Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Saka.

My guest in this interview recorded on the 10th of July had a long career as a British diplomat,

including stintz as ambassador in Azerbaijan and Russia.

But nothing could have prepared Sir Laurie Bristow for his last job.

He was ambassador in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the tumultuous weeks

leading up to the final pullout of all US and other NATO forces and the return of the Taliban.

It was an ignominious end to the two-decade-long NATO-led military intervention in Afghanistan. As Taliban troops entered

the capital, tens of thousands of Afghans besieged the international airport, trying to flee in the

emergency airlift organized by the U.S. and UK military. Ambassador Bristow was a key player

in those desperate days. The pullout fulfilled a political objective

set by Donald Trump and maintained by Joe Biden. But to the West's allies in Afghanistan,

the government of Ashrafgani and all of those who fought against the return of the Taliban,

it felt like a betrayal. And the strategic implications of what was, in essence, a defeat for the West

continue to play out today in theatres of hostility and conflict far beyond Afghanistan.

Sir Lorry Bristow has written a book reflecting on his own experiences in Kabul. It contains

painful lessons, but have they truly been learned? Well, he joins me now.

Sir Laurie Bristow, welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. Three years ago, you were a key player in the

chaotic Western withdrawal from Kabul. Many people would choose to move on to try to forget about it. You have chosen

to write a book, to dig deep into your memories of that chaos, that desperate time. Why?

There are really two questions that people asked me when I got back from Kabul in August

2021. One was, why did any of this happen? Why did it happen after a 20-year

campaign there, the expenditure of thousands of lives, the expenditure of trillions of dollars? How is it that

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