On Tuesday, General Chris Donahue was relieved of his duties as top U.S. Army commander in Europe by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The four-star general was the latest victim of Hegseth’s purging of the Army’s combat-tested leadership. Hegseth likes
to use the phrase “G.I.’s over Generals” when talking in broad strokes about his plans, but it was hard not to believe that General Donahue was being axed for doing his duty leading the efforts to get Americans and allies out of Kabul in August 2022 as Afghanistan fell into the arms of the Taliban. There’s even a famous photo of Donahue climbing into a C-17 as the last American soldier out of the country.
Hegseth didn’t see it that way. As a Fox News host, he railed about Biden and the military leadership and it didn’t stop when he became Secretary of Defense. Despite multiple previous investigations, Hegseth launched a new one in May 2025, calling the Afghanistan withdrawal “disastrous and embarrassing.” The investigation is still ongoing, but there is some thought among Pentagon watchers that Donahue was canned simply because of having been in charge of the mission. It wouldn’t be the first time. When Donahue was put forward for the European command post, a senatorial hold was put on the appointment by former plumber and then-Senator Markwayne Mullin, who now happens to be the new secretary of Homeland Security.
I wrote about the American withdrawal from Kabul in 2022 for Rolling Stone. The following has been adapted from that story.
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By August 2021, Christopher Donahue was 29 years out of West Point and had seen some things. He was driving back from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon on 9/11 when a jet crashed into the complex and killed 184 of his colleagues. He’d been fighting in the war without end for two decades and had deployed 17 times to Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa, and Syria. And now Donahue was preparing to lead his soldiers back to Kabul to a war he’d been told was over.
The two-star Donahue was the deputy commander of American troops under Navy Adm. Peter Vasley, a longtime colleague whose leadership skills meshed with his own. This was fortuitous. Vasley left Donahue in charge of extraction of all forces from the airport. Donahue had years of experience in fighting the Taliban, but more recently had found “common interests,” as the Americans like to call it, specifically a shared enemy, ISIS-K, a regional offshoot of the terrorist organization as sadistically violent as the original model.
Before coming to the 82nd, Donahue had served as the commander of the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the successor to Operation Enduring Freedom, America’s original Afghan mission. According to a senior military official, Donahue and American forces entered into a realpolitik relationship with the Taliban in 2019, and provided air support as they wiped out ISIS-K forces in Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden’s old hiding place. Donahue knew all the Taliban players.
THIS WOULD PROVE important because by the time Donahue landed on the afternoon of August 17, the battle was already lost. The day before, hundreds of Afghans broke through fences at Bagram Air Force Base and chased a departing C-17 down the runway, some of them plummeting to their deaths from the wheel well of the plane. Donahue arrived the next day and commandeered a Jeep and set out for a reconnaissance of the airport with a few soldiers. Almost immediately, they spotted a half-dozen Taliban with rifles sweeping out the main terminal. Donahue swore to himself.
“Get them out of there.”
Donahue made his way to the roof of the terminal. According to a witness, he found eight Taliban snipers with their rifles trained on the gates where Marines and despairing Afghans were gathering again at full swell. The American and Taliban stared at one another for a moment. Donahue spoke first in English and then through his translator.
“Get the hell off the roof. You’re done, get out.”
Donahue understood that the Americans and Taliban were at a surreal crossroads. The Taliban had won the war, but the Americans still had the firepower to destroy their Kabul forces and level the country. He ordered a jet fighter to fly over the Taliban’s airport positions fast and low. That got the Taliban’s attention. He then met with the leader of the Taliban at the airport, a member of the group’s elite Red Unit, and told him he wanted to meet with the Taliban’s Kabul military commander.
Four hours later, Donahue and his staff sat down in a nondescript conference room at the airport with Qari Hamdullah Mohlis, the Taliban’s longtime military strategist. (Mohlis had reached a level of international fame two days earlier when he was the first Taliban leader to enter the presidential palace.) The room was full of Taliban and American soldiers who had done good and terrible things for their sides, and now eyed one another warily. Donahue and Mohlis had been hunting each other for years, and there was a grudging respect, according to a senior military officer in the meeting.
