After two decades, America’s last soldier left without pomp, without ceremony, certainly without the grandeur of victory.
Bathed in the green light of a night vision scope, Maj Gen Chris Donahue, the final American pair of “boots on the ground”, walked up the rear ramp of an air force C-17 on Monday night.
In body armour and helmet, the commander of the US army’s 82nd Airborne Division carried his weapon in his right hand, his eyes downcast as his solitary walk ended America’ ill-starred mission in Afghanistan.
At precisely 11.59pm Kabul time, the final of five American C-17s was wheels up from Afghan soil. Donahue sent a final message to his troops: “job well done, I’m proud of you all”.
The image of Donahue’s lonely exit, posted publicly by US Central Command, may come to symbolise America’s humiliating, violence-plagued retreat from the country.
US president Joe Biden earlier insisted America’s exit from Afghanistan was not “remotely comparable” to the chaos of its departure from Saigon in 1975. A senator at the time, he remembers the damage done to US prestige by the black-and-white photographs of helicopters hurriedly airlifting people from the roof of a building near its embassy.
But those images too, have a contemporary iteration. Donahue is seen calmly leaving the airport but the anarchy there just days ago, with Afghans clinging to the side of US air force planes, may come to represent America’s exit.
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Boris Johnson returned to the West Country on Sunday to spend several days with his family but Downing Street has insisted it is not a holiday and that he was “continuing to work”.
In a briefing to journalists, the prime minister’s official spokesman said Johnson had travelled to the west of England on Sunday, and would be returning to No 10 on Thursday.
Asked repeatedly if the short break from Downing Street was a holiday, the spokesman insisted it was not. “He’s away from the office, but he’s still working,” he said.
The prime minister had previously been criticised after deciding to head off on holiday in Somerset on Saturday 14 August, despite the perilous situation in Afghanistan, with the Taliban advancing rapidly.
Johnson was forced to cut short that break after just a day, being pictured at Taunton station with aides on Sunday 15 August, before chairing a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee back in Downing Street later that day.
The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, also came under attack for choosing to go ahead with a holiday in Crete, before returning to tackle the mounting crisis.
Pressed on whether Johnson had felt free to leave his desk once the last UK personnel had been evacuated from Kabul on Sunday, his spokesman said:
I wouldn’t get into what dictates the prime minister’s diary.
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A day after the last US soldier left the country after 20 years of war, the effort to evacuate American citizens from Afghanistan has “shifted from a military mission to a diplomatic mission”, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Tuesday.
At least 100 US citizens are believed to remain in Kabul, from where the last US flight left on Monday. Many Afghan allies of the US and other nations were also left behind in a country now controlled by the Taliban.
Sullivan was answering fierce criticism over the evacuation, including from Republicans who have seized on the admission that not all Americans were airlifted out. The hawkish Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, for example, slammed “a disgraceful lack of leadership from an incompetent president”.
Speaking to ABC’s Good Morning America, Sullivan said:
Leadership means taking a look at the situation and asking the hard question, ‘What is going to be in the best interest of the United States of America, those American citizens still in Afghanistan and those Afghan allies?’
And [Joe Biden] got a unanimous recommendation from his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, all of his civilian advisers, all of his commanders on the ground, and all of the joint chiefs of staff, that the best way to protect our forces and the best way to help those Americans was to transition this mission.
Sullivan added:
On 14 August when this evacuation mission began, we believe that there were between 5,500 and 6,000 Americans in Afghanistan … we got out 97% or 98% of those on the ground, and a small number remain.
We contacted [them] repeatedly over the course of two weeks to come to the airport: 5,500 or more did that. The small number who remain we are committed to getting out, and we will work through every available diplomatic means with the enormous leverage that we have and that the international community has to make that happen.
Such leverage with the Taliban, he said, included “humanitarian assistance that should go directly to the people of Afghanistan, they need help with respect to health and food aid and other forms of subsistence and we do intend to continue that”.
Secondly, when it comes to our economic and development assistance relationship with the Taliban, that will be about the Taliban’s actions, it will be about whether they follow through on their commitments their commitments to safe passage for Americans and Afghan allies, their commitment to not allow Afghanistan to be a base from which terrorists can attack the United States or any other country, their commitments with respect to upholding their international obligations.
It’s going to be up to them.
Spain announced it will temporarily accommodate some 4,000 evacuees from Afghanistan at two military bases used by the US military. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty Images
Dominic Raab has rejected US claims that Britain was indirectly responsible for the suicide attacks at Kabul airport this week because it insisted that the Abbey gate entry point to the site be kept open to allow British nationals to enter the airport.
