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Andrew Quilty, 2002
Melbourne University Press, 2022, 292 pages
Read July-September 2026
Non-fiction, War, Journalism
Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty depicts the weeks which preceded the fall of Kabul in August 2021. However, in order to get to this chaotic, unforeseen end, he goes back to the beginning – Afghanistan more broadly, in October 2001 – and thereon contextualises it against the preceding 20 years.
With Quilty based in Afghanistan since 2013, it’s very much about the many Afghans that he interviewed (out of a total of 100-plus), rather than his own experiences. Besides verbatim quotes, Quilty goes into the lives of Afghans under the Taliban before October 2001, their existence during the US/NATO occupation, their lives under the Ashraf Ghani government, and what they faced as the Taliban returned to power. He interviews politicians, civilians, Taliban fighters and US military personnel. In particular, the account of ‘Nadia’ captures the plight of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Initially, it’s slow, especially as the interviews focus on what peoples’ lives were like (as opposed to forming an action-based narrative), but this pays off as the pace of events accelerates and their worst fears assume reality.
Although he does cover the strategic reasons why Afghanistan fell (and does so convincingly), it’s not a comprehensive documentation of the big picture. No doubt he has a good grasp of it: Donald Rumsfield’s early mistake of refusing to work with the ousted Taliban leadership; Obama making the strategic blunder of publicly announcing that the US would be leaving by a certain date; the premature handover to the Ghani government with the attendant removal of American supplies and leadership; the lack of improvement in rural living standards; the Doha Agreement tacitly allowing the Taliban to take back and hold territory – but most of the narrative is people trying to figure what to do and how to best survive as the Taliban first took back the countryside and then the cities. Although members of the Afghan National Army and the Taliban do feature throughout, this is first and foremost a book about civilians, and retains the feel of long-form journalism, rather than history.
Quilty, there throughout (and up until that November) captures the chaos of the fall of Kabul. The Afghan Army was eventually put in a position where, with its leadership having lost any understanding of who was where, and subsequently leaving the country, the soldiers had no one left to fight for, with the civilian government having also left the country. He describes how it finally fell without resistance, abandoned by its leaders, and how people looked to their government only to see it dissolve.
It must be said that the Taliban’s military victory would never have come without the ineptitude and malfeasance of successive administrations in Kabul and their armed forces, and the hubris of the American-led international military coalition.
Worth reading? Yes
Worth re-reading? Yes
If you are interested, you might like…
A Passage to India, E.M Forster
The 9/11 Wars, Jason Burke
To place
Being a journalist became paired to helping people try to evacuate.
interestingly, he doesn’t appear to have been one of those in the most danger
p. 251 – the Talib are reasonable towards the journalist
p. 171 – US war crimes were a call to arms
Ghani was a technocrat and not what Afghanistan needed in order to rebuild
Ghani was not the leader capable of leading Afghanistan – an already Herculean task
Book starts by talking about the speed of the fall and how the author and his journalist friends had to scramble to get back into the country to capture this
The bombing at the airport was carried out by ISIS-KP
The war was fought, for years, in remote districts
US Marines developed a working relationship with the Taliban – an informal handover of power
Following its war with the USSR and subsequent civil war, Afghanistan had little in the way of institutions nor infrastructure, and, receiving little help from the outside world, the Taliban were clearly no administrators. This didn’t forestall their determination to get back into power, and, contrary to what they said they would do, swiftly reimpose their previous, draconian rules. In short, this book confirms that generation to generation, being Afghan is a tough lot.
The US reached a point where it was no longer willing to shore up the Afghan government no matter what
were officially in charge of Afghanistan again – reignited the Taliban’s actions, as the Afghan army and police were still in no shape to effectively resist and wipe them out. The Taliban sensed that victory might actually be theirs
Argues that progress was made in cities, but in the countryside, there was no progress and the only distinction was damage to property and livelihood, as well as violence. This was in addition to extrajudicial actions – this allowed resentment to fester
(and though not a history book, the bits of history that contextualise the Taliban)
Given how hard life is for Afghans, I don’t want to sound flippant, but I remained slightly mystified as to why the Taliban even want to be in charge – they clearly can’t and/or won’t govern
