Explosive, heartbreaking, and enraging

The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End by Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson – 4 Stars

Kabul is an explosive, heartbreaking, and enraging deep dive into one of America's most disgraceful moments—the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews with service members, intelligence officials, and abandoned Afghan allies, Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson craft a meticulous, well-structured account of the horror that unfolded.

The book lays bare the tragedy at the Kabul airport—desperate Afghans falling from planes, trampling deaths, American civilians stranded—and does not shy away from placing blame where it's due. Although the evacuation began under the Trump administration's Doha Agreement, the authors argue persuasively that Biden ignored its conditions, reversed every other Trump policy he disliked, yet claimed his hands were tied here.

The early chapters do a fantastic job highlighting Biden’s poor foreign policy instincts dating back to Vietnam. Dunleavy and Hasson also confront the abysmal decision-making of the State Department, the lack of coordination with NATO allies, and the disastrous abandonment of the strategic Bagram Air Base. Particularly enraging was learning that Marines were ordered to clean literal faeces off the airport before turning it over to the Taliban—a terrorist group we had been fighting for twenty years.

This book doesn't just condemn the political class; it honours the extraordinary bravery of the service members on the ground. It portrays the gut-wrenching disconnect between those risking their lives and the incompetent bureaucrats safely thousands of miles away. It also offers important commentary on how the botched withdrawal emboldened U.S. adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran, and strained NATO relations.

The writing is clear, concise, and free of excessive jargon, making even complex topics accessible. The structure—fifteen tightly organised chapters—elicits strong emotional responses without feeling manipulative. While there is certainly a right-leaning perspective, the authors don't let Trump's administration off the hook entirely either, which I appreciated.

I came to Kabul after a deep dive into America's Middle Eastern entanglements, hoping for a detailed personal memoir of the evacuation. While this book is not a memoir, it comes close in capturing the harrowing first-person experiences of those abandoned and betrayed. I only wish the authors had spent a little more time exploring alternative strategies: what an orderly withdrawal could or should have looked like.

In short: Kabul is a brutally honest, painstakingly documented, and passionately written account of a tragedy that should never have happened—and whose ramifications will haunt U.S. foreign policy for decades to come. It is absolutely worth reading if you want to understand the true cost of incompetence at the highest levels.

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