Afghanistan: Sir Laurie Bristow, UK Ambassador to Afghanistan - There were moments where we didn’t know if we would get out alive.

Land, Sea & Air - Stories from the Armed Forces

Sir Laurie Bristow was central to the military withdrawal in 2021, there’s nobody better placed to give us the inside story than the last British ambassador in Afghanistan. He takes us through the days and hours counting down, “15th August we started the day with President Ghani behind his desk broadcasting to the nation…roughly 2.30pm” He’s “left the country…a few hours later you’ve got the Taliban behind that desk…taking their selfies.”

Laurie shares his views on the Doha Agreement and tries to make sense of what happened and why, “How was it that we invested so many lives, so much money, so much political capital and the results were so lamentable?”

He describes the evacuation “…panic doesn’t even begin to cover it…I struggle to find the words…Miles…of desperate people…” Among them “there are certainly Taliban…extreme violence going on…children, old people trampled in the crush…dead children being pulled out of those crowds…extreme heat…a Covid wave…Somehow…you’ve got to find, identify, pull out the people who qualify for evacuation.”

“We train these young men and women for combat, this is harder…By the 15th there were not enough soldiers to control the airport…It all becomes suddenly very very real, the government has collapsed, the Taliban are back in charge…The next thing you see is people falling off the plane…There were moments where we didn’t know if we would get out alive.”

Sir Laurie recognises the “incredible job that the military…the civilians working alongside them did; and the fact that we got out over 15,000 people…What I saw of the performance of our soldiers and our civilians was really quite humbling…The youngest of our ‘sunburnt young soldiers’ were just 18 years old.”
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