The Last Afghan Ambassador to the U.S. Recalls the 2021 Taliban Takeover
This August marks three years since the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan following a two-decade war with a U.S.-led coalition. The chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would become one of the most significant foreign policy moments in President Joe Biden’s administration.
Adela Raz, the last ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States, was in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 15, 2021, the day the Taliban seized Kabul, but her husband and brother were still in the Afghan capital. When she woke up that Sunday morning and saw all the texts and messages she had received overnight, she knew something was wrong.
Raz immediately called her husband who told her what was happening. “From that moment onward, I started to live my nightmare,” Raz tells FRONTLINE, saying she had feared the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan since her youth. “This was like an actual nightmare I always had. And this was like living it.”
Watch: Taliban Takeover
Next, she called her brother, and told him to leave Kabul as soon as possible. “I said, ‘You have to leave right now, your home.’” She recalls telling him he didn’t have time to pack.
When her brother arrived at the airport, he called Raz and told her there were already thousands of Afghans there trying to leave. For Raz, who says she had worked all her life to ensure “that moment of chaos does not arrive,” it felt like a failure.
“I failed on anything I had done until that day, that moment, that second, because that’s exactly what I didn’t want to see or experience — or [for] Afghans [to] experience — again.”
Scenes of people at Kabul’s international airport jumping over barbed-wire fences and clinging to the sides of planes as they took off would become indelible images of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Watch: 17 Essential Documentaries on the War in Afghanistan — and Its Consequences
Raz, who had been the first woman to serve as a permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, was appointed as Afghanistan’s ambassador to the U.S. just weeks before the Taliban takeover.
In the days leading up to Kabul’s fall — as the Taliban seized several regional capitals in Afghanistan — Raz spoke with Department of Defense officials and later members of the U.S. Congress in D.C. to convey the urgency, the risk to women’s rights and the danger of losing all Afghanistan’s democratic gains over the previous two decades.
“My biggest fear was — if Kabul falls, my fear was there would be a lot of killings, looting, torture, because it was a city where everybody from other provinces had arrived to take refuge,” she says.
Watch the three-part series: America and the Taliban
In April 2021, President Biden had announced that U.S. troops would withdraw from Afghanistan. The move followed through on a deal negotiated by the Trump administration and the Taliban, but also aligned with Biden’s long-held desire to end what he called a “forever war.”
“I think that whenever you end a 20-year war, it’s going to be difficult on the exit,” says Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff at the time. “And the president had been told that the Afghan civilian government would be able to maintain control, and then, very quickly, regional capitals began to fall to the Taliban. The Taliban moved on Kabul faster than anyone had predicted, and so they reached Kabul faster than predicted.”
Then, about 10 days after the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the crowds at Kabul’s airport, killing 60 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops who were there to help with evacuations. Klain says that day “was the most difficult day.”
It’s one of the moments examined in FRONTLINE’s recent documentary Biden’s Decision, which traces Biden’s rise to the presidency, and the personal and political forces that shaped him and led to his fateful decision to drop his reelection bid. The filmmakers conducted dozens of interviews, which this story draws from.
Biden biographer Evan Osnos explains that for the Biden administration, the consequences of the chaotic withdrawal were big. “The images out of Afghanistan were a huge turning point,” Osnos tells FRONTLINE. “You began to see this really dramatic fall in their favorability and in how people perceived them.”
For Raz, the Taliban takeover meant that the government she represented was no longer in power. But she says she felt the need to reach out to American veterans of the war. “It was a moment of pain and loss for so many of us. And when I say us, I think it was not only Afghans; it was also the American people as well, because you all had invested for 20 years in that country. And just seeing it — the images I saw, and everybody else saw — it was heartbreaking.”
She says she wanted to tell U.S. veterans, “You have made so much difference in that part of the country and that part of life, and especially with the younger generation.”
