Episode 665: The Road to the Fall of Kabul, with Jerry Dunleavy

·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Jerry Dunleavy explains how Biden's withdrawal decision led to the Taliban sweeping across Afghanistan in 2021.

The frame is Afghanistan, two years on. Midrats uses Jerry Dunleavy's book Kabul to go back over the withdrawal through the question that still bites: how was the evacuation supposed to work? This is not a broad blame tour. Dunleavy keeps pulling the conversation back to the noncombatant evacuation, the NEO, and the scale of people who might need out. Bagram matters because capacity mattered. As Dunleavy tells it, Command Sergeant Major Jake Smith's testimony made the warning hard to miss: Kabul would be a bad evacuation point. Then come the numbers. The old Bagram plan expected roughly 50,000 to 70,000 people. State Department members from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were thinking more like 120,000 to 140,000. That gap does a lot of work. If those figures were already understood in early 2021, then the later chaos was not just bad luck from events moving too fast. In Dunleavy's account, it was a planning failure people could see coming. He says everyone knew Kabul would not work, and he connects that to what State Department personnel heard during the Bagram site survey. The sharpest charge lands on Anthony Blinken and the State Department: they did not prepare for the evacuation they knew they might have to run. The television images become the proof point, not the whole story. What Americans saw was, in this telling, the visible end of earlier choices. Dunleavy keeps the human cost in view, citing tens of thousands of Afghan allies left behind and well over a thousand Americans left behind too. Sal and Eagle One give him room to build the case through testimony, facilities, acronyms, and the ugly math of moving people under pressure. The episode closes in Midrats fashion: point listeners to Kabul, mention an August 29 panel discussion, and leave the institution with the question.

As heard by us

A pointed account of evacuation planning, Bagram warnings, and the Kabul withdrawal as an institutional failure.

The episode treats the Afghanistan withdrawal less as sudden collapse than as a planning failure that had been warned about in advance. Jerry Dunleavy, author of Kabul and an investigator assisting the House Foreign Affairs Committee, grounds the discussion in evacuation…

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Why you'd press play

Want to sit with a grim warning about Kabul, Bagram, and an evacuation the guest says leaders knew would strain past its breaking point?

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