuation. “And then, for two glorious weeks, we threw out the rules.” Now the department is back to its risk-averse, pre-August
thinking, with an obstacle for every human need. “Bureaucracy is killing
more people than the Taliban,” Mary Beth Goodman, the State Department official, told me.

To Spence it seems as if the U.S. government has moved on. “Afghanistan
keeps descending into hell, and what are people like us supposed to do?”
she asked. “Are we supposed to leave these people who helped Americans, including people we served with personally, behind? I’m a very
idealistic person in some ways, and I understand we can’t save everyone,
and there are crises everywhere. But there was a 20-year war, and that
changed a lot of people here. A lot of people served and went there. Our policy, our money, went there. Do we just abandon the people? I don’t
think that’s who we are as a country. I don’t think that’s who we should be as a country.”

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline
“The Betrayal.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we
receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, Our Man: Richard
Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, The Unwinding: An Inner
History of the New America, and The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq.
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