the man from kabul essay

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Summary: “the cabuliwallah”.

"The Cabuliwallah" is a short story by Rabindranath Tagore that utilizes realism to explore the themes of The Transcendental Quality of Human Connection , A Father’s Love , and The Passage of Time . The plot centralizes the unexpected friendship that blossoms between the narrator’s young daughter, Mini , and a Cabuliwallah (meaning a man from Kabul) named Rahmun. The story was first published in 1892 and is narrated from the first-person perspective of a Bengali writer and father, who offers glimpses into the unlikely cross-cultural bond his daughter forms with the Afghani peddler.

Tagore's appreciation for the poets of medieval Bengal and Bengali folk literature reflects in his storytelling, which often features characters from rural Bengal and explores the depths of human emotions. He draws from Indian philosophies and aesthetics to explore universal themes of love, nature, and the human spirit. Moreover, Tagore’s fruitful exchange with modern European literary tradition, especially the English Romantic poets, adds a touch of Romanticism and introspection to his works. These influences are apparent in "The Cabuliwallah," which explores human connection, love, and longing for loved ones.

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This guide refers to the version of the text that is freely available on Project Gutenberg.

The story opens with an introduction to Mini, a spirited five-year-old girl. The unnamed narrator, who is Mini’s father , describes her as a talkative child who “all her life […] hasn’t wasted a minute in silence” (1). Mini's constant chatter vexes her mother, but her father appreciates her inquisitive nature and enjoys engaging in conversations with her.

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Mini sits in her father’s study as he works on his novel. She spots a Cabuliwallah from their window and calls out to him. The Cabuliwallah, named Rahmun, is a tall and bearded man. He wears traditional Afghan clothing, including a turban, and carries a bag and boxes of grapes. Rahmun is a peddler who sells various goods, including dry fruits and shawls, and often visits Calcutta to sell his merchandise.

Mini is initially reluctant to meet Rahmun. She is frightened by Rahmun’s strangeness; she imagines that he has stuffed children in his bag. Rahmun tries to approach her, but she fearfully hides behind her father. After the first encounter, however, Mini lets her guard down and her fear subsides. She soon strikes up a friendship with Rahmun, who offers her small treats of raisins and nuts. As he continues his visits to Mini’s home, she grows fond of him and the two bond over shared jokes.

Meanwhile, the narrator is captivated by Rahmun's tales of the distant land of Afghanistan. Rahmun’s vagrant life contrasts with the narrator’s own rooted existence in Calcutta. While the narrator dreams of traveling the world, he is hesitant to leave his familiar surroundings. On the other hand, Mini's mother is concerned about Rahmun's presence, primarily due to his foreignness. The narrator tries reassuring his wife, but she persists in harboring doubts against Rahmun.

Despite Mini's mother's unease, Rahmun’s visits continue until one day, the narrator witnesses him being led away in handcuffs. Rahmun explains that he got into a scuffle with a customer who refused to pay for a shawl that he had taken. During the quarrel, it is implied that he stabbed the customer. Mini, oblivious to the gravity of the situation, asks if the Cabuliwallah is being taken to his “father-in-law,” a euphemism Rahmun uses for “jail.” Rahmun is imprisoned for a few years.

Mini gradually forgets about Rahmun, makes new friends, and also grows less attached to her own father. The narrator laments that he has lost the close connection he once shared with Mini.

The plot jumps forward several years, and it is revealed that Mini is about to get married. The morning of her wedding is described as “bright and festive, with wedding-pipes playing since early dawn” (12). The narrator reflects on the radiant sunlight and the pain that he feels at the approaching separation from his daughter.

Immersed in his study, the narrator is startled when Rahmun unexpectedly arrives at his house, having just been released from jail. Rahmun's appearance has changed—he no longer carries a bag, has long hair, or the same vigor that he used to possess. However, Mini's father recognizes him by his smile.

The narrator initially tries to dismiss Rahmun by telling him that they are busy with wedding preparations. However, Rahmun expresses a desire to see Mini, believing that she is still the same little girl who would run to him, calling out "O Cabuliwallah! Cabuliwallah!" (7). When the narrator relents, Rahmun offers grapes, nuts, and raisins as a gift for Mini.

Rahmun then shows the narrator a crumpled piece of paper containing the handprint of his own daughter, Parbati, that he carries with him at all times. This show of a father's enduring love and longing for his child touches the narrator deeply, prompting a change of heart. The narrator calls Mini, who arrives dressed as a bride. The carefree little girl has transformed into an inhibited young woman.

When Mini enters the room, Rahmun presents her with a few almonds, raisins, and grapes wrapped in paper, just like he used to years ago. Now, the innocence of childhood has faded. She blushes and looks away, leaving the Cabuliwallah with a heavy heart.

As Mini departs, Rahmun is hit with a realization that his own daughter must have grown up like Mini. The narrator is touched by the deep love that Rahmun feels for his daughter; he sees himself reflected in the man’s defeated figure. He offers Rahmun money to help him return home. Though this means that the narrator can no longer finance a wedding band or electricity for Mini's wedding ceremony, he believes that this act of kindness brings a more gracious light to the occasion.

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Rabindranath Tagore’s The Cabuliwallah: Summary & Analysis

Rabindranath Tagore’s The Cabuliwallah: Summary…

The Cabuliwallah is from Kabul. His real name is Abdur Rahman. He works as a peddler in India. He goes to Kabul once a year to visit his wife and little daughter. In the course of selling goods, once he reaches the house of writer, Rabindranath Tagore. Then his five years daughter, Mini calls him ‘Cabuliwallah! A Cabuliwallah’.

When Cabuliwallah goes to visit Mini she is afraid because he is wearing loose solid clothes and a tall turban. He looks gigantic. When the writer knows that Mini is afraid, he introduces her to him. The Cabuliwallah gives her some nuts and raisins. Mini becomes happy from next day, the Cabuliwallah often visits her and he gives her something to eat.

They crack jokes and laugh and enjoy. They also feel comfortable in the company of each other. The writer likes their friendship. But Mini’s mother doesn’t like it. She thinks that a peddler like Cabuliwallah can be a child lifter. However, Mini and the Cabuliwallah becomes an intimate friend.

The Cabuliwallah sells seasonal goods. Once he sells a Rampuri shawl to a customer on credit. He asks him for the money many times but he doesn’t pay. At last, he denies buying the shawl. The Cabuliwallah becomes very angry and stabs the customer.

Then he is arrested by police and taken to jail. He is jailed for eight years. When he is freed from jail at first he goes to visit Mini surprisingly. It is the wedding day and he isn’t allowed to visit her.

When he shows the finger of a piece of paper to the writer, he permits to meet Mini who is in a wedding dress. The writer knows that the Cabuliwallah has no money to go back to his house so the writer cuts of the wedding expenses like a light and bands and gives one hundred rupees to the Cabuliwallah and sends him to Kabul.

Interpretation:

The writer may be trying to show the attitude of peoples towards foreigners and poor peddlers. Although the Cabuliwallah is very simple and honest, the writer’s wife suspects him as a child lifter also tries to cheat him by not paying his money.

The story also shows the plight of the people due to poverty. If the Cabuliwallah had enough money, he would not come to India leaving his wife and daughter in Kabul. The writer seems to shows that temper ruins anyone.

If Cabuliwallah didn’t stab the customer, he wouldn’t have to go to jail. This story is also full of feelings of humanity. The writer cuts off the wedding expenses and helps the Cabuliwallah.

Critical Thinking:

Although this story is full of the feeling of humanity, some ideas of the writer are skeptical. Does a man leave his children freely with a stranger? Does a peddler give things to other children freely every time? Does the Cabuliwallah stab the customer? Can we find anyone who helps others by cutting off wedding expenses? So, I don’t agree with the writer totally.

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Author: William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

27 Comments

Thank you very much 😊

What is the theme/central idea of the story ‘the cabuliwallah’

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS, FRIENDSHIP & FATHERLY LOVE

good great liked it!

What is the value in the story?

That is good bro or sis thanks for helping

Nice and easy to understand

story of feelings!!!!! also its super sad

Yes!! A man can leave his children with any stranger only when he feels that he is not stranger..Yes,of course,a peddler gives things freely to others children often if not everytime.. I’m totally agree with the writer and he is not skeptical regarding his ideas..

What are some style used by the narrator?

Its is a nice story

I am from the same language as was kabliwalla.Our pashtoon people even now give things free and sometimes with low price to forgners and espically to children.It always happens to me, whenever i go to my villiage. when my small sister asks for any thing at shop esp in town’s shop it is given free.So having skeptical remarks about kabliwallah is not right.The more you go past the more were the people generious and showed more affection to children in particular.

Not bad, but need more detail

Really helpful… and easy to understand😊👌

this is very helpful

very helpful… and its really interesting …

its really good

It is Kabuliwala actually. Please correct. Other than that its alright!!! 🙂

Its really helpful!! .

its good! shows a mixture of humanity, temper, friendship…etc.

Not bad …………….

Like sannia said, this is good for students. Good job.

Perfect way for student!

Ya of course

Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories

By rabindranath tagore, rabindranath tagore: short stories summary and analysis of "kabuliwallah".

The story opens with the narrator talking about his precocious five-year-old daughter Mini, who learned how to talk within a year of being born and practically hadn’t stopped talking since. Her mother often tells her to be quiet, but her father prefers to let her talk, so she talks to him often.

One day while the narrator is writing, Mini starts crying out “Kabuliwallah, Kabuliwallah!” The man she’s shouting about is an Afghan in baggy clothes, walking along selling grapes and nuts. Mini fears him, convinced that she has children the size of herself stashed in his bag.

But a few days later, our narrator finds the Kabuliwallah sitting with Mini, paying close attention as she talks and talks. He has given her some grapes and pistachios, so the narrator gives the Kabuliwallah half a rupee. Later, Mini’s mother finds her with the half-rupee and asks where she got it, and is displeased to hear she took money from the man.

Mini and the Kabuliwallah develop a close relationship, spending time together every day joking around and talking. The narrator enjoys talking to the Kabuliwallah too, asking him about his home country of Afghanistan, and all about his travels. But Mini’s mother is alarmed by her daughter’s closeness with the man, worrying that he might try to abduct Mini. The narrator does not agree that there is any danger.

Every year in the middle of the month of Magh, the Kabuliwallah returns home. Before making the trip, he goes around collecting money he is owed. But this year, the Kabuliwallah gets in a scuffle with a man who owes him money and ends up stabbing him. This lands him in jail for the next several years, during which Mini grows up and starts enjoying the company of girls her age. The narrator more or less forgets about the Kabuliwallah.

But on the day of Mini’s wedding, the Kabuliwallah appears at the narrator’s house. Without a bag or his long hair, he is barely recognizable to the narrator, but he eventually welcomes him in. The narrator is uneasy, thinking about how the Kabuliwallah is the only would-be murderer he’s ever known, and tells the visitor to leave. He complies.

But shortly after, the Kabuliwallah returns, bringing a gift of grapes and pistachios for Mini. The narrator doesn’t tell him that it’s her wedding today, but simply repeats that there’s an engagement at their house and he must go. But the Kabuliwallah pulls a small piece of paper out of his coat pocket and shows it to the narrator. It’s a handprint in ash, and he explains that he has a daughter back home in Afghanistan, and that Mini helps him deal with the heartache of being so far from her. The narrator is touched and gets Mini.

Mini and the Kabuliwallah have an awkward exchange during which the man realizes that Mini has grown up, and therefore so has his own daughter. Like with Mini, he’ll have to reacquaint himself with his daughter. The narrator gives the Kabuliwallah money so that he can return home to Afghanistan to see his daughter, meaning that Mini’s wedding will lose some of the theatrics such as electric lights and a brass band. But the wedding will be “lit by a kinder, more gracious light.”

There are two central themes in this story, and Tagore masterfully plays them against each other to build tension in the narrative. The first key theme is otherness , with Kabuliwallah standing as a clear outsider who speaks broken Bengali and dresses in a way that situates him outside of typical Bengali society. The narrator is fascinated by him in part because of the fact that he’s seen parts of the world that are so different from Calcutta, while the narrator’s wife distrusts him precisely because he is a foreigner, and perhaps one who will kidnap her child, which she thinks Afghanis are wont to do.

The other theme is doubling , as the narrator and the Kabuliwallah are construed as mirror characters of one another. They are both shown as storytellers, and each is fascinated enough by Mini to listen to her talk for hours. But most importantly, Tagore reminds us that they’re both fathers, and the narrator seeing the Kabuliwallah as a man who is heartsick over a daughter that he has not seen in years helps the narrator see the man as a human being, not as some would-be murderer.

