Reading “August in Kabul”

I may finish August in Kabul in time for January 6th in DC

August in Kabul by Andrew Quilty wasn’t at the top of my books-to-read pile. It was a Christmas gift a year ago. I think my son said he was friends with the author when he worked in Kabul so I guessed Quilty wasn’t a typical western reporter who dropped into Afghanistan, met a few elites, maybe a warlord or two and flew out after a few months with skewed ideas and the draft of a book. But did I really want to read about the gut wrenching final days and hours of the collapse of Afghanistan, in effect the final repudiation of the life’s work of my father’s generation trying to build a modern multiethnic multicultural democracy in one of the worlds poorest countries?

It turns out to be a compelling read weaving insight on how the Taliban, after being driven from power, renewed control of society, through personal stories of people deeply embedded in the former government. I know where this story is going. I know how the story ends, and that adds tension to the minute by minute accounts of people working to hold the collapsing central government together, to protect the residents of Kabul, even as they attempted to keep their own families safe and plan an escape in the case of their likely failure. Quilty has an eye for telling details, a bureaucrat who in his last act before fleeing the presidential palace destroys passports of people seeking visas to flee the country so the Taliban won’t find evidence against them, of police who came to work on the final morning with street clothes under their uniforms so they can disappear into the crowds at the last minute, high officials showing up for meetings with top ministers only to realize that the ministers had already been in contact with the Taliban and had quietly fled the city.

It’s a recurring story in Afghanistan with echoes of the first rise of the Taliban in the 1990’s, the coups of the 1970’s and the early 20th century, even back to the collapse of the Achaemenid Persian dynasty with the assassination of the last King of Kings Darius III at the hands of Bactrian satrap Bessus as they fled before the armies of Alexander III of Macedon in hopes of reconstituting the empire from the eastern stronghold of what is now the northern Afghan plains and the lands north into Central Asia. Western writers usually credit Alexander with building a great empire at a young age spanning from the Greek city states across modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Gaza, Egypt, parts of Arabia, Iraq, Iran, swathes of steppe north of the Oxus (Amu Darya) Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But, of course, the reality is that Alexander took full advantage of an Achaemenid Empire that had suffered internal division, the court poisonings of Bagoas the eunuch vizier, and transitions of power that left a massive and wealthy empire vulnerable. Alexander’s great empire barely expanded the empire of the Persians that had brought democracy back to Greek cities which had fallen into tyrannies, returned the Jews from exile in Babylon with funding and instruction to rebuild the Temple, had connected vast disparate geography and peoples of many faiths and ethnicities in satrapies under one tolerant ruler, the King of Kings. And the final one, Darius, lay dead on the side of the road a victim of regime change and Bessus’ sword. Bessus, satrap of Bactria who for a short time styled himself the last Achaemenid Artaxerxes V, a king but not king of kings, still fleeing north into what is now Uzbekistan was soon turned over by his own troops to Alexander’s general Ptolemy. But the empire lived on under Alexander for a few years until his death and the empire was divided among his generals.

Quilty describes the final day of the Afghan republic with President Ghani at the presidential palace calling meetings to oversee defense of Kabul even as the nearby American embassy was burning documents and air-evacuating thousands of employees to the airport. In the end Ghani was forced to evacuate as well with his family and a few top staff on the few helicopters available, but the pilots refused the airport and instead flew north to land in Uzbekistan, and with that the republic ended.

August in Kabul is a thriller, but it’s also a troubling reminder of how collapse of societies and governmental structures happen, slowly in small ways that tear at the social fabric of a society, that put questions in our minds about the motives and trustworthiness of our neighbors. The Taliban were a force outside of the established government, but they were not an outside force. There were night letters left at a door warning of consequences for ignoring their fundamentalist dictates. Men were beaten in the street for not wearing a beard, women for not covering their heads. Families were warned for sending daughters to school, and for more serious transgressions men were sometimes found hanging dead in the village square. Sometimes the dead would be the local police. Seeing something like that changes peoples psyche.

August in Kabul takes place in 2021, about a year after President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo finalized negotiations with the Taliban. For nearly all my life American policy was that we would not and did not negotiate with terrorists. But Trump did things differently, and some people really like that. So Trump negotiated the surrender of US forces in Afghanistan with the terrorist Taliban and did not include the legitimate Afghan government in the talks. Most Americans paid no attention, but the people of Afghanistan took notice that their government was powerless to even get a seat at the negotiating table.

At the same time Trump was running for a second term as president. We saw in 2015 and earlier how Trump had diminished the office of the President, and tore at the fabric of our society. He pushed Birtherism conspiracies, supported white nationalists, crackpots and criminals of all kinds, brought out thousands to enjoy his rants against what had been considered decent American principles. In the fall of 2020 when most Americans had never heard of the Proud Boys Trump ordered them to “stand back and stand by.” But on January 6th, 2021 Donald Trump did not tell them to stand back, Donald Trump told them to march on the Capitol. It was a tremendous show of force and Americans took notice.

We don’t have night letters here in America. Much of that sort of thing is done on line, on the internet. We have doxxing, swatting, or simply calling people groomers and pedo’s. And we have lawn signs and flags. It used to be political lawn signs were a temporary form of litter that provided some free expression of political support. Under Trump they’ve become a form of night letter, an implicit threat. The are implicitly saying “we are here, we are many, and we are dangerous.” They often hold vulgar messages intended to offend and to weaken social structure, to divide. It is a fundamentalist culture war and the defenses against it are impossibly weak. It is a constant assault on the basic building blocks of a free and just society, on our schools, libraries, public and private institutions of all kinds.

In Kabul in early August of 2021 people did not expect a rapid collapse of the government. They knew there would be a change. They expected a negotiated settlement that would allow the Taliban into the government. Many expected a full Taliban takeover, but not in a matter of days. Even the day of August 15 top Taliban commanders had assured the government that their forces would stop at the gates of Kabul, that they would not take the city by force. They pledged an orderly, negotiated transition that kept police and military security in place for everyone’s safety.

The thing is, the Taliban were already in the city. Their networks had cells of supporters living there for years. And they were already there in the minds of the people who knew for years about night letters, about public beatings and stoning. They’d seen it before, it wasn’t new.

People fought the idea of Taliban takeover until there came for them a moment of personal resignation to it. Until the moment they realized they could not stop it. That it was too late and their allies were too few and too weak, until they realized the Taliban had outplayed them on every front, cut every possible line of supply. And then they fled if they could, blended in if they couldn’t.

This January 6th I wonder, how far are we here in America from the point of no return, from an ultimate collapse of the great American experiment with democracy? Just as the Taliban were already within the gates of Kabul the American version permeates our local governments, our police forces, our military, our courts, and Congress. Can our defenses hold?

(Note, this was lightly edited to eliminate typos and for minor syntactical errors and such on 10/30/2024)