Many of those whose stories are told in this book either held positions in the former Afghan Government administration and security forces or are viewed with hostility by the Taliban for other reasons. Many are still hiding from the Taliban.
I was initially sceptical of the risk posed to former government and security officials by the incoming Taliban. Promises of immunity came from the highest echelons of the Taliban administration and, despite the warnings almost every Afghan I spoke to gave me about distrusting the Taliban’s conciliatory rhetoric, I wanted to believe them. I wanted to believe that an end to the war also meant peace for those who had suffered not only for the past 20 years but, as Afghans are quick to correct America-centric commentators, the past 42.
During the months spent researching and writing this book, I have come to realise the scepticism was well founded. The majority of those whose stories are featured have been actively searched for and threatened by the Taliban. Several continue to move houses regularly and have cut off contact with friends and relatives— effectively eliminating their own existence as Afghans—to lessen the chances of being found. In many cases it hasn’t worked. Family members have been detained and threatened; homes and property have been seized. At the time of writing, several Afghans whose stories are told in this book continue to try to leave the country. They believe a failure to do so will result in their ultimate capture. At best, they believe that will mean the forfeiture of their freedom, and at worst, their lives. They are justifiable beliefs.
For that reason, the names of many who feature in this book have been changed, as have those of their family members and acquaintances. Using pseudonyms did not, however, limit the scrutiny under which I placed their accounting of events.
While I was in Kabul from 14 August until the final US evacuation aircraft departed in the early hours of 31 August, and had my own experience of those tumultuous days, the eight weeks of reporting I conducted on the ground thereafter revealed to me how different each individual’s experience of that same period was.
This book could have comprised the extraordinary experiences of any number of the millions of Afghans who survived or perished during that month in high summer in the Afghan capital. Those whose stories I ultimately focused on were chosen because, to me, they represented a cross-section of experiences from within an infinite spectrum.
For those in positions of power who feature in the pages that follow, their actions and behaviour have necessarily been the subject of great scrutiny since long before August 2021 and will continue to be for years to come. The desire for senior officials who oversaw the collapse of the Afghan Republic to diminish their own culpability and launder their legacies after the fact poses a risk for a journalist trying to piece together events through those who shaped them.
While some scenes described in this book and the real motivations for the actions of individuals are difficult or impossible, respectively, to verify, I have tried to qualify those parts with language that indicates as much. That does not mean that anything a source told me, even with qualification or caveat, was considered worthy of inclusion; far from it. If I found an account implausible, I did not include it. Moreover, the deceit would factor into my assessment of everything else the source shared.
Some sources’ accounts were so implausible, so self-eulogistic, that, despite their proximity to key events, their accounts were excluded altogether. On the other hand, understandable bitterness for the massive personal losses suffered as a result of the republic’s collapse also tainted the credibility of some sources.
More forensic retellings of the last days of America in Afghanistan will be written as information is declassified and others who were involved come out of self-imposed public exile. This book represents the most accurate accounting of events—collected as they happened and in their immediate aftermath—that I can offer.