The genius of the story is the fact that the climax seems to come when Kabuliwallah stabs the debtor, which would confirm the narrator’s wife’s worst fears that this outsider is dangerous. During what seems like the denouement of the story, the Kabuliwallah returns and the narrator, who has clearly spent the intervening years considering the man a would-be murderer, tries to brush this outsider off.

But then the real climax comes. The Kabuliwallah pulls out the piece of paper with his daughter’s handprint inscribed on it. This image draws a link between the narrator and Kabuliwallah as men with daughters they love dearly. With the move to bond the narrator and the Kabuliwallah, Tagore crafts a tale about finding common humanity despite all of the differences that two men may have.

It’s worth noting here that one of the things that makes Tagore such an innovator given the context he was writing in was his unconventional narrative structure. Indeed, this story doesn’t play out over some sort of conflict and resolution like a typical narrative (or the adventure stories that the narrator writes) might. Instead, Tagore develops a set of relationships and shows us how those relationships play out when tempered by the sands of time.

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Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Character sketch of kabuliwala

A traveling fruit and nut merchant from Afghanistan, the Kabuliwallah develops an unlikely friendship with a five-year-old girl while in Calcutta. After a period of time in jail, the Kabuliwallah returns to meet the girl, only to find her on her...

Discuss the contribution of Tagore to Indian education discussed in Uma Gupta's book.

I'm sorry, this is a short-answer question forum designed for text specific questions. I am unfamiliar with the book you've cited above.

Comment on themes of Tagore’s writing,

GradeSaver as a complete theme page readily available for your use in its study guide for the unit.

Study Guide for Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories

Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories study guide contains a biography of Rabindranath Tagore, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories
Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories Summary
Character List

Lesson Plan for Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories

About the Author
Study Objectives
Common Core Standards
Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories
Relationship to Other Books
Bringing in Technology
Notes to the Teacher
Related Links
Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories

Introduction
Family history
Life and events

The Man from Kabul

We first met Naajab on a dreary December evening. It was very cold and the wind pricked our faces with…

Arnab Banerjee | New Delhi | March 29, 2017 9:23 am

(PHOTO: SNS)

We first met Naajab on a dreary December evening. It was very cold and the wind pricked our faces with sharp, icy needles. We had just got off the bus and right in front of us, inside the bus stop shelter, was this tall gaunt man playing Hedwigs theme on his violin. My daughter, being a recently indoctrinated, diehard Harry Potter fan, was understandably excited. She stood rooted, rapt in awestruck admiration. I had to remind her that she would be late for her ballet lesson and Miss Sarah wouldnt be too happy. She asked me for a pound and with the greatest possible gentleness and care, deposited it inside the upturned, tattered cap on the pavement in front of the violinist, who had probably just met his biggest fan that evening.

I hurried along almost dragging my daughter by her hand. She continued to look behind her and though I did not turn back to see, I instinctively knew that that the fascinating object of her admiration was also holding her adoring gaze with a big toothy grin and violently nodding away at her, amid the gradual quickening tempo of the fiddling. When we came back to the bus stop after the lesson, much to the disappointment of my daughter, he was gone.

After that we saw him every week on our way to ballet lessons. If he was playing anything else on the violin, he would stop at once, as soon as he saw us, and immediately strike up Hedwigs theme to my daughters evident satisfaction.

Whats your name? he asked my daughter, one evening.

Rukmini, she mumbled shyly.

Mini, he laughed out loud, Mini, the leetil one, ha ha ha. He held out a bar of chocolate. Take, take, he insisted, I will be happy… Please!

Sensing my daughters hesitation and seeing the apparent delight on the face of the man opposite, I gave her a tiny nudge of encouragement. She almost snatched the chocolate off him and ran. As I trotted after her, I heard a guffaw as Hedwigs theme came back again on the airwaves. That evening, after dropping my daughter off, I came back to the bus stop. It was a relief to hear something else being played for a change. As I got into the shelter, he stopped playing and looked up, a little apprehensively. I rummaged in my pockets and offered him a fiver, Very kind of you but you shouldnt. Those are expensive chocolates. He refused point-blank, Leetil girl, she is baby, I dont. Not wishing to dilute the sentiment, I changed the subject, Whats your name? Naajab You from Afghanistan? Yes Whereabouts? Kabul Been here long? 14 years. I leeve in Pinner. How come we did not see you in the summer? My daughters started ballet in August. Summer, I do odd jobs here there. Help in garden. Garden, did you say? Perhaps you can help me then. The squirrels have dug up all my tulip bulbs. Can you replant them and cover the bed with some netting? Yes Tomorrow? Yes Eleven in the morning? Yes, I will go I jotted down my address and handed it to him. Then I went back to get my daughter. When we came to the bus stop again, Naajab was gone. On the bus ride home, I could not help thinking that this was straight from the pages of Tagore. You know Tagore, dont you, I asked my daughter. In a flash she uncoiled like a jack-in-the-box and stood up. Before I knew what was happening, to my utter consternation, in her accented Bengali she began belting out, Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka jaya he, Bharata Bhagya Bidhata. Fortunately, no one on the bus seemed to mind, some even attempted little indulgent smiles. I was glad this was London, such a child-friendly city. The little tykes can get away with murder here. As for me I was glad that I did not have to stand up. Tagore also wrote stories, I told her, a lot of very good stories. You should read them. Perhaps I will read them to you and your sister, one day, when I have time. The Man from Kabul, I was already translating in my mind for my daughters eventual paraphrased consumption.

True to his word, Naajab was there the next morning. And on time too! My daughter could not believe her luck when she saw him, though she was a tad disappointed when she discovered Naajab did not have his violin with him. In the garden, Naajab knew what he was doing. Within an hour he was done. When the doorbell rang, the tulips were back in their beds, the protective netting in place; everything swept up and cleaned; all tools, nettings and strings put away neatly in the shed. As I handed him a little more than the pro-rated London minimum wage, I thanked him for a job well done and asked if he could come next week to remove the dead annuals and put them on a new compost heap.

Soon Naajab was a regular feature in our lives. Hedwigs theme on Friday evenings and his pottering about in the garden on Saturday mornings became routine. So where did you learn the violin, Naajab? I asked him one day. In Kabul I play rubab. One garden job here I find violin in shed. I take it. I listen to radio and play. Violin not so difficult. Not for you Naajab. You are a man of many talents.

Winter gave way to spring. Summer followed. My daughter started with her own violin lessons. We no longer had Hedwigs theme to entertain us on Friday evenings and I, for one, wasnt complaining. My daughter was a bit upset at first but since she saw Naajab every Saturday, she did not take it too much to heart. Naajab brought his violin on some Saturdays. The ever so familiar Hedwigs theme resumed, assailing my senses once again when I was on the phone with my mother in Calcutta. Rukmini lost her shyness and leaned heavily on Naajab when he played the violin. She taught him jelly on a plate, which Naajab, after a few exaggerated false starts and punctuated with shrill reprimands, Finally got it, to the exhilarated delight of both my daughters who, holding hands, broke into an impromptu dance. They played in the garden after Naajab finished work and all three grinned and giggled and rolled on the lawn laughing out loud till it was time for Naajab to tear himself away to his next job of the day. So when were you in Kabul last, Naajab? 14 years You havent been back since you came? No Do you have family Naajab? Yes, in Kabul. Two boys one girl. Do you Skype them? Do you Facetime them? No! Internet no good in Kabul. I talk to them. I send them money. How old are your children? Two, five and seven. But you said you havent been home for 14 years? Two, five and seven when I leeve Kaboul. 14 years ago. I leeve when they sleep. They dont see me go. So they are all grown up now? He shrugged his shoulders. Why dont you go back? They need money. I make money here. I dont go back. If I go back I cant come.

It was as I had feared. I had been providing employment to an illegal immigrant and had put myself on the wrong side of the law. Her Majestys law enforcement officers owed me a visit; social service too, when they found out we let our daughters play with Naajab, unsupervised. When I come I fill papers. Make me a refugee I ask. Afghanistan no safe. They take papers. Two years I get letter. Go back they say. Afghanistan is peace. No war no more. Democracy. I tear letter. I pack, I leeve Kent. I come to Harrow. I dont go back. I work. I make money. I send money home. Dont we all, I thought to myself. If they make me refugee I can bring family. That day we made a decision. Till he wanted, we would employ Naajab in some capacity or the other in summer and winter. He would see my daughters grow up. Not that it would lessen, in any way, the unarticulated pain of not seeing his own children blossom into young men and women, but at least every week, he would see expectant faces light up with innocent joy whenever he came to the garden through the back gate. He could talk to them about the stories he knew but never got to tell and play games he would have played in the Kabul that was never far from his mind. Sitting in his little room off Pinner Lane, perhaps he could see before him, a little more clearly, his own little children growing up in the barren, war-ravaged mountainous terrain of Afghanistan.

Next week before leaving for the airport, I popped my head into my daughters room to say goodbye. Both were deep in sleep. I knew when I came back home on Thursday, they would have gone to bed. So they get to see me only on Friday? Naajab, you either have a heart of stone or else a bank of resolve and a well of sorrows that puts me to shame, I whispered. In the flight I opened my long neglected, well-worn copy of Tagores collected short stories at the The Man from Kabul. I started to read and began to paraphrase, My seven-year-old daughter Mini cannot live without chattering. I really believe that in all her life she has not wasted a minute in silenceTears came to my eyes. I forgot that he was a poor man from Kabul, while I was, but no, what was I more than he? He also was a father. The memory of the sleeping faces of his little children in their distant mountain home that Naajab carried inside him every moment of his life, reminded me of my own daughters.

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Rabindranath Tagore

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions, the narrator, rahamat / the “kabuliwala”, the narrator’s wife / mini’s mother.

Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore

Fresh Reads

The Fruitseller from Kabul

My five years’ old daughter Mini cannot live without chattering. I really believe that in all her life she has not wasted a minute in silence. Her mother is often vexed at this, and would stop her prattle, but I would not. To see Mini quiet is unnatural, and I cannot bear it long. And so my own talk with her is always lively.

One morning, for instance, when I was in the midst of the seventeenth chapter of my new novel, my little Mini stole into the room, and putting her hand into mine, said: “Father! Ramdayal the door-keeper calls a crow a krow! He doesn’t know anything, does he?”

Before I could explain to her the differences of language in this world, she was embarked on the full tide of another subject. “What do you think, Father? Bhola says there is an elephant in the clouds, blowing water out of his trunk, and that is why it rains!”

And then, darting off anew, while I sat still making ready some reply to this last saying, “Father! what relation is Mother to you?”

“My dear little sister in the law!” I murmured involuntarily to myself, but with a grave face contrived to answer: “Go and play with Bhola, Mini! I am busy!”

The window of my room overlooks the road. The child had seated herself at my feet near my table, and was playing softly, drumming on her knees. I was hard at work on my seventeenth chapter, where Protrap Singh, the hero, had just caught Kanchanlata, the heroine, in his arms, and was about to escape with her by the third story window of the castle, when all of a sudden Mini left her play, and ran to the window, crying, “A Kabuliwala! a Kabuliwala!” Sure enough in the street below was a Kabuliwala, passing slowly along. He wore the loose soiled clothing of his people, with a tall turban; there was a bag on his back, and he carried boxes of grapes in his hand.

I cannot tell what were my daughter’s feelings at the sight of this man, but she began to call him loudly. “Ah!” I thought, “he will come in, and my seventeenth chapter will never be finished!” At which exact moment the Kabuliwala turned, and looked up at the child. When she saw this, overcome by terror, she fled to her mother’s protection, and disappeared. She had a blind belief that inside the bag, which the big man carried, there were perhaps two or three other children like herself. The pedlar meanwhile entered my doorway, and greeted me with a smiling face.

So precarious was the position of my hero and my heroine, that my first impulse was to stop and buy something, since the man had been called. I made some small purchases, and a conversation began about Abdurrahman, the Russians, she English, and the Frontier Policy.

As he was about to leave, he asked: “And where is the little girl, sir?”

And I, thinking that Mini must get rid of her false fear, had her brought out.

She stood by my chair, and looked at the Kabuliwala and his bag. He offered her nuts and raisins, but she would not be tempted, and only clung the closer to me, with all her doubts increased.

This was their first meeting.

