Andrew Quilty’s ‘August in Kabul’ is an incomplete story of Taliban

Vivek Katju

ANDREW QUILTY is an Australian photojournalist who lived in Afghanistan from 2013 till the ignominious end of America’s ‘forever war’ in August 2021. In this notable work, he examines the calamitous impact of America’s presence and final failure on the lives of Afghans, especially those who worked with it.

He does so by focusing on the situation of some, including women. He looks at the deficiencies of the Afghan Republic’s armed forces. Without the crutch of American support, they proved simply incapable of confronting the Taliban. This, too, he does through an account of what happened in a particular area in Wardak province, close to Kabul. Quilty also looks into the causes that led some Afghans to join the Taliban. And he gives vivid accounts of developments at the Presidential Palace in the dying days of the Republic and also the almost fortnight-long tragic chaos at the Kabul airport when the Taliban re-captured the city after two decades on August 15.

The collapse of the Afghan Republic was both a failure, long in the making, of the country’s political elite and that of America’s persistently confused diplomatic and military policies in Afghanistan. Quilty notes: “…those who allied with the Americans and the government they installed under president Karzai… now saw an opportunity not only to gather wealth and power but to exact revenge.” This was so because these persons had suffered, as had all sections of Afghan society at one time or another, after the end of the Afghan monarchy in 1973. What was now needed was a visionary Afghan leader who would be able to knit the country together and also carry Washington with himself. Neither Karzai nor his successor Ashraf Ghani even remotely had such capabilities. It was ironic that America and its allies put their faith in them as they permitted the rigging of elections to bring them or let them continue in power. Quilty should have examined these aspects to enrich his work, but does not.

Quilty interviewed many Afghans for his work. He records: “Those whose stories I ultimately focused on were chosen because, to me, they represented a cross-section of experiences from within an infinite spectrum.” He concedes that, in many cases, those who were in high and critical decision-making or advisory positions would seek to whitewash their roles. This becomes evident in the pages dealing with developments in the Presidential Palace, which culminated in Ghani fleeing Afghanistan, leaving the country he had sworn to lead in the lurch.

It is incredible that on the morning of August 15, when the Taliban were at the city gates, Ghani’s closest aide and the country’s National Security Adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, found Ghani “reading a book beneath an enormous oriental plane tree in the palace courtyard”. At a time when he should have been inspiring his army and steeled himself to make a final stand against an unforgiving enemy, Ghani seems to have detached himself from the defeat of the Republic, a defeat to which he had himself contributed so much. For this reviewer, this is a haunting image, for, he is so familiar with the old splendid Chinar at Haram Sarai Palace.

What is most lacking in Quilty’s book is his ignoring the role played by Pakistan in sustaining the Taliban and in helping their campaign in the last two months that saw them capture Afghanistan. He records David Kilcullen, now a retired Australian army officer, telling him that in 2010, when the Taliban had taken heavy casualties in American operations against them, they took the step of “holding back most of their forces in Pakistan, having a breather, building them up… waiting for us to leave”. It is, therefore, most surprising and intriguing that Quilty did not seemingly interview any Pakistani, official or non-official. This is the great lacuna of this book, for, Pakistan was inextricably linked with the Afghan drama in the past four decades and the Afghan story is incomplete without a consideration of its role.

But, all in all, this is a good, at times even a gripping, read.