As the fighters advanced on Kabul, it was civilians who mobilised to help with the evacuation. In the absence of a plan, the hardest decisions fell on inexperienced volunteers, and the stress began to tell
In the weeks before Kabul fell, my mind was strangely calm. There is a moment just before the world falls apart, when human beings almost believe they can reverse the sequence of events that has brought them to this point – a flash of magical thinking in which they can will a different reality into existence.
On 2 July, when the Americans left Bagram airbase, I woke up in London with a horrible headache. My phone was inundated with messages of disbelief. “I am so sorry about it,” a few friends wrote, but they couldn’t name “it”. I couldn’t name it either.