One morning, however, not many days later, as I was leaving the house, I was startled to find Mini, seated on a bench near the door, laughing and talking, with the great Kabuliwala at her feet. In all her life, it appeared; my small daughter had never found so patient a listener, save her father. And already the corner of her little sari was stuffed with almonds and raisins, the gift of her visitor, “Why did you give her those?” I said, and taking out an eight-anna bit, I handed it to him. The man accepted the money without demur, and slipped it into his pocket.

Alas, on my return an hour later, I found the unfortunate coin had made twice its own worth of trouble! For the Kabuliwala had given it to Mini, and her mother catching sight of the bright round object, had pounced on the child with: “Where did you get that eight-anna bit?”

“The Kabuliwala gave it me,” said Mini cheerfully.

“The Kabuliwala gave it you!” cried her mother much shocked. “Oh, Mini! how could you take it from him?”

I, entering at the moment, saved her from impending disaster, and proceeded to make my own inquiries.

It was not the first or second time, I found, that the two had met. The Kabuliwala had overcome the child’s first terror by a judicious bribery of nuts and almonds, and the two were now great friends.

They had many quaint jokes, which afforded them much amusement. Seated in front of him, looking down on his gigantic frame in all her tiny dignity, Mini would ripple her face with laughter, and begin: “O Kabuliwala, Kabuliwala, what have you got in your bag?”

And he would reply, in the nasal accents of the mountaineer: “An elephant!” Not much cause for merriment, perhaps; but how they both enjoyed the witticism! And for me, this child’s talk with a grown-up man had always in it something strangely fascinating.

Then the Kabuliwala, not to be behindhand, would take his turn: “Well, little one, and when are you going to the father-in-law’s house?”

Now most small Bengali maidens have heard long ago about the father-in-law’s house; but we, being a little new-fangled, had kept these things from our child, and Mini at this question must have been a trifle bewildered. But she would not show it, and with ready tact replied: “Are you going there?”

Amongst men of the Kabuliwala’s class, however, it is well known that the words father-in-law’s house have a double meaning. It is a euphemism for jail, the place where we are well cared for, at no expense to ourselves. In this sense would the sturdy pedlar take my daughter’s question. “Ah,” he would say, shaking his fist at an invisible policeman, “I will thrash my father-in-law!” Hearing this, and picturing the poor discomfited relative, Mini would go off into peals of laughter, in which her formidable friend would join.

These were autumn mornings, the very time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it, and at the sight of a foreigner in the streets, I would fall to weaving a network of dreams,—the mountains, the glens, and the forests of his distant home, with his cottage in its setting, and the free and independent life of far-away wilds. Perhaps the scenes of travel conjure themselves up before me, and pass and repass in my imagination all the more vividly, because I lead such a vegetable existence, that a call to travel would fall upon me like a thunderbolt. In the presence of this Kabuliwala, I was immediately transported to the foot of arid mountain peaks, with narrow little defiles twisting in and out amongst their towering heights. I could see the string of camels bearing the merchandise, and the company of turbaned merchants, carrying some of their queer old firearms, and some of their spears, journeying downward towards the plains. I could see—but at some such point Mini’s mother would intervene, imploring me to “beware of that man.”

Mini’s mother is unfortunately a very timid lady. Whenever she hears a noise in the street, or sees people coming towards the house, she always jumps to the conclusion that they are either thieves, or drunkards, or snakes, or tigers, or malaria or cockroaches, or caterpillars, or an English sailor. Even after all these years of experience, she is not able to overcome her terror. So she was full of doubts about the Kabuliwala, and used to beg me to keep a watchful eye on him.

I tried to laugh her fear gently away, but then she would turn round on me seriously, and ask me solemn questions.

Were children never kidnapped?

Was it, then, not true that there was slavery in Cabul?

Was it so very absurd that this big man should be able to carry off a tiny child?

I urged that, though not impossible, it was highly improbable. But this was not enough, and her dread persisted. As it was indefinite, however, it did not seem right to forbid the man the house, and the intimacy went on unchecked.

Once a year in the middle of January Rahmun, the Kabuliwala, was in the habit of returning to his country, and as the time approached he would be very busy, going from house to house collecting his debts. This year, however, he could always find time to come and see Mini. It would have seemed to an outsider that there was some conspiracy between the two, for when he could not come in the morning, he would appear in the evening.

Even to me it was a little startling now and then, in the corner of a dark room, suddenly to surprise this tall, loose-garmented, much bebagged man; but when Mini would run in smiling, with her, “O! Kabuliwala! Kabuliwala!” and the two friends, so far apart in age, would subside into their old laughter and their old jokes, I felt reassured.

One morning, a few days before he had made up his mind to go, I was correcting my proof sheets in my study. It was chilly weather. Through the window the rays of the sun touched my feet, and the slight warmth was very welcome. It was almost eight o’clock, and the early pedestrians were returning home, with their heads covered. All at once, I heard an uproar in the street, and, looking out, saw Rahmun being led away bound between two policemen, and behind them a crowd of curious boys. There were blood-stains on the clothes of the Kabuliwala, and one of the policemen carried a knife. Hurrying out, I stopped them, and enquired what it all meant. Partly from one, partly from another, I gathered that a certain neighbour had owed the pedlar something for a Rampuri shawl, but had falsely denied having bought it, and that in the course of the quarrel, Rahmun had struck him. Now in the heat of his excitement, the prisoner began calling his enemy all sorts of names, when suddenly in a verandah of my house appeared my little Mini, with her usual exclamation: “O Kabuliwala! Kabuliwala!” Rahmun’s face lighted up as he turned to her. He had no bag under his arm today, so she could not discuss the elephant with him. She at once therefore proceeded to the next question: “Are you going to the father-in-law’s house?” Rahmun laughed and said: “Just where I am going, little one!” Then seeing that the reply did not amuse the child, he held up his fettered hands. “Ali,” he said, “I would have thrashed that old father-in-law, but my hands are bound!”

On a charge of murderous assault, Rahmun was sentenced to some years’ imprisonment.

Time passed away, and he was not remembered. The accustomed work in the accustomed place was ours, and the thought of the once-free mountaineer spending his years in prison seldom or never occurred to us. Even my light-hearted Mini, I am ashamed to say, forgot her old friend. New companions filled her life. As she grew older, she spent more of her time with girls. So much time indeed did she spend with them that she came no more, as she used to do, to her father’s room. I was scarcely on speaking terms with her.

Years had passed away. It was once more autumn and we had made arrangements for our Mini’s marriage. It was to take place during the Puja Holidays. With Durga returning to Kailas, the light of our home also was to depart to her husband’s house, and leave her father’s in the shadow.

The morning was bright. After the rains, there was a sense of ablution in the air, and the sun-rays looked like pure gold. So bright were they that they gave a beautiful radiance even to the sordid brick walls of our Calcutta lanes. Since early dawn to-day the wedding-pipes had been sounding, and at each beat my own heart throbbed. The wail of the tune, Bhairavi, seemed to intensify my pain at the approaching separation. My Mini was to be married to-night.

From early morning noise and bustle had pervaded the house. In the courtyard the canopy had to be slung on its bamboo poles; the chandeliers with their tinkling sound must be hung in each room and verandah. There was no end of hurry and excitement. I was sitting in my study, looking through the accounts, when some one entered, saluting respectfully, and stood before me. It was Rahmun the Kabuliwala. At first I did not recognise him. He had no bag, nor the long hair, nor the same vigour that he used to have. But he smiled, and I knew him again.

“When did you come, Rahmun?” I asked him.

“Last evening,” he said, “I was released from jail.”

The words struck harsh upon my ears. I had never before talked with one who had wounded his fellow, and my heart shrank within itself, when I realised this, for I felt that the day would have been better-omened had he not turned up.

“There are ceremonies going on,” I said, “and I am busy. Could you perhaps come another day?”

At once he turned to go; but as he reached the door he hesitated, and said: “May I not see the little one, sir, for a moment?” It was his belief that Mini was still the same. He had pictured her running to him as she used, calling “O Kabuliwala! Kabuliwala!” He had imagined too that they would laugh and talk together, just as of old. In fact, in memory of former days he had brought, carefully wrapped up in paper, a few almonds and raisins and grapes, obtained somehow from a countryman, for his own little fund was dispersed.

I said again: “There is a ceremony in the house, and you will not be able to see any one to-day.”

The man’s face fell. He looked wistfully at me for a moment, said “Good morning,” and went out. I felt a little sorry, and would have called him back, but I found he was returning of his own accord. He came close up to me holding out his offerings and said: “I brought these few things, sir, for the little one. Will you give them to her?”

I took them and was going to pay him, but he caught my hand and said: “You are very kind, sir! Keep me in your recollection. Do not offer me money!—You have a little girl, I too have one like her in my own home. I think of her, and bring fruits to your child, not to make a profit for myself.”

Saying this, he put his hand inside his big loose robe, and brought out a small and dirty piece of paper. With great care he unfolded this, and smoothed it out with both hands on my table. It bore the impression of a little band. Not a photograph. Not a drawing. The impression of an ink-smeared hand laid flat on the paper. This touch of his own little daughter had been always on his heart, as he had come year after year to Calcutta, to sell his wares in the streets.

Tears came to my eyes. I forgot that he was a poor Cabuli fruit-seller, while I was—but no, what was I more than he? He also was a father. That impression of the hand of his little Parbati in her distant mountain home reminded me of my own little Mini.

I sent for Mini immediately from the inner apartment. Many difficulties were raised, but I would not listen. Clad in the red silk of her wedding-day, with the sandal paste on her forehead, and adorned as a young bride, Mini came, and stood bashfully before me.

The Kabuliwala looked a little staggered at the apparition. He could not revive their old friendship. At last he smiled and said: “Little one, are you going to your father-in-law’s house?”

But Mini now understood the meaning of the word “father-in-law,” and she could not reply to him as of old. She flushed up at the question, and stood before him with her bride-like face turned down.

I remembered the day when the Kabuliwala and my Mini had first met, and I felt sad. When she had gone, Rahmun heaved a deep sigh, and sat down on the floor. The idea had suddenly come to him that his daughter too must have grown in this long time, and that he would have to make friends with her anew. Assuredly he would not find her, as he used to know her. And besides, what might not have happened to her in these eight years?

The marriage-pipes sounded, and the mild autumn sun streamed round us. But Rahmun sat in the little Calcutta lane, and saw before him the barren mountains of Afghanistan.

I took out a bank-note, and gave it to him, saying: “Go back to your own daughter, Rahmun, in your own country, and may the happiness of your meeting bring good fortune to my child!”

Having made this present, I had to curtail some of the festivities. I could not have the electric lights I had intended, nor the military band, and the ladies of the house were despondent at it. But to me the wedding feast was all the brighter for the thought that in a distant land a long-lost father met again with his only child.

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Summary and Questions Answers of Kabuliwala by Robindranath Tagore

Table of Contents

Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore

Introduction

Kabuliwala is a subtle exploration of the links of friendship, affection, and separation in the relationship between a middle-aged Pathan trader and a five-year-old Bengali child. The story is set in early twentieth-century Kolkata. It is a simple storey about a father’s love for his daughter and how that love is passed on to another young girl. It is a love that knows no bounds in terms of race, religion, or language.

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Kabuliwala, which translates to “The Kabuli Man” (also known as “The Fruitseller from Kabul”), is a storey about a historic and loving bond between India and Kabul city.

Summary of Kabuliwala

Mini, a five-year-old girl, and Rahamat, a dried fruit vendor in Kabul, are the central characters in the “Kabuliwala” storey. Mini is talkative and innocent, calm, and gives his load of nuts to someone who has been suspended. Kabuliwala patiently listens to Mini. Mini’s father is friends with the young man, and he loves it when he sees him laughing at Mini and talking to him about life in Afghanistan and what he has seen on his travels among the Kabuliwala fruit sellers.

Because of the narrator, the pastor invites a Ramat (dry fruit) trader from Kabul to a wedding interview with an innocent Mini, and the Kabuliwala reunites with his daughter and has a happy life in Kabul. Tagore’s short “Kabuliwala” storey, from a collection of Tagore stories, is recounted by the father of an unknown man named Mini, and the reader knows he is reading a communication narrative by reading Tagore.

Mini, a five-year-old girl from Kabul who is a suspended fruit seller, and Kabuliwala, a man who deals with Calcutta’s past, are the primary characters in the novel. Mini is the narrator of this narrative and is a sweet and talkative girl who falls in love with her Babuji. Mini’s father, who is five years old, tells the storey “Kabuliwala”

Kabuliwali arrives in India for a year to sell dried fruit and meets Mini. Rahmat Chhabi Biswas, a middle-aged Afghan fruit seller, arrives in Calcutta to peddle her wares and make friends with Mini Oindrila Tagore (Tinku Tagore), a Bengali girl who reminds her of her Afghan daughter. The Kabuliwala have a daughter who is the same size as Mini, and they believe Mini is their daughter, with whom they share the responsibilities of a father and his daughter.