“Let’s just cut to the chase,” said Donahue, according to eyewitness accounts. “You need us more than we need you.”
Mohlis didn’t say much, letting Donahue talk himself out. Donahue then pulled out a map.
“Check it out, here’s where all your positions are. There’s a B-52 and there’s a B-1 over top. I’m telling you right now what they’re gonna do,” Donahue said. “They have every single one of your positions lined in. And if you shoot at us, we will kill every one of your checkpoints. And if you think I’m screwing around, you know me, and I know you. Tempt us.”
The two former foes tried to work out an uneasy detente with Donahue and the Army controlling the gates at Bagram with the Taliban in charge of maintaining a semblance of order amongst the tens of thousands of Afghans hoping to flee the country.
While Mohlis held the land and many of the airport-adjacent buildings that Donahue had used as command posts on earlier deployments, Donahue still controlled the sky, and that provided him with information about the Taliban’s movements. He also hinted to Mohlis that there were credible threats of suspicious men and vehicles operating near the gates.
According to a senior Army officer, Donahue shared something more personal with Mohlis. ISIS-K had targeted him for death.
“Be careful. They’re coming for you.”
Mohlis paused before responding through his translator.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen the intelligence. They’re coming for you, and they’re coming for me.”
I KNOW AT LEAST one man who is grateful for Donahue’s service.
Fazel Roufi was six years old when the twin towers fell, and the Americans arrived in Kabul. He remembered his mother and aunts rejoicing at their new freedoms after the Taliban were chased back into the caves and hills. His big brown eyes lit up when coalition troops walked the streets dispersing chocolates and soccer balls. Some suspicious Afghans declined the goodies, claiming the candy was poison and the balls somehow included listening devices. Roufi didn’t care, he and his friends just wanted to play like Cristiano Ronaldo, whose poster hung on his bedroom wall.
But there was much he didn’t miss. As a kid, he took up kickboxing, eventually becoming a junior national champion, so he could protect himself from thieves and gangs on his long walk to school. Afghanistan was a country where you were always on guard. The country had been run by communists, theocrats, and now kleptocrats. He knew the only Afghan certainty was that the political chairs would be rearranged, and some Afghans would pay with their lives.
You were always being watched. A friendly high-five with a Yankee soldier might be filed away and used against you during the next, inevitable regime transformation.
“Things will change, and then they will change again,” his father told him. “You have to be always careful.”
In between, there was violence. One of Roufi’s English-class requirements was to daily translate a news article from his native Pashto to English. Roufi cheated by translating the same car-bomb story every day, just changing the neighborhood or town. A bomb was always going off somewhere in Roufi’s world.
He graduated from high school in 2011. Roufi’s English was good and he was smart, so it was not hard for him to get a commission in the Afghan army. He was made a captain after a year at military academy. But Roufi had dreams other than to be sent to a faraway province to fight the Taliban. He applied for a student visa designed for Afghan officers to continue their education in the United States.
The agreement was that he would study for two years and come back and serve his country. He ended up in San Antonio and almost immediately met a kind and selfless girl named Vanessa at a crowded BBQ joint. She taught him about Mexican food and the seemingly indecipherable culture of the Lone Star State. They fell in love and married within six months. Roufi’s father, Abdul, went to his Afghan commander and explained that if Roufi came home he would not be eligible to return to the U.S. and his bride for 10 years. Abdul’s commander smiled and said anyone who could get out of Afghanistan had his blessing.
Roufi took some classes and worked security. But he felt an obligation to his new country. He wanted to thank America for welcoming him, and the best way he knew was to enlist in the United States Army. Eventually, he became an American citizen and ended up at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a proud mechanic in the 82nd Airborne.
