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Five years ago today, a suicide bomber killed 13 Marines and 170 civilians in an attack on Kabul airport that came to symbolize the chaotic and ill-conceived withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
But the Abbey Gate bombing was only one part of the heavily flawed August 2021 evacuation. Afghan forces turned their weapons on civilians during the chaos, and local allies who had worked with US forces for decades were left to be slaughtered by the Taliban, according to “The Path to Zero,” a hard-hitting Wall Street Journal documentary out today.
The feature is bookended by choppy bodycam footage from the terrorist attack — carried out by ISIS-K member Abdul Rahman al-Logari — showing heavily armed US soldiers, many in a state of shock, lying amid rubble at the airport.
The film condemns the Biden administration for its disastrous end to America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan, then two decades long, pointing out that al-Logari was released from one of the two prisons the Taliban emptied after US troops started to leave the country in disarray in the summer of 2021.
“He [Biden] wanted to say to the American public that he was the president who got us out of Afghanistan, who ended the forever war,” says Paul Gigot, the longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page in the movie.
“[George W.] Bush couldn’t do it. Obama couldn’t do it. Trump couldn’t do it. Biden did it and everybody took their cues from that.”
The documentary, by filmmakers Michael and Thomas Pack of Palladium Pictures, features interviews with the retired Marines, diplomats and others who were eyewitnesses to the hasty pullout and its serious collateral damage — much of which went unnoticed by the wider world, which was focused on the COVID pandemic at the time.
As the August 30 deadline for US forces to leave approached, Marines at the airport couldn’t handle the onslaught of desperate civilians. Special Afghan forces known as Zero Units, trained by the CIA, were called in to help.
Those inexperienced operatives didn’t know how to handle a crowd and indiscriminately ran over them or shot civilians dead, according to the soldiers who witnessed the carnage.
“They would use vehicles, they would run people over, they would execute people, they’d shoot ’em, shoot into the crowds,” said Joseph Laude, a retired Marine who was at the airport. “[We were] bearing witness to atrocities, to war crimes, and not being able to do anything about it.
“That is something someone has to take home and wrestle with when they reflect on their service or their experience… potentially for the rest of their life.”
The members of the Zero Units were given priority to leave Afghanistan by the US government because of their service in the country, according to the documentary.
US Marines were also traumatized by having to make life and death decisions at the airport, overrun with desperate civilians fleeing the Taliban’s rule.
The US kept changing the criteria for who it would evacuate and Marines had to determine who had the correct paperwork.
Edward Gonzalez, a retired Marine, describes one resident who begged him to allow her into the airport, worried that as an unmarried woman she would be persecuted by the Taliban if returned to Kabul.
“She kept begging all night and I couldn’t let her in,” he said. “And meanwhile there’s thousands of families that got denied and dragged off by the Taliban because they didn’t possess the right paperwork [which would have been accepted] a day and a half, two days later.”
Most of the evacuees were young, single men who were able to fight their way through the crowds, the documentary points out. Some latched on to a C-17 military transport plane as it took off. Video footage famously captured figures falling from the airplane shortly after takeoff.
A much better option to evacuate US allies would have been using Bagram Air Base, which had been the center of US combat operations since 2001.
But on Biden’s orders, the US had vacated that base in July, a month before the complete withdrawal of troops, leaving hundreds of millions worth of war materiel on the ground to be snapped up by the Taliban.
Biden and his policy advisors, including former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, refused to listen to military chiefs who begged the administration to maintain a residual permanent force of about 2,500 US soldiers to help the Afghan troops who had been fighting against the Taliban for two decades.
But Biden was determined to reduce US troops to zero.
“We even said these things . . . if you pull everything out of Afghanistan, if you pull the contractors out, if you pull the special forces out, if you pull your air assets out and you don’t give us anything, then we will lose,” said General Haibattulah Alizai, the Afghan Army Chief in 2021.
“The Taliban are still the old people, the same people. The situation with regard to women’s rights, it’s a disaster. We don’t have any doctors on the ground,” he added.
Retired Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie agreed.
“All of this happened because we did not make a decision in April to bring out our embassy, our citizens, and our at-risk Afghans,” he said.
“Let’s be very clear where blame lies for this. It doesn’t lie with the Joint Force. It doesn’t lie with the military people who are executing this operation.
“It lies with the political leadership that chose to turn a blind eye to the situation in Afghanistan and allow this to boil to a point in August when it became out of control, and was beyond control of any reasonable military capability to impose order on it.”
The disorganized US pullout would have dangerous repercussions beyond Afghanistan, and compromise the US’s position around the world.
“This was a major, major mistake,” Gigot said. “And what it did was, undermine the American public’s perception of Biden’s competence.
“It also seeded, I think, the sense among adversaries that this president didn’t have the will to do what was needed to stand up to America’s crucial interests.
“I think it did lead to the perception in Moscow and in Tehran and in Gaza that they could take advantage of that. And I believe they did.”
English (US)