When Mini’s father learns of Kabuliwala’s hardship, he offers her enough money to visit her daughter in Kabul. Kabuliwali pays one rupee to her daughter for each dried fruit she provides her for free. Kabuliwala’s father begins a pleasant relationship with Mini after learning about him, and they meet every day.

The narrative begins with a teacher chatting to his five-year-old daughter Mini, who has spent years learning to speak and was born prematurely and has never stopped speaking since. Mini’s mother encourages her to quiet down, but her father allows her to express herself and converses with her.

As the youngsters fled the dreadful Kabuliwala, a young girl named Mini risked to be her friend. Her father remembers her and she visits him every day to give him news and gifts. A father dressed in Afghan baggy clothes, like his five-year-old daughter Mini, had learnt to speak within a year of his birth and had never stopped shouting grapes and nuts in the streets.

In this short storey about the friendship between a five-year-old girl named Mini, a member of the Calcutta royal family, and an Afghan fruit seller in Kabul, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) can be found. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and was considered one of the most important literary figures. This is the twentieth century. Despite being written in the first person, “Cabuliwallah” is a storey presented from the perspective of Mini’s father. Tagore reminds us that they are both fathers, and that a first-person description of a man with a grieving daughter whom he has not seen in years aids him in seeing her as a person rather than a killer.

The vendor spends the evening at the narrator’s house, talking to Mini, as part of his plans to go to Calcutta to collect the money the customer owes him.

Questions and Answers of Kabuliwala

Question 1 : Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow.

“Stopping her game abruptly Mini ran to the window which overlooked the main road, and began calling out at the top of her voice, “Kabuliwala, O Kabuliwala!”

i) Where is Mini at this time? How can you say that she is a very talkative girl?

Answer : Mini is at home at the moment. Her behaviour indicates that she is a very talkative girl. Her father says she has not squandered a single awakened moment of her life by remaining mute.

ii) What was Mini doing before the game?

Answer : Mini sat with her father before going outside to play. She was questioning him, but he was too preoccupied with his work. Mini was sent to play with Bhola, so he told her to go. She got down next to his writing desk and began playing knick-knacks.

iii) What was Mini’s father doing at this time?

Answer : Mini’s father, who is the narrator of the chapter, was working on the seventeenth chapter of the novel. In the seventeenth chapter of the novel, Pratap Singh and Knachanmala were jumping off a high balcony at night with a friend. That did not stop Mini from asking him a lot of different kinds of questions though.

iv) What did Mini do when the Kabuliwala approached the house?

Answer : Mini immediately paused her gaming and shouted out to the Kabuliwala. He walked up to the home. Mini, on the other hand, raced inside and was nowhere to be found. The Kabuliwala and his sack frightened her.

v) Give the description of the Kabuliwala.

Answer : The Kabuliwala was a tall, unkempt Afghan street trader. He was wearing a turban, carrying a bag, and holding a few crates of dry grapes. Rahamat was the name of the boy. Mini had a childhood worry that the Kabuliwala kidnapped children and held them in his bag.

Question 2 : Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow.

“The Kabuliwala saw Mini and became confused; their good-natured humour of old also didn’t work out. In the end, with a smile, he asked, ‘Girl, are you going to the in-law’s house?’ ”

i) Who is the Kabuliwala?

Answer : The Kabuliwala was a tall, unkempt Afgan street trader. He wore a turban, had a bag over his shoulders, and held a few boxes of dry grapes. Rahamat was his name.

ii) Why was the Kabuliwala confused?

Answer : The Kabuliwala happened to notice a girl he did not recognise. In fact, he last saw Mini when she was a very young child. She was now all dressed up and ready to be married. As a result, he was perplexed because he had that childlike vision of her in his mind.

iii) What had happened to the Kabuliwala?

Answer : The Kabuliwala had been sent to jail for causing grievous injury to a man. He had a customer in the narrator’s colony who denied paying his debt for a shawl. Things got nasty and Rahamat had stabbed the man in the heat of the moment.

iv) Why was the Kabuliwala so attached to the narrator’s daughter?

Answer : Rahamat was a native of Afghanistan. He came to Kolkata for business. He had a daughter like Mini back home. He longed to be with her. He saw his daughter’s reflections in Mini and hence got attached to her very much.

v) How did Mini react to his question? How would she earlier react to his question?

Answer : When Rahamt inquired as to her whereabouts, she became embarrassed and her face turned scarlet. Immediately, she exited the room. Previously, she was unaware of the meaning of the term ‘in-laws’ and would dismiss the question. Earlier, she would respond to him by asking if he intended to see his in-laws, to which he would respond that he would thump them.

Long Answer Type Question

Question 1 : Comment on the changing relationship between Mini and Rahamat. Why was Rahamat so attached to Mini?

Answer : Mini was five years old when she first encountered Rahamat. She was a very talkative child, and even her father did not always have ears for her. The narrator was working one day when Mini began to pester him with questions. He advised her to seek entertainment elsewhere. She was engaged in a game when Kabuliwala arrived. She dashed towards the window and yelled at him. However, when he smiled as he approached the house, she raced inside and was no longer visible. She was terrified as a child that he would kidnap children.

Rahamt arrived at the house, and the narrator decided that now was the time to help Mini overcome her worries. He summoned Mini. She approached and stood anxiously, her gaze suspiciously fixed on the Kabuliwala and his bag. He offered Mini some raisins and apricots, but she rejected and remained snuggled against the narrator’s knees. That was the conclusion of their initial meeting.

A few days later, the narrator noticed his young daughter seated on a bench next Rahamat and chattering incessantly. The narrator realised that Mini had never encountered a more receptive listener in her little life. Additionally, he had given her some raisins and nuts. The narrator requested that he refrain from doing so in the future and handed him a half-rupee coin. Rahamat instead gave the currency to Mini, sparking a full-fledged argument at the narrator’s house.

The narrator discovered that this was not their second encounter. They had been meeting on a near-daily basis. Rahamat won the child’s heart. They also kept a few of their personal gags on hand. Then something happened in their brief friendship. Rahamat was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to his customer and sentenced to several years in prison.

He was imprisoned, and Mini grew up to marry. Rahamat was released on the wedding day. He paid a visit to Mini. He was perplexed to see Mini because he had a mental image of her as a young girl. He inquired as to if she was on her way to her in-place. law’s Mini became embarassed and retreated inside.

That was their final encounter. Rahamat slouched on the floor, heaving a long, deep sigh as he realised his own daughter back home in Afghanistan had grown up to be just like Mini. He always carried a small impression of her with him. He was so devoted to Mini that he saw a reflection of his own small daughter in her.

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Man from kabul.

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In the short story, "The Man From Kabul- by Rabindranath Tagore, there was a man known as the Kabuliwallah. He was a man from the mountains of Afghanistan, who made his living as a peddler of fruits and nuts. He had left his family behind to make his way through life, and during this time he began longing to see his daughter. Then one day he came across a young girl named Mini whom he felt resembled his daughter and he became attached. Through the beginning of their relationship the Kabuliwallah and Mini were the best of friends. They would sing and laugh together for hours on end and some days the Kabuliwallah would bring the young girl dried fruits and nuts, but instead of paying the usual price for these goods the Kabuliwallah would give them to the young girl not out of personal profit but out of sheer happiness of the thought that Mini would enjoy them. One of the important pieces of the relationship and the story was when Mini and the Kabuliwallah would sing. The special part of the song went as followed; the Kabuliwallah would say: "Well, little one, and when are you going to your father-in-law's house?- then Mini would say: " are you going there?- and shaking his fist at an invisible policemen he would reply: "I shall thrash my father-in-law."" At the time Mini did not understand that this term father-in-law meant jail, and as for the Kabuliwallah he looked at this expression as a place of free room and board. Later on the Kabuliwallah was to turn return to Mini one afternoon, but that morning Mini's father saw the Kabuliwallah in the street covered in blood and being arrested. Then her father had come to learn later of an assault of a man over a business dispute committed by the Kabuliwallah. Years later the Kabuliwallah returned at the time of Mini's wedding, but he had changed after jail. His hair was short he seemed aged and he carried no bag of goods at his side. Also Mini had changed a great deal over the years; she had become a woman and was on her way to marriage.

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The Kabuliwala Summary | Rabindranath Tagore

“Kabuliwala” by Tagore is a tale of heart-rending friendship between a 5-year-old Bengali girl Minnie and an Afghan moneylender, Abdur Rahman or Rahamat. The story beautifully ties a bond of mutual affection and the unconventional relationship between the two.

Table of Contents

Inception of an Odd Friendship

The voice of the story is lent by the father of Minnie. Rahamat, who is a hawker of dry fruits and shawls from Kabul, frequents the Bengali locales where Minnie and her family reside. He was a strapping, turban-clad man and fascinated Minnie.

One day she called him from the window of her house. But as he approached closer she got startled and ran back inside. Minnie’s father talked to Rahmat and learned about his family in Kabul.

He introduced Minnie to him with the title of Kabuliwala. To make her more comfortable Rahmat offered some dry fruits to Minnie. He started calling Minnie as Khuki (a child).

As their friendship blossomed, Minnie and Rahmat started meeting and interacting every day. Rahmat narrated stories of his homeland to Minnie and the young girl happily returned the warmth with her own innocent tales and playfulness. Kabuliwala listened to the young girl with great intent and relish.

Misfortune Overtakes the Kabuliwala

However, the maidservant of Mini’s parents started filling the ears of Rama, Minnie’s mother regarding the Kabuliwala’s true intention. Soon, Minnie’s mother grew suspicious of this flourishing friendship and feared that Rahmat might even kidnap and sell her daughter. She also stopped paying Kabuliwala for his goods.

On the other hand, Kabuliwala’s woes magnified as he got arrested for stabbing a customer after getting involved in a scuffle. The tiff started due to non-payment of a Rampuri shawl that the Kabuliwala sold to the customer. The customer denied having ever bought the shawl and that caused Rahmat to lose his control.

During the trial, he confessed to killing the man even after being advised against it by his lawyer. The judge decided to reduce his punishment to 10-years imprisonment after being impressed by his honesty. After getting released several years later he went to see Minnie.

Return of a Friend

To his surprise, a lot had changed and the day he arrived was actually Minnie’s wedding day. But when Minnie’s father realized his presence, he asked Rahmat to leave the premises owing to his ill-fated and inauspicious absence.

Kabuliwala obliged but while leaving offered some raisins for Minnie. He also showed a scruffy piece of paper with a handprint of his daughter that he left in Kabul.

Seeing that her father’s heart melted and he called Minnie. Mini was dressed and embellished like a bride but was too apprehensive to meet her long-forgotten friend.

Kabuliwala was taken aback to see a girl he could not recognize and struggled to cope with the reality of the time he lost while imprisoned. He was tormented by the thought of having lost his own daughter’s childhood. She would have been a grown woman like Minnie.

Minnie’s father understood his precarious condition and offered him enough money for a safe trip back to Kabul and a reunion with his own daughter. Even Minnie’s mother, realizing her misjudgment, extended the money she saved for Minnie’s wedding ceremony.

Minnie’s father set aside a portion of the wedding expenses like for lights etc in order to arrange 100 rupees for Rahmat. In a way, they could sympathize with the plight of another parent longing for his long-separated daughter.

Key Lessons

The fundamental message of the story is that people have the ability to do good as well as bad to others. Often, it is easier to side with our fears and suspect someone who is not like us. It can be a different skin colour or a different language.

But if we are patient with people and try to understand their situations and problems then we can find some common ground. They go through the same emotions and conflicts as we do.

They are also faced with difficult choices like us. Therefore, we must show empathy for their struggles if we expect to receive the same from them In the end, we all live to make each other’s life easier and worth living. Refer to this site for a shorter summary.

Shadow City, Invisible City: Walking Through an Ever-Changing Kabul

Taran khan on life in an uncertain afghanistan.

It comes in waves.

On my phone: Three missed calls and several voice messages, hours before the last evacuation flight leaves Kabul. My fingers falter between scrolling through and forwarding messages, stopped short by a little girl’s face on my screen.

Tayyaba is at the airport in Kabul, in the middle of the botched evacuation of Afghans by the United States and its allies. Her mother’s name is on the list of evacuees but hers is not. Neither is her brother’s or her grandmother’s. Her mother, Shazia, is divorced and has spent years working with different organizations in Kabul to help vulnerable Afghan women. None of these employers have turned up to support Shazia in this dire moment and she sees no other way for her family but to flee the country.

