‘Two things can be true at the same time’

By ALEXANDER WARD

06/02/2023 09:31 AM EDT

Welcome back to Global Insider's Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist will share an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, Alex Ward talks to a chronicler of the U.S. evacuation of Afghans from Kabul as the Taliban took over.

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Mitchell Zuckoff has tracked the human element of wars for years. Whether it was writing "13 Hours" about the terrorist attack and rescue mission in Benghazi or a minute-by-minute account of 9/11 in "Fall and Rise," the journalist and professor has made a career of identifying big takeaways from the smallest moments.

That continues with his latest work, "The Secret Gate," which follows the struggle of Homeira Qaderi and her family trying to escape the coming takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Sam Aronson, a State Department officer deciding who gets on evacuation flights out of the fallen capital city. By piecing together how they interacted — and how Aronson ultimately helped Homeira and her son flee — Zuckoff weaves a rich yarn about what it was really like during the fall of Kabul.

The White House would like to move on from Afghanistan, not only because the war in Ukraine is ongoing, but also because it doesn't make them look good. An after-action report showed the administration took little responsibility for the events in Kabul, effectively blaming Donald Trump for everything that went wrong.

Zuckoff's book serves as a de facto report card. There are two main takeaways: That the evacuation on the whole was a major success — tens of thousands of people were rescued. But there was chaos, confusion and carnage on the ground, including the killing of 13 service members by a terrorist outside the airport's Abbey Gate.

Zuckoff spoke to me about what he learned when writing the book, the impact of the withdrawal on the Biden administration and their effort to avoid wrestling with its implications.

The interview is edited for length and clarity.

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On the macro level, the U.S. was able to whisk 124,000 people to safety from Kabul. But on a micro level, a person-to-person level, your book makes clear that there was failure after failure after failure. How do you reconcile the two?

Two things can be true at the same time, and what you said is absolutely true. Getting 124,000 people out in a matter of a couple of weeks is a tremendous success — and also should not have been necessary.

The evacuation campaign did leave behind tens of thousands of people who, in many cases, were equally deserving of rescue. It should not have turned into the humanitarian disaster we saw at the airport's gates and the walls. We should not have seen Chinook helicopters taking off or the embassy roof, which we were promised we wouldn't see.

Administration officials, when defending the evacuation from Kabul, typically say: Tell me the policy decision we made that was a mistake. Were you able to pinpoint one?

I’m not sure it was a policy choice as much as a planning choice, or a series of planning decisions or the absence of planning decisions. Alex, you and I listened in to the same State Department town hall where members who are on the ground that there was a failure of planning, that there was a failure of mindset that more could and should have been done.

The failures came after the Doha Agreement and the withdrawal decision: The deal wasn't executed well and some of the specifics of the withdrawal were a shambles. Those were clear breakdowns.

What did you make of the administration's Afghanistan after-action report effectively saying "it's Trump's fault?" You’ve looked at this withdrawal as close as many people in government.

It's disappointing. The absence of candor was completely lacking in the White House report. There's a lot of blame to go around inside the Trump administration after the Doha Agreement excluded the Afghan government and pressured Kabul to release 5,000 Taliban fighters. That's a setup for chaos, and the White House was right to point those things out.

But they were not genuinely candid at all or self-reflective in the after-action report in a way that would have been useful. The administration says they don't want to be backward-looking, but sometimes we have to be backward-looking. We saw in that internal town hall that a consular officer believed the administration was more worried about backside covering than a genuine assessment of what happened.

In other words, this isn't an outside assessment of this. It's the administration's own people saying the leadership has to own up to the failures.

We tend to focus a lot on the decisions made by high-level people. But your book makes clear that, at the end of the day, it's the people on the ground that have to execute what senior leaders decide. A lot of what occurred in Kabul during those days were based on split-second thinking.

It's an enormously important point. You have about 40 State Department officials dealing with these tens of thousands of people who are desperate to leave, a ticking clock of time before the last thing goes wheels up. And, from Washington, we’re getting repeated changes in the priorities of the day.

One day, the State Department can issue an order saying people with or who have applied for special immigrant visas are eligible for consideration into the airport. Then the next day, we find out, no, only people with approved SIVs are allowed in.

So, suddenly, a Sam Aronson or another consular officer is forced to shift on the fly. Now, the same people you were ready to put on a cargo plane the day before are getting rejected. That's something we all need to look at more, here, because it's not just policy, it's practice.

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Your book has many moments of tragedy in it. But were there any moments of joy, of levity, during the whole ordeal?

I do think the overall story is one of triumph, and in many ways it's a story about personal triumph.

There's a very funny moment in the book when Sam reveals he's a bit of a newbie in this situation. He's at the CIA's Glory Gate, this secret backdoor to the Kabul airport, and he approaches the operator, who is the guy in charge at that moment. Sam mistakes him for an Afghan paramilitary guy.

So Sam starts talking to him simplistically. The guy starts talking back to him with a Midwestern accent and he's, you know, an operator. He's an American operator. It's a sweet moment where Sam, who is one of America's best, realizes he's out of his depth.

You’ve been writing about America's wars for decades now. The Afghanistan withdrawal in some ways feels like the closing of a chapter. In some way, was such a messy end inevitable? In some narrative way, was it tragically fitting?

It's funny, I never quite thought of it that way, but I’m not objecting to that notion. I understand the spirit in which you’re asking this, so we’re in no way suggesting it's appropriate.

There were successes, of course, like killing Osama Bin Laden and undermining al-Qaeda. But in the big picture, I’m not sure what we got from spending trillions of dollars and losing thousands of lives for the post-9/11 wars. The books don't seem balanced to me. What we saw in Afghanistan and Kabul does seem emblematic of the whole war effort.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard.

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‘Two things can be true at the same time’