A Tale of Two Armies

Chaos, confusion and desperation in the run-up to US’ exit from Afghanistan. An extract.

Andrew Quilty

(Specialist Nate) Nelson hadn’t expected the Afghanistan he’d learned about through the media and movies over the course of the war, nor that which he’d heard of through the stories of his National Guard sergeants who had already deployed: about IEDs, and a platoon’s experiences in the Korangal Valley, in the country’s north-east, as shown in the documentary film Restrepo. That was because he knew the American involvement in Afghanistan had declined significantly in recent years, and that there hadn’t been a single casualty since February 2020, Nelson’s unit was assigned to diplomatic security, protecting the embassy and the airport using a dozen C-RAMs stationed between the two sites. The ‘diplomatic security designation meant that Nelson and his National Guard colleagues would be staying beyond the 31 August withdrawal date set for foreign ‘combat’ forces.

‘Life really wasn’t bad,’ says Nelson. ‘There were restaurants, all these stores. We had this cafe with a fake garden and fake grass and you could buy a smoothie. I felt like I was on vacation. You could get a massage, you could get a great haircut, the food was actually very good, and we figured we could coast like this until the end of the deployment [February 2022]. Even though the Taliban was taking ground each day, you still felt like the war was a world away.’

In fact, aside from superficial changes, Kabul was closer to the city described by Nelson’s father, who had visited the capital for his work as a cartographer with the British military in the 1960s. Nelson sent his father photos of the bare mountains on the northern side of the airport. ‘Oh,’ his father responded. ‘That all used to be forest. Then the Russians napalmed everything.’ He told Nelson how Westerners would travel to Kabul to ski. ‘It really was like a regular country,’ he said.

Every couple of days, Nelson would check a BBC interactive map contrasting the territory controlled by the Taliban with that controlled by the government. And by the start of the second week of August, the blotches of colour denoting government control were shrinking by the day. But Nelson says there was ‘this thinking that Washington had, and that our leadership had … that the Afghan forces would at least be able to hold until after the fighting season and regroup or something’.

Nelson recalls how, during pre-deployment training in Oklahoma, ‘everything was making jokes: “It will probably end up like Saigon or something.’” But even after the capital of Helmand province, Lashkar Gah, fell on 12 August, Nelson checked himself. ‘There’s no way this will be like Saigon,’ he thought. ‘That was in ’75, in Vietnam. We have all this technology now and we’ve been in this country 20 years. Things will be different.’

Nelson says that on 15 August, when corporal Cummins and Charlie Company arrived, and as thousands of Afghans converged on the airport, ‘we really didn’t have a lot of troops