I was sent Shazia and Tayyaba’s information by their relative, my friend, an Afghan now living in Europe. Was there anyone who could help get them through the barricades? Anyone who could get their names on the list? On a plane? Should they wait where they were, in a sewage ditch under the blazing sun? Or should they go back to a city controlled by the Taliban; go home to a home that is profoundly changed?

My first return to Kabul was in the autumn of 2006. It was August, a time that a friend had told me was the most beautiful season in the city. The toot (mulberry) trees are bright with color, he had said. You can see them everywhere.

It was a time that was not quite war and not peace. Over the next few years, I would walk through the city and watch the seasons turn. I saw arghawan trees blossom in spring and spent summer weekends on picnics with friends. On Christmas I saw the streets emptied of their customary rush of Land Cruisers, as most consultants and international staff departed for the holidays.

In the years that followed the security situation progressively worsened. I watched as the international community and the Afghan government withdrew behind sandbags and boom barriers. Concrete walls topped by concertina wires took over entire thoroughfares, dividing the city into a cruel hierarchy. If there was a blast in their vicinity, these walls were likely to turn the impact outwards, towards those on the streets.

I recognize these same walls again now in the images from Kabul airport, including those of Tayyaba’s family. Keeping thousands of Afghans at bay, cutting them off from the flights departing to safety.

In 2013, on my last journey to Kabul, most of my conversations with friends revolved around the formal end of the NATO combat mission, scheduled for the next year. Their talk was of departures to other cities, of different lives in faraway places where they could envisage a future. A future that had vanished for them from Kabul.

Kabul changed years before the Taliban entered the city on August 15th, 2021, and yet in the news and in mainstream narratives, I find it presented as a surprise.

Walking through Kabul then, I had found it to be what one historian has described as an “amnesiac city”—a place where the past is obscured below the surface, leaving few visible traces. Writing about Kabul, I had also collided with its periodic, deliberate invisibility; how it appeared and vanished to the outside world. Now you see it, now you don’t. Surprise, I find, is another word for wilful forgetting, a different shade of amnesia. A way to talk only of those who were “saved,” rather than those who had no choice but to remain.

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes city after city to the great ruler Kublai Khan. Some of these, or all of these, could be real. Or they could be fictions, places existing only in the imagination of the listener, or of the narrator. They could be stories woven by them both.

One of these is Eusapia, a city that exists in reverse below the earth, as a city of the dead. Reading Calvino’s description of these mirroring terrains, above and below the ground, I think of Kabul on a spring day in 2013, seen from a hill in the Graveyard of the Pious Martyrs, the Shuhada-e-Saliheen. This valley on the southern edge of the city is dotted with Muslim shrines and pilgrimages now, but it has been hallowed ground for over 2000 years. Where I stood, on Tepe Naranj, or Orange Hill, a team of archaeologists were excavating the remains of a Buddhist monastery, raising steps and prayer chambers from the Kabuli earth.

Around the site, the city circled closer. Houses were being built between the graves. Wire fences protected the excavations from the creeping sprawl of habitations. From this vantage point, Kabul’s diverse past lay revealed to me as if on the pages of a book, as though to prove it existed. I think of that spot now, under the control of the Taliban, and of the rueful reality faced by the archaeologists, that sometimes the safest way to protect Afghanistan’s heritage was to leave it buried.

Wandering through the graveyards and monuments of Kabul, I had found few formal memorials to the upheavals of its recent past. The city has changed many times without leaving traces on its terrain. But it is also possible to see it in reverse, to find that there are, in fact, few things that do not serve as memorials in this city. In the middle of a crowded Soviet-era apartment complex, for instance, stands a shrine to a young woman chased to her death by local militia during the civil war. A ruined cinema, an empty spot at a table, a missing father’s photo on a wall. Like Calvino’s city of Eusapia, below the Kabul of the surface that is unmarked by memory, exists a Kabul of remembering.

My grandmother, who had grown up in northern India in a home marked by rigid gender segregation, told me how she used to listen to the poets who frequented the male quarters of her house through cracks in the wall.

In the days after the Taliban’s takeover, I listened to Kabul through cracks in the silence that descended on the city. In the voices of friends I could reach on the phone, and behind their fear and their laughter, their assurances and their hesitating requests, I heard the streets and the soundtrack of the city’s everyday life, away from the transient media glare.

I listened, for instance, to the transformed cadences of my friend Suhail’s voice, as he talked to me about finding a way to leave Afghanistan. He had not left his house for a year. The international agency he worked for had not responded to his emails asking for help in getting evacuated. Through a well-placed friend, he managed to get evacuation papers a day after the Taliban seized power. But despite having all the documents needed, he could not make his way into the airport.

Once, Suhail told me, his son fainted in the crowd. On another occasion, his family was beaten by the Taliban guards outside the building. The last time, he managed to get seats for his family on a bus that he was confident would be allowed past the barricades. He sent me a selfie from this bus, smiling at the camera with his wife and kids. They narrowly escaped the blast that ripped through the premises.

I read and watch the media coverage. In these breathless stories I hear of thousands of Afghans being “saved,” and of millions being “left behind.”

As I read these stories I find Kabul being erased in front of my eyes. Because what such narratives are saying is this ending was preordained . That violence in Afghanistan was inevitable. That despite all the efforts to save them, Afghans could not be saved. And now, it was time to go home, to leave these same Afghans to carry on with what had become their war.

History repeats itself in this land, or so we are told. Colonial-era battles are juxtaposed with current events. It strikes me that for a terrain that is so heavily inscribed, Kabul is also remarkably empty, colored in shades the contemporary reader wishes to see. Like its physical landscape, bombed and flattened and remade again and again, the city is an empty stage, a tabula rasa on which the fantasies of departing armies and saviors are once again played out.

Such stories, I find, are a way of erasing the city’s past, because a city without a past is also a place without a future, a place it is possible to look away from, to care for only intermittently and not too deeply. It is a place of inevitable, never-ending war; a form of violence that implicates no one. Such stories, I find, are comforting lies. The important part of these stories, the part to pay attention to, is to whom they are offering comfort.

Nowadays Kabul appears in flashes on my screen, already part forgotten, a month into the Taliban’s takeover. I glimpse the city in fragments, in the images of internally displaced people living in tents in the Shahr-e-Nau park, in the slogans of women protesting on the streets, in the text that Suhail sent me, apologizing for having lost the almonds he was carrying as gifts.

As I spoke to Suhail I heard the voices of his children, and from outside, from a street I had only to shut my eyes to see—its path to a shrine, a cinema, trees—I heard the tinny distorted voices of an official announcement from the new government. I heard the voice tell Kabulis to stay at home, to stay calm.

On my phone now: questions.

Roya, a TV producer friend, asks me if I can get her on “the list.” She is unsure of the precise details of this list, but is certain that it exists, that it has the names of people who are deemed worthy of evacuation. Could she and her family be counted among them?

In the last 20 years, like most Kabulis I know, Roya worked with a wide range of donor agencies and NGOs. On WhatsApp she sends me a steady stream of certificates and contracts and letters of recommendation. All emblazoned with the logos of responsible, respectable agencies. All of them absent from the present scene. Roya had written to her former supervisors, she told me. They had not replied.

Through her impressive CV, through her love for her work, Roya now fears she has placed her family at risk. She worries that she is on the Taliban’s list of collaborators. A list much longer than the one of those who will escape. She fears a knock at her door.

On the television:

“My fellow Americans, the war in Afghanistan is now over,” declares the new American president.

“Thanks to God,” says the Taliban, “the war is over in the country.”

At the end of each phone conversation, my friends’ collective refrain: “Pray for us.”

On my phone, a message from an artist in Kabul:

The day the Taliban entered, she was in Shahr-e-Nau, an upmarket suburb. When she heard the news, she began running home. She was wearing a chadori, a garment she is not accustomed to, and as she ran she exposed her denim-clad legs. Around her, she heard women saying, “Good, run. The Taliban is coming to sort out women like you.”

Had it always been there, this Kabul, waiting to emerge?

I began writing about this amnesia in my book Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul to safeguard against forgetting, words a talisman against erasure. A reminder to myself as much as to readers that the city of beauty and complexity that I had seen did indeed exist.

Among the places I left unseen, that I wanted to return to Kabul to visit, is the stream of Khizr. I think of him often these days—a mystical figure who appears in the Islamic tradition to travelers and to those facing troubles. He is the guide dressed in green robes, whose advice befuddles his companions because it seemed so strange, sometimes even cruel. But his deeds, we learn, are not to be questioned, because Khizr can see what we cannot. He has knowledge of the consequences of our actions. Which is the opposite of where Roya and Suhail have found themselves, the place where Shazia has led her family—a place of unforeseen consequences.

The chashm-e-Khizr lies in Shuhada, and in the densely written and rewritten terrain of this valley I think of a different list etched onto the Kabuli soil. I think of all the lives unlived, all the destinies that could have been, the paths that could have been taken had there been no war. Lives that only Khizr can see. A life where the artist does not destroy her paintings, fearing the Taliban will come knocking at her door. A life where Tayyaba does not return to the house of her relatives, because Shazia does not feel safe returning to her own home. Where the family does not move into the empty rooms of their relatives who were allowed on the flight, who were now in a refugee camp in Europe, two decades after they returned to Afghanistan after living as refugees in Iran.

In the reckoning of war, and in the reckoning of this so-called peace, is there a list that takes these lives that have never been into account?

The last flight from Kabul departed. Suhail was not able to get aboard. He searched to find a route to get out of the country by car. Please don’t call me for the next few days, he adds, I will tell you when I get there.

Millions will do what they did in the previous cycles of war: walk.

In a video from 1993, I watched images of Kabul from the era of its civil war, a conflict that was so invisible even the then-US president was surprised by its existence. In his book Ghost Wars , American journalist Steve Coll described a CIA agent trying to discuss the conflict in 1991 with George H.W. Bush. “Is that thing still going on?” Bush senior is reported to have said.

In the footage, a man is standing on a street in Kabul, speaking to the camera with desperate urgency. “In Kabul there is no peace,” he says. “We ask the United Nations, please if you can take our voices to the UN, tell them to help the Afghan people because they are also human.”

Walking through Kabul, I had found it full of ghosts. What I had not known was that they were whispering of the future.

On my phone now: obituaries.

The man who had told me about Kabul’s mulberry trees in autumn. Killed in Panjshir in the season that he loved.

The next day, I get a message from Suhail, who has reached a third country. Now, he was trying to find a way to leave for Europe. He would let me know when he arrived, he said.

One morning I woke from a dream in tears. In the dream, I had been walking around with a deep wound in my body. I was weeping not from pain or fear, but because no one could see me bleed. Or they could see but didn’t seem to care.

I keep those friends who are still able to place calls on the phone longer than I should; I talk to them even when I sense they want to say goodbye. I dread their news, worry about learning of fresh tragedies or difficulties. But what I dread more is the thing looming over the horizon, the cloud that is gathering in the wake of the planes leaving, the cameras departing.

What I dread the most is their silence.

The names in this essay have been changed to protect identities.

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Pentagon Reviews Events Before Attack That Killed 13 U.S. Troops in Kabul

A team conducted new interviews to address lingering questions about the bombing in the final days of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.

A large crowd, including President Biden; the first lady, Jill Biden; and Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary; with their hands on hearts, stand in the background, as a military contingent carries a flag-draped coffin from a plane on the tarmac.

By Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

A new Pentagon review of the events leading up to the bombing that killed 13 American service members at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021, has reaffirmed earlier findings that U.S. troops could not have prevented the deadly violence.

The review’s conclusions focus on the final days and hours at Abbey Gate before the attack, which also killed as many as 170 civilians. The review provides new details about the Islamic State bomber who carried out the suicide mission, including how he slipped into the crowds trying to evacuate the capital’s airport just moments before detonating explosives.

Some Marines who were at the gate have said they identified the suspected bomber — who became known to investigators as “Bald Man in Black” — in the crowds hours before the attack but were twice denied permission by their superiors to shoot him. But the review, building on a previous investigation made public in February 2022 , rejected those accusations.

The narrative of missed opportunities to avert tragedy has gained momentum over the past year among conservatives and has contributed to broader Republican criticisms of the Biden administration’s troop withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul in August 2021.

The bombing was a searing experience for the military after 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thirteen flag-draped coffins were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and a succession of funerals were held across the country for the service members, most of them under the age of 25.