He said the “story was simply untrue”, adding nothing the UK did required Abbey gate to be kept open.
In a difficult round of media interviews defending the Foreign Office’s role in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the UK foreign secretary was also unable to say whether call logs would show he made a single phone call to the foreign ministers of Afghanistan or Pakistan in the six months prior to the crisis, adding that he had delegated the issue to a junior minister, Lord Ahmad.
Raab also rounded on his critics, describing them as “backbiting finger-pointing peripheral people involved in buck-passing”, adding that no department had done better than the Foreign Office. Among his targets were retired military figures including Lord Dannatt. Raab said they needed to reflect on whether the resources required for nation-building in such an inhospitable climate as Afghanistan had ever been sufficient.
Defending Britain’s actions before the ISKP – also known as Isis-K – suicide bombings at Kabul airport, he said: “We coordinated very closely with the US, in particular around the Isis-K threat, which we anticipated, although tragically were not able to prevent, but it is certainly right to say we got our civilians out of the processing centre by Abbey gate, but it is just not true to suggest that other than securing our civilians inside the airport that we were pushing to leave the gate open.
“In fact, and let me just be clear about this, we were issuing changes to travel advice before the bomb attack took place and saying to people in the crowd, about which I was particularly concerned, that certainly UK nationals and anyone else should leave because of the risk.”
Raab accepted there had been a surge in the number of claims by Afghans fearful of Taliban reprisals who were stranded in Afghanistan and had contacted the Foreign Office or MPs seeking a chance to come to the UK.
He vowed MPs would be given a proper response in days, but refused to accept claims reported by the Guardian that as many as 7,000 claims or emails had yet to be processed.
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Hossain Rasouli, one of the two Paralympic athletes evacuated from Afghanistan in an emergency operation last week, has been able to take part in competition at Tokyo’s flagship Olympic Stadium.
The 26-year-old, who is primarily a sprinter, competed in the T47 long jump on Tuesday morning. He finished in last place, but recorded a personal best distance of 4m 46 as he took the applause of the competing athletes and delegates.
If Rasouli gave the appearance of being discombobulated, bewildered by the experience, then it was understandable. He flew into the country on Saturday night with his teammate Zakia Khudadadi, who will compete in the taekwondo competition later this week, after being smuggled out of Kabul in dramatic circumstances.
In an international operation that included efforts on the part of ParalympicsGB, Rasouli and Khudadadi were able to enter Kabul airport thanks to the assistance of the Australian military, which had a presence there.
The founder of Human Rights for All, Alison Battisson, who provides legal assistance to refugees and was personally involved in the process of helping the athletes out, described her experience in an interview with the New York Times.
She said that the athletes were guided into the airport remotely using a shared GPS position, and that they were told to carry bright scarves so as to identify themselves to troops once inside. Athletes were given advice such as to hide their papers and money in a bright scarf in their underwear, “and then when you pass through Taliban checkpoints, bring out your scarf and wave it like crazy,” Battisson said.
Khoudadadi and Rasouli got the attention they needed and were able to board a plane. They flew first to Dubai and then on to Paris, where they spent several days at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance in Paris. On Saturday they came to Tokyo where they were welcomed by the International Paralympic Committee.
“I was very happy to hear they made it to Tokyo, because I had no idea where on the planet they were,” Battisson said.
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As the last US military transport aircraft lifted off from Kabul airport on Monday night, marking the end of two decades of American troops in Afghanistan, celebratory gunfire rang out the capital as Taliban fighters revelled in the end of America’s longest war.
Just two weeks earlier, Taliban fighters had taken Kabul and toppled the government without force as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. It was a rise to power so swift that it had taken the US and even Taliban leadership by surprise.
After the US announced its departure just before midnight local time, an exit made with little fanfare and no official handover, Taliban spokesperson Qari Yusuf said in statement: “The last US soldier has left Kabul airport and our country gained complete independence.”
The mood was one of jubilance from Afghanistan’s new rulers, marking their return to power 20 years after the first Taliban regime was ousted by the 2001 US military invasion. Footage from inside the city showed loud gunfire ringing out, lighting up the night sky as Taliban fighters fired into air.
“The last five aircraft have left, it’s over!” said Hemad Sherzad, a Taliban fighter stationed at Kabul’s international airport. “I cannot express my happiness in words … Our 20 years of sacrifice worked.”
“The world should have learned their lesson and this is the enjoyable moment of victory,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a livestream posted by a militant.
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