Andrew Quilty’s book, August in Kabul seems to be everywhere on social media, print media and radio. In case you haven’t caught it then read up and then get this book. It needs to be read. It’s a first-hand experience of America’s last days in Afghanistan.
First, two admissions. #1, I have not followed the events over the last 20 years in Afghanistan. Call me deeply superficial but it seemed so complex I figured I could never catch up. Now for #2, Andrew Quilty is my son’s friend, surfing mates whose paths went different ways and both in unusual ways for boys groomed by the ultra-conservative private boys’ school system; that system may have some merit after all.
Quilty has done a remarkable job with August in Kabul. You’d expect this from a person who has received ten Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley for his work on Afghanistan, where he was based since 2013 and remained until late 2021. What makes Quilty’s book even more remarkable is that he is a photojournalist extraordinaire NOT a writer, until now, yet he captures in words every detail as evocatively as he does with his camera. I won’t lie. I found reading this book difficult and not just because of the subject matter. Quilty writes in a way that shows he believes his readers are intelligent enough to keep up. I struggled to start with and read many pages a few times over. By page 58 my brain had adjusted, and I couldn’t read it fast enough, yet slow enough to fully absorb the impact of what I was reading.
I have intentionally not listened to any of Quilty’s interviews, nor read any of the reviews of his book. I wanted to come at this task with my own eyes and opinions. I started out reading with a highlighter in hand because I wanted to easily call out the aspects of Quilty’s account that hit me in the gut. It didn’t take long before I cast the highlighter aside, otherwise the whole book would have been highlighted in yellow.
I remember back in August 2021 when we were all deep in our Covid-19 crisis reading about the fall of Kabul. My thoughts immediately went to Quilty’s welfare, would he get out alive? I soon realised he had no desire to do anything but stay. Crikey. This extract from his book puts this into some perspective, “As journalists, we were in the middle of what would be the biggest story in Afghanistan since the US invasion 20 years earlier. There had never been so much ‘news’ to cover, nor so great a demand for it, yet we were all somehow paralysed, unable to divert attention away from the impending collapse of the city and the community we’d become emotionally invested in over the years.” Quilty’s love of the Afghan community shines through in his book. What happened to that community and his many friends is beyond words.
The Taliban’s brutality is horrifying, and they certainly outsmarted the US, there’s a lesson in that for us all but that won’t help the Afghan people today. Almost half the population is on the verge of life-threatening starvation and their plight was made worse by the earthquake that struck in June 2022. It’s hard to imagine any sort of happy ending for the people of Afghanistan. Quilty’s account helps us understand why.
*To purchase Andrew Quilty’s debut book, ‘August in Kabul: America’s last days in Afghanistan‘, please click here.