Military officials had stood by the conclusions of the earlier inquiry that a lone Islamic State suicide bomber carried out the attack and was not joined by accomplices firing into the crowd.

But under mounting political pressure to address disparities in the earlier review and the accounts of the Marines at the gate — which also included reports that the Islamic State had conducted a test run of the bombing — a team of Army and Marine Corps officers interviewed more than 50 people who were not interviewed the first time around.

One of the main issues was the identity of the bomber. Almost immediately after the attack, the Islamic State identified him as Abdul Rahman Al-Logari. U.S. and other Western intelligence analysts later pieced together evidence that led them to the same conclusion.

American officials at the time said that Mr. Logari was a former engineering student who was one of several thousand militants freed from at least two high-security prisons after the Taliban seized control of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021. The Taliban emptied the facilities indiscriminately, releasing not only their own imprisoned members but also fighters from ISIS Khorasan or ISIS-K, the terrorist organization’s Afghanistan branch and the Taliban’s nemesis.

Mr. Logari was not unknown to the Americans. In 2017, the C.I.A. tipped off Indian intelligence agents that he was plotting a suicide bombing in New Delhi, U.S. officials said. Indian authorities foiled the attack and turned Mr. Logari over to the C.I.A., which sent him to Afghanistan to serve time at the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base. He remained there until he was freed amid the chaos after Kabul fell.

At the airport, investigators said, the bomber detonated a 20-pound explosive, probably carried in a backpack or vest, spraying 5-millimeter ball bearings in a tremendous blast that was captured in grainy video images shown to Pentagon reporters.

All this was known to the Marine and Army officials as they started their supplemental review last September. But they were assigned to address the lingering questions.

On the day of the bombing, Marines at the gate were given intelligence to be on the lookout for a man with groomed hair, wearing loose clothes and carrying a black bag of explosives. The review team determined, after additional interviews and assessing security camera footage and other photographs of the chaotic scene, that the description was not specific enough to meaningfully narrow the search.

But Marines at the gate came forward later to say that at about 7 a.m., they saw an individual matching the suicide bomber’s description. The Marines said that the man had engaged in suspicious behavior and that they had sent urgent warnings to leaders asking for permission to shoot. Twice their request was denied, they said.

The review team concluded that the Marines had conflated the intelligence reports with an earlier spotting of a man wearing beige clothes and carrying a black bag. The team also reviewed a photo taken of the suspect from one of the sniper team’s cameras.

The man in question did not actually match the description, the review team concluded. He was bald, wore black clothes and was not carrying a black bag. Moreover, photographs taken of Mr. Logari when he was in American custody did not match the photographs of the suspect, even after facial recognition software was used.

“Al-Logari and ‘Bald Man in Black’ received the strongest negative result,” concluded a slide from the supplemental review team’s findings that was briefed to reporters.

Moreover, the review team concluded, Mr. Logari did not arrive at Abbey Gate on Aug. 26 until “immediately before” the attack, minimizing his chances of being detected by the Marines.

The review team went through a similar process to discount the sightings of specific individuals whom Marines had suspected of carrying out a dry run of the eventual attack.

Members of the review team did not challenge the motives or dedication of the Marines who raised the vexing questions. But in the end, the review team concluded, the Marines were mistaken.

As traumatic as the bombing was, perhaps it is not surprising that the recollections and conclusions of Marines and soldiers that day, however sincere, were not supported by subsequent inquiries.

The findings of the original Army-led investigation in February 2022 contradicted initial reports by senior U.S. commanders that militants had fired into the crowd of people at the airport seeking to flee the Afghan capital and had caused some of the casualties.

The accounts of what unfolded immediately after the attack — from the Pentagon and people on the ground — changed several times. Defense Department officials initially said that nearby fighters from Islamic State Khorasan began firing weapons. That turned out not to be true.

Some people near the scene said the Marines had shot indiscriminately into the crowd, apparently believing they were under fire. That, too, according to the accounting by the military’s Central Command, turned out not to be true, although investigators said that British and American forces had fired warning shots in the air.

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt

Kabul airport bomber was an ISIS operative freed from prison by the Taliban

The bombing area at Abbey Gate, before the blast occurred

The man who detonated a bomb outside the Kabul airport in August 2021, killing 170 Afghans and 13 American service members , was an Islamic State operative who had been held in a coalition detention facility in Afghanistan but was freed by the Taliban, according to a new U.S. military review that has identified him for the first time.

Some service members who were at the airport that day claimed they had spotted the suicide bomber at the site and were ordered not to engage. But the review found that those service members had the wrong man in their sights, and the strike was not preventable.

“There was no opportunity to engage the bomber prior to the attack,” said a senior U.S. military official, who was involved in the supplemental review.

The bombing at Abbey Gate took place during the U.S. military’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan. Thousands of people had converged on the airport in a desperate effort to flee after the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country.

An initial Pentagon review released in February 2022 found that the attack was carried out by a lone suicide bomber and that it was not preventable. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, ordered the supplemental review last year after witnesses of the attack came forward with new information and allegations that they could have stopped it but were denied the chance to do so.

One of the most vocal witnesses was retired Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who lost an arm and a leg in the attack, and suffered damage to internal organs that resulted in roughly 50 surgeries.

In testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March 2023, Vargas-Andrews said the Marines and others involved in the evacuation were given descriptions of men believed to be plotting an attack. Vargas-Andrews said he and others spotted a man who fit the description — a person who came to be known as “bald man in black.”

But the review — which included interviews with more than 50 service members directly involved in the evacuation, including a dozen who had not previously been interviewed — found that this man had no connection to the attack.

The actual bomber was Abdul Rahman al-Logari, according to the U.S. military. A facial comparison analysis determined that al-Logari and the bald man in black could not be the same person, the review found.

The team of military investigators reviewed photos and video taken of the scene before the attack and found no footage of al-Logari. He was determined to have arrived immediately before the blast and blended in with the massive crowd gathered outside the airport.

The officials involved in the review said that given the density of the crowd, the U.S. military members at the scene did not have time to identify him.

A day after the attack, ISIS-K, an Islamic State offshoot based in Afghanistan, identified al-Logari as the bomber. The new review marks the first time U.S. officials have said they have independent confirmation.

Al-Logari was among the thousands of militants released from Afghan prisons after the Taliban seized control of Kabul in mid-August 2021. But the officials involved in the review said U.S. intelligence determined that even if al-Logari had not been released from prison, the attack would likely have still been carried out because ISIS-K had other bombers ready and available.

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Mosheh Gains is a Pentagon producer for NBC News.

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Review says Kabul airport attack wasn't preventable, refutes claims troops sighted the would-be bomber

The suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed U.S. troops and Afghans in August 2021 was not preventable, and the "bald man in black" spotted by U.S. service members the morning of the attack was not the bomber, according to a new review by U.S. Central Command.

What You Need To Know

A new review says the suicide bombing at the kabul airport that killed u.s. troops and afghans in august 2021 was not preventable, and the "bald man in black" spotted by u.s. service members the morning of the attack was not the bomber the findings from u.s. central command were released monday they refute assertions by some service members who believed they had a chance to take out the would-be bomber but did not get approval the u.s. military also for the first time is confirming that the bomber was abdul rahman al-logari, an islamic state militant who had been in an afghan prison but was released by the taliban.

The findings, released Monday, refute assertions by some service members who believed they had a chance to take out the would-be bomber but did not get approval. And, for the first time, the U.S. military is confirming that the bomber was Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an Islamic State militant who had been in an Afghan prison but was released by the Taliban as the group took control of the country that summer.

The Abbey Gate bombing during the final chaotic days of the Afghanistan withdrawal killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans, and wounded scores more. It triggered widespread debate and congressional criticism, fueled by emotional testimony from a Marine injured in the blast, who said snipers believe they saw the possible bomber but couldn't get approval to take him out.

Former Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last March that Marines and others aiding in the evacuation were given descriptions of men believed to be plotting an attack. Vargas-Andrews, who was injured in the blast but not interviewed in the initial investigation, said he and others saw a man matching the description and might have been able to stop the attack, but requests to take action were denied.

In a detailed briefing to a small number of reporters, members of the team that did the review released photos of the bald man identified by military snipers as a potential threat and compared it with photos of al-Logari. The team members, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public, described facial recognition and other analysis they used that they said confirmed those were not the same man.

"For the past two years, some service members have claimed that they had the bomber in their sights and they could have prevented the attack. We now know that is not correct," said a team member.

They said they also showed the photo of the bald man to service members during the latest interviews, and that the troops again confirmed that was the suspicious man they had targeted.

The review notes that the bald man was first seen around 7 a.m. and that troops lost sight of him by 10 a.m. The bombing was more than seven hours later, and the U.S. says al-Logari didn't get to Abbey Gate until "very shortly" before the blast took place. They declined to be more specific about the timing, saying details are classified.

Family members of those killed in the blast received similar briefings over the past two weekends and some are still unconvinced.

"For me, personally, we are still not clear. I believe Tyler saw what Tyler saw and he knows what he saw. And it was not the guy that they were claiming was the man in black," Jim McCollum, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, told The Associated Press.

He said the team went into "pretty good detail, not trying to discredit Tyler, but effectively saying he was wrong. However, that ended up being as clear as mud to us."

And Mark Schmitz, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, questioned the photo itself.

"They kept saying this is who Tyler Vargas-Andrews was looking at and we were thinking to ourselves, 'well, that's interesting. Why is this a picture of a picture from a Canon camera?'" he said. "To me it felt like they were trying to find the guy in those cameras that may have come close to looking like somebody of interest that they can try to sell to us."

The families, however, also said they were relieved to get more details about their loved ones' deaths, saying the initial briefings were not as good.

Schmitz said that Army Gen. Eric Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, was part of the latest briefing and apologized for how the families were treated during the initial probe. This time around officials were able to share with Schmitz for the first time exactly where his son was when the bomb went off and that he was unconscious almost immediately, and therefore did not feel the impact of the shrapnel that went through his left torso, hitting a primary artery.

"That to me was, first and foremost, the best news I could have gotten," Schmitz said. "That gave me a little bit of closure that my son didn't suffer, which made me feel really good."

Team members said they also are planning to speak with the troops who were interviewed this time, to share the results of the report.

They said the review also could not completely rule out claims that militants did a test run of the bombing several days earlier. But after reviewing photos and other intelligence, the team concluded it was unlikely that three men seen carrying a large bag — which troops deemed suspicious — were doing a trial run.

More broadly, the team said the review brought some new details to light, including more discussion about the possible bombing test run. But they said overall it confirmed the findings of U.S. Central Command's initial investigation into the bombing: that it was not preventable and that reports of threats prior to the bombing were too vague.

As an example, the new review noted that threat reports talked about a possible bomber with groomed hair, wearing loose clothes, and carrying a black bag. That description, the review said, could have matched anyone in the enormous crowd desperately trying to get into the airport.

The team said they conducted 52 interviews for the review — adding up to a total of 190 when the previous investigation is included. Service members were asked about 64 questions, and the sessions lasted between one hour and seven hours long.

A number of those questioned weren't included in the original investigation, many because they were severely wounded in the attack. The new review was ordered last September by Kurilla, largely due to criticism of the initial investigation and assertions that the deadly assault could have been stopped.

Members of the team said the Islamic State group put out the bomber's name on social media, but U.S. intelligence was later able to independently confirm that report.

U.S. Central Command's initial investigation concluded in November 2021 that given the worsening security situation at the airport's Abbey Gate as Afghans became increasingly desperate to flee, " the attack was not preventable at the tactical level without degrading the mission to maximize the number of evacuees."

Critics have slammed the Biden administration for the catastrophic evacuation, and they've complained that no one was held accountable for it. And while the U.S. was able to get more than 130,000 civilians out of the country during the panic after the Taliban took control of the government, there were horrifying images of desperate Afghans clinging to military aircraft as they lifted off.

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KABULIWALA SHORT STORY BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Buy Kabuliwala (Children Classics by Tagore) Book Online at Low ...

Kabuliwala is a Bengali short story written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1892. This story is of a Pashtun merchant from Kabul, who comes to Calcutta now Kolkata, India each year for selling dry-fruits. This dry-fruit seller is known as Kabuliwala as he was from Kabul (Afganistan).

While living in India, the Kabuliwala becomes friend with a five-year old girl Mini. She was from a middle-class aristocratic family.

Kabuliwala’s friendship with Mini reminds him of his daughter who lives in Kabul.

The theme of the story Kabuliwala is mainly the theme of friendship. The famous writer Rabindranath Tagore beautifully portrayed the friendship of an Afghan trader and Mini a little playful child.

