The closing episode of Kabul starts with a recording of George W Bush’s 2001 address, when the US was on the verge of invading Afghanistan. ‘The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies,’ the teleprompter instructed him to say. ‘The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people.’ This tense drama, six episodes in length, then goes on to show what that friendship ultimately meant.
Set in the Afghan capital in August 2021, the series arrives at the end of a Western military presence that had lasted two decades and, in the end, did not produce the liberation its architects promised. The Taliban, far from being dismantled, are ready to reinstall an even more intimidating version of their old regime the moment American and European troops leave.
A co-production between companies across Europe, Kabul imagines what it was like for the vast majority of Afghans whose future suddenly held nothing but oppressive terror. The foreigners who had come after Bush’s declaration were about to become absent friends, if they had ever been friends at all. The drama, though, keeps its focus on the small number of people who held a ticket out. Their ties to Nato personnel had earned them the paperwork needed to be evacuated to fresh lives in the West.
The first episode captures the slow, sickening realisation, among both ordinary citizens and the last diplomats stationed at the French and Italian embassies, that those visas might be one more broken promise. Taliban fighters are already inside the city and are ignoring the agreed timetable. A piece of paper will not save anyone from imprisonment, execution, or simply being blocked from reaching the airport, which grows more besieged by the hour.
The series uses an old but effective trick: following one family, led by matriarch Zahara, played by Darina Al Joundi. As a prosecutor, Zahara sent countless Taliban fighters to prison on terrorism charges, so she knows she will be shot on sight if a fighter recognises her. Her husband Baqir (Vassilis Koukalani) is trying to convince her to drop everything and flee when gunfire erupts on their street, proving his urgency justified. In a wrenching, terrifying sequence, Zahara is forced to leave behind a beloved elderly colleague who cannot keep up on the dash to the French embassy. Everywhere, people are making impossible decisions in a matter of moments.
As the couple run, they stay on the phone to their adult children, neither of whom seems willing to put their own safety first. Their son Fazal (Shervin Alenabi) starts out manning a rural checkpoint for the Afghan army. Overwhelmed by the Taliban’s numbers, he abandons the post but, instead of heading toward the capital, he goes further into the countryside in search of his old CIA handlers. His journey becomes a way to see what is happening beyond Kabul and to measure the responsibility of the last Americans still on the ground.
Their daughter Amina (Hannah Abdoh) is a hospital doctor for whom the prospect of a new life in Europe holds no appeal. She has trained to care for sick and injured Afghans, and she is determined to continue. But when the Taliban walk into the hospital, she witnesses firsthand that their aggressive, irrational dogma cannot be argued with or resisted. The moment recalls Margaret Atwood’s warning that everything in The Handmaid’s Tale has already happened, somewhere.
The Taliban quickly erect a crude wall of cinder blocks, splitting the hospital in two and enforcing a strict division of men and women with no concern for patients’ wellbeing. Amina has formed a bond with a girl of primary school age, who finds comfort in the calming distraction of songs on an iPod. That comfort is destroyed when a Taliban soldier storms in and snatches the device from the girl’s hands because, as he says, ‘music is haram.’
The central question is whether Zahara’s family will be reunited, and whether the well meaning westerners, among them Giovanni (Gianmarco Saurino), a hesitant, bookish administrator who suddenly finds himself acting as the Italian consul and has to transform quickly into a firm and resourceful diplomat, can rescue everyone they promised to protect. The answer to that second question is a resounding, doom laced no. Yet as Kabul proves itself an efficient and empathetic drama, filled with political anger without ever being weighed down by it, the audience cannot help caring deeply about the outcome.
The show is not flawless. It has a tendency toward speechified dialogue, and some characters’ paths converge in ways that beggar belief. But its thriller mechanics, the ticking clock, the constant sense of being watched by an enemy who will never negotiate, are put to excellent use, making the story as compelling as it is appalling.
August 2021 in Kabul was an awful, shameful moment in history, and this series brings it back to life with vivid force. Kabul aired on BBC Four and is available on iPlayer in the UK and on SBS On Demand in Australia.
