Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story

Product Information

Q: Hi. First of all, well, I’m Fred Roggero, retired Air Force, and thank you all very much for your time, today’s fabulous presentation.

BBC Two documentary Escape From Kabul Airport to show New BBC Two documentary Escape From Kabul Airport to show

Was there an attempt by you at the start to go any—to senior ranking people in the Department of Defense or in the Marine Corps even of itself? Or is that something that just happened or did you say, no, we’re going to cut it off at this level? But there were conversations that the Taliban were having with American forces as to the pace of their advance into Kabul because they knew that we would need to get our people out, and the decision was made that the only thing we needed the Taliban not to move on was the airport itself. It’s a, you know, three- to four-year effort to do that and that’s because there’s a lot. If you’re going to be serious about examining in depth what happened, why it happened, what lessons to learn, then it takes time to do that. I’d like to open it to questions. I wouldn’t like to. I would like to keep doing this. (Laughs.) But we are going to now open this from the audience. So if you can, you can see some instructions down at the bottom of your screen and we will open the questions to you. Drawing on a wide range of first-hand accounts – the politicians and officers who planned the trans-continental rescue, the young soldiers who were faced with the unenviable task of keeping a crowd of thousands of desperate people at bay, former interpreters and soldiers of the Afghan Special Forces who made it out – Escape from Kabul is the harrowing true story of Operation Pitting and the Kabul airlift.

Rate And Review

And, you know, it’s not to say that people weren’t in—I mean, people were desperate to get out and people who were—you know, it’s not for me to judge who is more deserving and who is more desperate to get out, and I think that would have been a hard judgment to make. When there was no decent interval, there was no contingency plan for a mass evacuation of Afghan nationals and partners, and what I think the film documents so well is just how visceral that collapse was. I mean, you see—you know, you see children, babies, being passed over the gate. You hear accounts of very small children being trampled to death, of people passing out from exhaustion and dying. I mean, I would encourage people to watch the film. It was visceral. You know, these wars were not generationally defining but for a small segment of America they were defining and have been the—they’ve been the defining experience of the last twenty years of my life and many others’. And we all know each other. So Chris Richardella, who’s the colonel in that film, he and I actually went to—through Quantico together when we were twenty-four years old.

Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New ‘Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New

But those numbers and that equipment, you know, only is relevant if there’s a political reality that supports it and the political reality that supported it was no longer there. And so in that respect, the collapse seems inevitable.AMOS: Can I ask you, Jamie, a question? Did the BBC—were they aware that this would come out around 9/11? Was that the point? We have one Marine Expeditionary Unit that’s typically in the Pacific, one that’s in the Mediterranean. So the 2/4 MEU—I actually deployed with the 2/4 MEU about fifteen years ago. They’re—and they’re like a rapid contingency force.