Please read the short story…. KABULIWALA

One morning, for instance, when I was in the midst of the seventeenth chapter of my new novel, my little Mini stole into the room, and putting her hand into mine, said: “Father! Ramdayal the doorkeeper calls a crow a krow! He doesn’t know anything, does he?”

And then, darting off anew, while I sat still making ready some reply to this last saying, “Father! what relation is Mother to you?”

“My dear little sister in the law!” I murmured involuntarily to myself, but with a grave face contrived to answer: “Go and play with Bhola, Mini! I am busy!”

The window of my room overlooks the road. The child had seated herself at my feet near my table, and was playing softly, drumming on her knees. I was hard at work on my seventeenth chapter, where Protrap Singh, the hero, had just caught Kanchanlata, the heroine, in his arms, and was about to escape with her by the third story window of the castle, when all of a sudden Mini left her play, and ran to the window, crying, “A Kabuliwallah! a Kabuliwallah!” Sure enough in the street below was a Kabuliwallah, passing slowly along. He wore the loose soiled clothing of his people, with a tall turban; there was a bag on his back, and he carried boxes of grapes in his hand.

I cannot tell what were my daughter’s feelings at the sight of this man, but she began to call him loudly. “Ah!” I thought, “he will come in, and my seventeenth chapter will never be finished!” At which exact moment the Kabuliwallah turned, and looked up at the child. When she saw this, overcome by terror, she fled to her mother’s protection, and disappeared. She had a blind belief that inside the bag, which the big man carried, there were perhaps two or three other children like herself. The peddler meanwhile entered my doorway, and greeted me with a smiling face.

As he was about to leave, he asked: “And where is the little girl, sir?”

And I, thinking that Mini must get rid of her false fear, had her brought out.

She stood by my chair, and looked at the Kabuliwallah and his bag. He offered her nuts and raisins, but she would not be tempted, and only clung the closer to me, with all her doubts increased.

This was their first meeting.

One morning, however, not many days later, as I was leaving the house, I was startled to find Mini, seated on a bench near the door, laughing and talking, with the great Kabuliwallah at her feet. In all her life, it appeared; my small daughter had never found so patient a listener, save her father. And already the corner of her little sari was stuffed with almonds and raisins, the gift of her visitor, “Why did you give her those?” I said, and taking out an eight-anna bit, I handed it to him. The man accepted the money without demur, and slipped it into his pocket.

Alas, on my return an hour later, I found the unfortunate coin had made twice its own worth of trouble! For the Kabuliwallah had given it to Mini, and her mother catching sight of the bright round object, had pounced on the child with: “Where did you get that eight-anna bit? ”

“The Kabuliwallah gave it to me,” said Mini cheerfully.

“The Kabuliwallah gave it to you!” cried her mother much shocked. “Oh, Mini! how could you take it from him?”

I, entering at the moment, saved her from impending disaster, and proceeded to make my own inquiries.

It was not the first or second time, I found, that the two had met. The Kabuliwallah had overcome the child’s first terror by a judicious bribery of nuts and almonds, and the two were now great friends.

Then the Kabuliwallah, not to be behindhand, would take his turn: “Well, little one, and when are you going to the father-in-law’s house?”

Amongst men of the Kabuliwallah’s class, however, it is well known that the words father-in-law’s house have a double meaning. It is a euphemism for jail, the place where we are well cared for, at no expense to ourselves. In this sense would the sturdy peddler take my daughter’s question? “Ah,” he would say, shaking his fist at an invisible policeman, “I will thrash my father-in-law!” Hearing this, and picturing the poor discomfited relative, Mini would go off into peals of laughter, in which her formidable friend would join.

Perhaps the scenes of travel conjure themselves up before me, and pass and repass in my imagination all the more vividly, because I lead such a vegetable existence, that a call to travel would fall upon me like a thunderbolt.

In the presence of this Kabuliwallah, I was immediately transported to the foot of arid mountain peaks, with narrow little defiles twisting in and out amongst their towering heights. I could see the string of camels bearing the merchandise, and the company of turbaned merchants, carrying some of their queer old firearms, and some of their spears, journeying downward towards the plains. I could see–but at some such point Mini’s mother would intervene, imploring me to “beware of that man.”

Mini’s mother is unfortunately a very timid lady. Whenever she hears a noise in the street, or sees people coming towards the house, she always jumps to the conclusion that they are either thieves, or drunkards, or snakes, or tigers, or malaria or cockroaches, or caterpillars, or an English sailor. Even after all these years of experience, she is not able to overcome her terror. So she was full of doubts about the Kabuliwallah, and used to beg me to keep a watchful eye on him.

I tried to laugh her fear gently away, but then she would turn round on me seriously, and ask me solemn questions.

Were children never kidnapped?

Was it, then, not true that there was slavery in Kabul?

Was it so very absurd that this big man should be able to carry off a tiny child?

Once a year in the middle of January Rahmun, the Kabuliwallah, was in the habit of returning to his country, and as the time approached he would be very busy, going from house to house collecting his debts. This year, however, he could always find time to come and see Mini. It would have seemed to an outsider that there was some conspiracy between the two, for when he could not come in the morning; he would appear in the evening.

Even to me it was a little startling now and then, in the corner of a dark room, suddenly to surprise this tall, loose-garmented, much bebagged man; but when Mini would run in smiling, with her, “O! Kabuliwallah! Kabuliwallah!” and the two friends, so far apart in age, would subside into their old laughter and their old jokes, I felt reassured.

Hurrying out, I stopped them, and enquired what it all meant. Partly from one, partly from another, I gathered that a certain neighbour had owed the pedlar something for a Rampuri shawl, but had falsely denied having bought it, and that in the course of the quarrel, Rahmun had struck him. Now in the heat of his excitement, the prisoner began calling his enemy all sorts of names, when suddenly in a verandah of my house appeared my little Mini, with her usual exclamation: “O Kabuliwallah! Kabuliwallah!” Rahmun’s face lighted up as he turned to her. He had no bag under his arm today, so she could not discuss the elephant with him. She at once therefore proceeded to the next question: “Are you going to the father-in-law’s house?” Rahmun laughed and said: “Just where I am going, little one!” Then seeing that the reply did not amuse the child, he held up his fettered hands. “Ali,” he said, “I would have thrashed that old father-in-law, but my hands are bound!”

On a charge of murderous assault, Rahmun was sentenced to some years’ imprisonment.

From early morning noise and bustle had pervaded the house. In the courtyard the canopy had to be slung on its bamboo poles; the chandeliers with their tinkling sound must be hung in each room and verandah. There was no end of hurry and excitement. I was sitting in my study, looking through the accounts, when some one entered, saluting respectfully, and stood before me. It was Rahmun the Kabuliwallah. At first I did not recognise him. He had no bag, nor the long hair, nor the same vigour that he used to have. But he smiled, and I knew him again.

“When did you come, Rahmun?” I asked him.

“Last evening,” he said, “I was released from jail.”

“There are ceremonies going on,” I said, “and I am busy. Could you perhaps come another day?”

At once he turned to go; but as he reached the door he hesitated, and said: “May I not see the little one, sir, for a moment?” It was his belief that Mini was still the same. He had pictured her running to him as she used, calling “O Kabuliwallah! Kabuliwallah!” He had imagined too that they would laugh and talk together, just as of old. In fact, in memory of former days he had brought, carefully wrapped up in paper, a few almonds and raisins and grapes, obtained somehow from a countryman, for his own little fund was dispersed.

I said again: “There is a ceremony in the house, and you will not be able to see any one to-day.”

I took them and was going to pay him, but he caught my hand and said: “You are very kind, sir! Keep me in your recollection. Do not offer me money!–You have a little girl, I too have one like her in my own home. I think of her, and bring fruits to your child, not to make a profit for myself.”

Tears came to my eyes. I forgot that he was a poor Kabuli fruit-seller, while I was–but no, what was I more than he? He also was a father. That impression of the hand of his little Parbati in her distant mountain home reminded me of my own little Mini.

The Kabuliwallah looked a little staggered at the apparition. He could not revive their old friendship. At last he smiled and said: “Little one, are you going to your father-in-law’s house?”

I remembered the day when the Kabuliwallah and my Mini had first met, and I felt sad. When she had gone, Rahmun heaved a deep sigh, and sat down on the floor. The idea had suddenly come to him that his daughter too must have grown in this long time, and that he would have to make friends with her anew. Assuredly he would not find her, as he used to know her. And besides, what might not have happened to her in these eight years?

The marriage-pipes sounded, and the mild autumn sun streamed round us. But Rahmun sat in the little Calcutta lane, and saw before him the barren mountains of Afghanistan.

I took out a bank-note, and gave it to him, saying: “Go back to your own daughter, Rahmun, in your own country, and may the happiness of your meeting bring good fortune to my child!”

CONCLUSION :

Yes – Kabuliwala was almost of the age of Mini’s father still, he and Mini shared a very unique bond of friendship.

Here, Kabuliwala is described as someone who has come from Kabul in Afghanistan, which is the country of Kabuliwala.

Kabuliwala is also described as a travelling fruits salesman who earn money in distant place like Calcutta (now Kolkata) and stays in that place for long.

This is an interesting story on relationships and mostly friendship….. It is worth reading and to understand the human feelings.

Ratikanta Singh

U.S. military review disputes that Marines had Kabul bomber in sights

Marines who survived a devastating suicide bombing during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan were mistaken in their belief that they had the attacker in their gun sights hours before the blast, a new military review determined, disputing allegations made before Congress and in the media.

The findings, released Monday after they were shared with the families of 13 service members killed in the August 2021 attack at the edge of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, relied in part on facial recognition technology and interviews with the Marines and with others who were not questioned during a previous investigation conducted soon after the explosion. The new review found that the Marines, while diligently performing their jobs on a sniper team, conflated vetted intelligence reports with unverified “spot reports” made by service members on-site, leading to confusion.

“Over the past two years, some service members have claimed that they had the bomber in their sights, and they could have prevented the attack,” a member of the review team said, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. “But we now know that is not correct.”

The renewed scrutiny underscores how the bombing, which also killed about 170 Afghans and wounded 45 additional U.S. troops, continues to haunt survivors and the Biden administration.

Predicted for days, the attack was a traumatic nadir to the hastily arranged airlift that ferried 124,000 people to safety as Taliban fighters swept into Afghanistan’s capital and the U.S.-backed government fled, ending 20 years of war. For President Biden, the incident remains a low point in his time in office, with House Republicans, who continue to investigate the decision-making that precipitated it, having pledged to hold him and his administration accountable for the bloodshed.

The military’s supplemental review was ordered by Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla , head of U.S. Central Command, in September, more than a year after Marines who survived the bombing surfaced their contention that the Islamic State operative responsible for the attack could have been shot dead before he harmed anyone. The issue was first raised by Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews in an interview with The Washington Post near the first anniversary of the attack, and subsequently in testimony he delivered to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber,” Vargas-Andrews told lawmakers under oath last year. “Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded.”

Vargas-Andrews said in a phone interview that he appreciated the review team’s work and that, after a briefing last week, he agrees that the “bald man in black” — distinguishable because of his black headscarf and shaved head — was not the suicide bomber.

“I will say this: I think the investigation team did a really good job and were really thorough,” said Vargas-Andrews, who lost an arm and a leg in the explosion and underwent dozens of surgeries in the following year.

He added, though, that he still believes the Marines could have had the eventual bomber in their sights. They photographed numerous suspicious individuals, passing those images up their chain of command, but many of the photographs went missing, he said, including those of two other men the Marines requested permission to shoot.

“They straight-up told us in the briefing, ‘Hey, these photos don’t exist anywhere,’” he said.

A person familiar with the review team’s work, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, affirmed that many photographs captured by the sniper team — and other units — went missing in the chaotic last days of the evacuation. This person said there is no record of them requesting to shoot other potential bombers, but the review found that the snipers did request to shoot Taliban fighters who were abusing civilians, and were denied.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, has said the allegations of the suicide bomber slipping away demonstrate the need for accountability. During a recent hearing, retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers that the “fundamental mistake” made by the Biden administration was the State Department’s failure to begin the evacuation before it was “too late.”

In a statement Monday, McCaul said that while he was pleased that his investigation “forced” the Biden administration to take another look at the attack, “it should not have taken this long to get answers.” Congressional Democrats also could have “fulfilled their constitutional obligations and conducted oversight” of the evacuation when they were in power in the House, he added, bringing to light information that could have “saved years of anguish and speculation for many.”

