Hoover Oral Histories Project Documents Loss, Grief, and Resilience After Afghanistan’s 2021 Collapse

Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) - Though they came to the realization at separate points in time, more than eight hundred miles apart, Afghan Air Force Maj. Mahdi Ahmadi and journalist Farahnaz Forotan can still pinpoint precisely when they knew their country would fall back into the hands of the Taliban.

For Forotan, a broadcast journalist in Afghanistan who later went on to found her own magazine, the moment came for her while in Qatar in 2020, covering the negotiations between the Taliban and the United States to end the war in Afghanistan.

A jubilant mood characterized what Forotan could observe of the talks. And the positivity, the friendly comments made toward one another by the negotiating parties, disheartened her.

"When I was watching that moment, something just broke in my heart, and I was just thinking, 'What about us?'."

She was thinking about the voices of the victims of war, the new generation, and her entire gender. She could not absorb the insult of the fact that her government and all those who had been harmed after nearly two decades of fighting the Taliban were not given a seat at the table.

Instead, she watched the Taliban negotiators, their oppressors, receive "recognition, acceptance, and even praise." She noted, "Americans, the Gulf countries, everyone kind of treated them with a red carpet."

She returned to Afghanistan to tell her friends what occurred in Qatar. "When I came back, I sat with a group of my friends who were thinking like me and I was like, 'That's it, this is the end.'"

Forotan was forced to flee the Afghan Republic due to death threats in mid-November 2020, nine months before the country fell to the Taliban.

The following year, in August 2021, in the operations center of Afghanistan's Kandahar Airfield, Maj. Ahmadi couldn't help but remark at the relative calm he observed in the city, reportedly on the cusp of a major assault by the Taliban. But small, unnerving details slowly revealed to him the calm was a mirage.

First, an airliner touched down at the airfield on August 13, 2021, the first civilian plane to do so in two weeks. It was bound to return to Bokhtar, in neighboring Tajikistan.

"[Someone] in the tower was radioing to the civilian plane, begging the pilot to let him on if he had an extra seat," Ahmadi said.

He recalled someone from the plane radioing back that all seats on the airliner were taken. "If there's no seat, I will sit on the floor," Ahmadi said the controller replied.

"For me, this was a shocking conversation," Ahmadi recalled.

By that same evening, Ahmadi and his fellow helicopter pilots could see only one trouble spot in all of the city of 650,000 residents on fire, and no Taliban fighters in sight.

At about 11 p.m., he and his colleagues gathered again in the operations center of the airfield, where they saw a video feed depicting hundreds of Afghan National Army military vehicles assembled in the middle of Kandahar, preparing to depart the city.

Ahmadi reached out to his commander, a man named Salim, who asked the local army commanders what was going on. "They connected us on radio. . . . and we received a call to leave Kandahar," Ahmadi said.

A deal had been made. All Afghan National Army troops and aviators needed to leave for Kabul. The Taliban was coming.

"Every pilot was crying, everyone was in a very bad situation-I never saw my friends like this before."

Ahmadi later evacuated to the United States but says the freedom his family enjoyed before in the twenty years where the Taliban were kept from power, made all of his sacrifices worth it.

"If I was not fighting, my sister was not able to go to school, my mom was not able to go shopping or go to work," Ahmadi said. "We'd all lose those values. That's the only thing we were thinking about."

He said he knew of colleagues who were murdered by the Taliban, and others who defected to them. For his own safety, he moved homes frequently.

"This situation is tough, but you have to stand and fight," he said.

These accounts are two of dozens provided by those who lived and fought through the twenty-year war against the Taliban to the Hoover Afghanistan Research & Relief Team (HART) and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives for its new oral history project.

Led by Halima Kazem, Stanford professor and Hoover oral historian, the project contains filmed statements from leaders of the American and NATO campaign between 2001 and 2021, including Senior Fellow and retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, retired generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus; senior members of the former Afghan government, including Habiba Sarabi, the first female governor of an Afghan province; and former Hoover visiting fellow Ahmad Nader Nadery, who represented the Afghan Government in peace negotiations with the Taliban in 2020-21. Curator and research fellow Jean McElwee Cannon of the Library & Archives led work to receive and document the stories for public access.

Speaking about the importance of the oral history project for Afghans and Americans to understand the two decades of fighting in the country, McMaster said "it can be heartbreaking" to think back to the losses sustained during that period and the humiliation for coalition nations and Afghans of the US withdrawal.

"But I think it's important, because what you really need when you come out of a traumatic experience is a community of people to share those experiences with. It can be cathartic, and it can be therapeutic."

Beyond promoting healing, he said, the stories of those Afghans who fought, some until the absolute bitter end, demonstrate the falsity of the suggestion that Afghans weren't willing to shoulder the burden, fight, and sometimes die for their shot at a free and open society.

"[The oral history can] counter some of the fundamental misunderstandings-that the war itself was a futile endeavor-that a free Afghanistan, with a government that respects the rights of its people, its women, was incompatible with history." McMaster said.

One of those women who fought for the rights of the Afghan people is Mahnaz Akbari. As a leader in the Afghan National Army's Female Tactical Platoon, she was part of a specialized unit that accompanied Coalition and Afghan special forces on night raids, ensuring they could communicate and interact with women and children they encountered in a culturally competent and respectful manner.

She says she eventually took part in about two thousand raids between 2011 and 2021. By the end of the conflict, as many as seven thousand Afghan women were serving in the military and security services.

Those she encountered on the raids often could not make heads or tails of a woman sporting combat fatigues, holding a rifle. Once, she said a ten-year-old girl approached her and touched her hand.

"Are you a woman?," the girl asked, wondering if it could be true that women could carry weapons and fight.

Everywhere she could, she said, she tried to instill in the women and girls she encountered that their trajectories would broaden because of the Afghan government's efforts. "I tried to make moments or pictures in their minds that there is another world," Akbari said.

"I once spoke to a very small girl who told me, 'My brother can't write.'"

"Can you write?," Akbari remembers asking the girl.

"No, I am a girl," the girl replied.

"I am a girl, and I am writing," Akbari told her. "And I just left her with that thought."

Today, girls in Afghanistan can no longer attend school beyond the age of twelve, outside of limited circumstances such as religious education. "We lost everything," Akbari said. "But the Taliban is not the future of Afghanistan. I believe we will have those days again."

The current records of the oral histories project take 19 days, or 450 hours, to consume in full. This body of work is now available online and open to the public.

While oral history archival projects are often available only in audio format, Kazem said, Hoover's Library & Archives graciously agreed to accept the added cost and complexity of gathering and maintaining video footage as well.

Doing so allows those who view the footage to absorb the depth of the loss suffered by the Afghan people and their allied partners, who fought so hard for so long to bring freedom to the nation.

"With video, we get the power of what we see here," Kazem said of the emotional responses heard during the afternoon. "The gazes drop, the moment of grief in the eyes."

"That has a vocabulary of its own."

Interested in listening to the full conversation? The recordings from the project's launch event are now live on the Library & Archives' YouTube channel.