McCaul said the review team’s report also shows that the Biden administration has been “sitting on critical information about what happened” during the evacuation.

“It is clear there are many more questions to be answered,” he said. “I am absolutely determined to see this investigation through to completion and will leave no stone unturned.”

Review team members told reporters that the man the Marines thought was suspicious appeared about 7 a.m. at the airport’s Abbey Gate, prompting Vargas-Andrews’s sniper team — call sign Reaper 2 — to report suspicious activity up through their chain of command. In response, personnel in an operations center issued a warning known as a BOLO, short for “be on the lookout.”

“BOLO: Snipers at Abbey Gate identify individual in the crowd acting suspicious, clean shaved, bald head,” according to a message sent to service members that day and included in briefing slides shared with the media. “Individual is acting calm, not rushing towards the gate, but is instead sitting along the wall. The individual has a backpack and another clear bag that he has kept with him.”

About 8 a.m., Vargas-Andrews’s team radioed to request permission to shoot the man and eliminate the threat they believed he posed. The request was denied about 30 minutes later.

Vargas-Andrews told lawmakers that he then asked a senior commander to come to their security tower to observe the man they thought to be the bomber and that, when they asked again if they had permission to shoot, the commander responded, “I don’t know.” The man faded into the crowd about 10 a.m., the review team found.

In the briefing slides made available by the Pentagon, the review team shared an image of the man and said he did not match numerous photographs of the suicide bomber, a member of the Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan whom the militants later identified as Abdul Rahman al-Logari.

The bomber, a review team official said, did not arrive at Abbey Gate until just before the explosion. The official declined to say how the military review determined that, saying some aspects of the matter remain classified. Logari was among the thousands of militants freed by Taliban fighters a few weeks earlier as they emptied Afghan government prisons on their march to Kabul, a review team member said.

The review team interviewed 52 people, including Vargas-Andrews and a few dozen others who were wounded in the explosion and unable to speak to investigators in fall 2021. Eighteen people who were interviewed in the initial investigation were consulted again, review team members said.

The review team addressed several other issues, substantiating testimony from rank-and-file troops who observed Taliban fighters outside the airport abusing and killing civilians attempting to flee the country. The militants were posted there after a top U.S. commander, Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, negotiated an uneasy agreement with the group’s leaders that called for U.S. troops to safeguard the airport and its perimeter while the Taliban would provide security outside.

The review team credited U.S. troops involved in the evacuation with adhering to rules of engagement they had, and said that guidance was “clear, understood, and followed.”

However, the review team did not take up numerous reports from survivors that after the explosion, militants opened fire on U.S. service members. The initial investigation found that the loss of life was caused by the single explosion, and that troops who reported coming under gunfire and returning it were probably confused amid the chaos.

“If anything,” one review team member said, “we’ve only confirmed our assertions that there was no complex attack.”

Killed in the attack were 11 Marines: Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, 20; Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23; Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, 31; Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22; Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20; Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20; Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20; Cpl. Daegan William-Tyeler Page, 23; Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25; Cpl. Humberto Sanchez, 22; and Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20. Also killed were Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23, and Navy Hospital Corpsman Maxton Soviak, 22.

Hoover’s father, Darin Hoover, said in an interview that family members have been notified of the review team’s findings over each of the past two weekends. He said the team provided “much, much, much more detail than we were originally given,” but he still questioned whether they had the full truth about the suicide bomber.

“That’s not sitting too well with me, to be honest with you,” he said. “I think there is lot more to that they’re not telling us.”

The elder Hoover said Marines present after the explosion continue to insist they came under and returned gunfire, and he remains disgusted, he said, that the United States relied on the Taliban to provide security outside the airport.

“Here we are allowing the enemy to be our security,” he said. “It just makes no sense to me whatsoever.”

U.S. military review disputes that Marines had Kabul bomber in sights

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A Taliban fighter stands guard at the site of the suicide bombing at Kabul airport

US review finds August 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul airport was unpreventable

Findings also detailed how a ‘bald man in black’ thought by service members to be the bomber was misidentified

The suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed US troops and Afghans in August 2021 was not preventable, and a “bald man in black” spotted by US service members on the morning of the attack was not the bomber, according to a new review by US Central Command.

The findings, released on Monday, refute assertions by some service members who believed they had a chance to take out the would-be bomber but did not get approval. And, for the first time, the USmilitary confirmed that the bomber was Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an Islamic State militant who had been in an Afghan prison but was released by the Taliban as the group took control of the country that summer.

The Abbey Gate bombing during the final chaotic days of the Afghanistan withdrawal killed 13 US service members and 170 Afghans , and wounded scores more. It triggered widespread debate and congressional criticism, fueled by emotional testimony from a Marine injured in the blast, who said snipers believed they saw the possible bomber but could not get approval to take him out.

Former Marine Sgt Tyler Vargas-Andrews told the House foreign affairs committee last March that Marines and others aiding in the evacuation were given descriptions of men believed to be plotting an attack. Vargas-Andrews, who was injured in the blast but not interviewed in the initial investigation, said he and others saw a man matching the description and might have been able to stop the attack, but requests to take action were denied.

In a detailed briefing to a small number of reporters, members of the team that carried out the review released photos of the bald man identified by military snipers as a potential threat and compared them with photos of al-Logari. The team members described facial recognition and other analysis they used confirmed those were not the same man.

“For the past two years, some service members have claimed that they had the bomber in their sights and they could have prevented the attack. We now know that is not correct,” said a team member.

They said they also showed the photo of the bald man to service members during the latest interviews, and that the troops again confirmed that was the suspicious man they had targeted.

The review notes that the bald man was first seen around 7am and that troops lost sight of him by 10am. The bombing was more than seven hours later, and the US says al-Logari did not get to Abbey Gate until “very shortly” before the blast took place.

Family members of those killed in the blast received similar briefings over the past two weekends and some are still unconvinced.

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“For me, personally, we are still not clear. I believe Tyler saw what Tyler saw and he knows what he saw. And it was not the guy that they were claiming was the man in black,” Jim McCollum, the father of Marine Lance Cpl Rylee McCollum, told the Associated Press.

Critics have slammed the Biden administration for the catastrophic evacuation, and they have complained that no one was held accountable for it. And while the US was able to get more than 130,000 civilians out of the country during the panic after the Taliban took control of the government, there were horrifying images of desperate Afghans clinging to military aircraft as they lifted off.

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Kabul Airport Attack Review Reaffirms Initial Findings, Identifies Attacker

A supplemental review of the original investigation into the 2021 suicide bombing attack that killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians at Hamid Karzai International Airport's Abbey Gate has reaffirmed the military's findings of the initial investigation and identifies the attacker.

Ordered by U.S. Army Central Command in September 2023, the results of the two-year supplemental review found that no new information disclosed in public testimony since March 2023 had any material impact on the original investigation's findings. It also confirmed that a lone ISIS-K suicide bomber had carried out the attack, and that the attack could not have been preventable at the tactical level, members of the supplemental review team explained during a recent briefing.

A heavily fenced-off compound with a handful of small buildings during the daytime.

"With access to analysis from across the intelligence community, we were able to identify the Abbey Gate person-borne IED bomber as Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an [ISIS-K] member since 2016," said one Army official on the 12-person, joint supplemental review team.

Al-Logari was one of thousands of ISIS-K members the Taliban released from a pair of detention centers in mid-August 2021, according to another Army team official.

The same official also pointed out that the supplemental review team determined ISIS-K would have still been able to conduct the attack regardless of whether al-Logari had been released, because the terror organization already had multiple suicide bombers available.

"This supports the conclusion that the attack at Abbey Gate was not preventable at the tactical level," the official said.

During the supplemental review, the team sought to address five separate topics deemed worthy of either initial or follow-on assessment since the original release of the 2022 report on the attack.

Two of those five topics included the circumstances surrounding the alleged confirmation of the description of the alleged attacker; as well as the circumstances related to the request for the authority to engage that individual.

A man in civilian attire hands a small child down to a soldier in camouflage from the top of a large truck.

Regarding identification of the alleged attacker and the request to engage that perceived threat, the supplemental review found that the chain of command's proper use of the rules of engagement allowed the Marines on the ground to avoid making any potentially lethal mistakes amid all of the confusion brought on by having to deal with throngs of Afghan evacuees, according to one Marine supplemental review team official.

"Leaders constantly engaged service members and Marines on the ground throughout the evacuation to ensure they understood the use of force to deal with the unruly crowds, the Taliban and the constant threat before them," the official said.

One topic of some contention the review team sought to address was if, on the morning of the attack, Marine snipers had or had not positively identified a particular individual who appeared to stand out from the rest of the evacuees — a so-called "bald man in black" — as a threat worthy of engaging.

An image of a bald man in a black shirt and matching black head scarf who is sitting surrounded by Afghan refugees. The image is pulled up on the back of a still photo camera.

The review found that the battalion commander on scene properly evaluated the request to engage the individual by applying the set rules of engagement.

"The battalion commander exercised sound military judgement to conclude that the 'bald man in black' was not a lawful military target … Any portrayal of these events showing the battalion commander did not understand these events [is] just not supported by the evidence," the official said.

"It is clear [the battalion commander] did not approve the snipers to engage the 'bald man in black,' and it was clear that this decision was understood."

As to the actual attacker, the review team determined that there was very little chance of identifying al-Logari prior to him detonating his body-worn IED.

"Positive identification of the bomber prior to the attack would have been improbable, given the timeline and the density of the crowd," another Army review team member said, before going on to state that service members were "vigilant in their duties" the day of the attack, despite the fact that intelligence available at the time lacked data that could have been used to identify al-Logari as the assailant.

The same official also said the intelligence community has used facial recognition technology to compare a photo of al-Logari to one of the "bald man in black," and that the result yielded the "strongest negative possible rating" determining that the separate photos were not of the same individual.

Additional examples of service member vigilance and professionalism came to light during the supplemental review.

One topic assessed in the review — which was not included in the original report on the bombing — was a question as to whether ISIS-K or the Taliban had conducted a perceived "IED test run" on Aug. 21. That day, Marine snipers who were posted at the airport observed three individuals with accompanying bags that they deemed to be suspicious.

Though the supplemental review team ultimately couldn't conclude whether an IED test run had actually taken place, the team praised the level of skilled professionalism the Marines exhibited while investigating the situation.

"The Marines remained disciplined, and they were relentless in how they treated these bags," said one army team official, adding that the Marines were sure to execute the appropriate tactics, techniques and procedures.

"They did the right thing, despite the uncertainty of the environment," the official said. "They remained disciplined, and they performed their duties admirably; and that was to preserve the force and also to protect civilians and others."

Another of the topics the review team assessed, and subsequently praised, was the Marines' decision to consolidate their perimeter at the airport on the day prior to the bombing. This was due to increased exposure to unvetted evacuees and the threat of an IED attack, among other hazards.

"Based on our assessment, consolidating the perimeter was a sound tactical decision," a Marine official from the review team said. "Additionally, after discussing that decision during the supplemental review with several service members who were critical of it previously, they all agreed that it was a sound tactical decision."

Over a dozen service members in camouflage and hundreds of evacuees are on one side of a chain link fence while a handful of other camouflaged service members patrol on the opposite side of the fence.

Though it wasn't one of the core five topics addressed, the supplemental review team saw it as germane to mention the robust presence of military leadership in the vicinity of Abbey Gate during the day of the bombing.

"It is important to note that multiple Marines emphasized that leaders were present and engaged throughout operations at Abbey Gate, [and] our supplemental review found the same," one of the Army officials stated, while adding that 22 leaders at the rank of E-4 or above were wounded or killed during the attack.

"We found that certain individuals, even two years after the blast, were unaware that the battalion commander had been wounded by ball bearings; and that — while still performing his duties — he had to be forcibly led away from the blast zone because senior enlisted Marines insisted that he needed to be treated for his wounds."

Between the supplemental review and the initial Abbey Gate investigation, the team interviewed more than 190 people at 24 separate locations. The average interview consisted of approximately 64 questions, resulting in 16 pages of typed transcription in the form of a signed memorandum for record, according to one of the army review team officials.

The official closed out the briefing by pointing out that the supplemental review team has photos of the 13 U.S. service members who lost their lives in the Abbey Gate attack posted in the team's office in such a manner that the photos are the first thing the team members see in the morning, and the last thing they see as they depart for the evening.

"This is to always remind us of the fallen service members and the importance of what we're doing," the official said.

"This is to honor them." Spotlight: Afghanistan Evacuation: DOD Response Spotlight: Afghanistan Evacuation: DOD Response: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/DOD-Response-Afghanistan-Evacuation/

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