EIGHT YEARS LATER, Roufi landed back in Kabul on the same flight with Donahue ahead of the withdrawal. The soldiers were told to lock and load their weapons before descending onto a tarmac blanketed with the detritus of refugees: left-behind clothing and empty water bottles swirling in the wind.
He had not eaten since he left his Fort Bragg and choked back vomit as he walked onto the tarmac. He was frightened, but the fear wasn’t for himself. He squinted into the sun and saw the roads adjacent to the airport where he used to ride his bicycle as a boy on his way to English lessons. Those streets were now filled with thousands of would-be refugees, their meager possessions strapped to their backs, mothers grasping the hands of screaming and frightened children. They had arrived at the airport with papers signifying varying degrees of American affiliation; letters of recommendations from long-gone embassy personnel; and cellphone testimonials from now-retired Army officers who they translated for during the forever war.
Earlier that day, Roufi’s family had tried to make it to the airport gates, but the crush of people had reached dystopian levels. Shots rang out, the Taliban brandished whips, and mothers tossed their babies to Marines in hopes of getting them out of the country.
Roufi had last talked to his mom and dad on the phone 12 hours earlier, during a refueling stop in Germany. He could tell they were in trouble. His family had watched an Afghan policeman shoot a man trying to climb a fence and witnessed a woman run over by a truck. They were scared, and he could sense in the voice of Abdul, Roufi’s proud father, that he and the family were losing hope.
Through the fuzzy connection, Roufi heard women screaming and men shouting, the sound of bedlam. Then he recognized the voice of his 18-year-old sister, Fatima, the baby of the family. Fatima wanted to be a journalist and possessed a composure beyond her years. But right now her voice was mad with fear.
“Fazel, the Taliban are coming over to us. The Taliban are going to kill us. Fazel!”
And then the line went dead. For the next 12 hours, Roufi feared his family was dead. And he feared it was his fault. After all, he was the one who came to the United States and became an American soldier.
ROUFI WAS IN KABUL because of Donahue. It all happened gradually and then suddenly. He had told his dad earlier in August not to worry about the Taliban closing in on Kabul.
The government won’t fall,” Roufi told his father, on a WhatsApp call. “Rich people have too much to lose.”
He was wrong. The generals cut deals with the Taliban and fled for Tajikistan or Pakistan, wherever they had stashed their money and their girlfriends. Soon, the city was defenseless. Shop owners ripped down hair-salon posters advertising Western cuts. On the afternoon of Aug. 15, the president fled to Tajikistan on a helicopter without telling his senior staff. Kabul was up for grabs.
His sisters’ professional lives — the older two were a dentist and a surgeon — ended that day. And if the Taliban or ISIS-K terrorists who had infiltrated Afghanistan during the chaos learned the sisters had a brother serving in the U.S. Army, Roufi’s whole family might be killed. He told his family to go to the airport. From Fort Bragg, he was able to FaceTime at the gate with an 82nd paratrooper already on the ground.
“My family is there; can you help them?” yelled Roufi into a bad FaceTime connection.
“Bro, it’s insane here,” said the soldier. “I can’t do anything.”
Roufi had one card left to play. The 82nd has an open-door policy in which a soldier can skip the chain of command in case of an emergency. He talked to his division chaplain, and later that afternoon he was escorted to the offices of General Donahue.
Roufi entered amid a tornado of majors and colonels with maps and briefing books. Roufi knew he needed to project confidence that he could be an asset, so he stood ramrod straight and saluted the general.
“What can I do for you, soldier?”
Roufi spoke up.
“My whole family is in Kabul. I need to help them. I don’t want them to die.”
Donahue asked Roufi if he spoke Pashto and Dari well enough to translate for him and his staff.
“General, I can.”
Donahue looked back at Roufi for a long moment.
“You’re my guy. We will get your family out.”
Roufi summoned up the last of his courage.
“Do you mean it?”
Donahue stared back at the specialist.
“Go pack your gear. We’re leaving in two hours.”
On the flight over, Roufi promised himself he wouldn’t get greedy; he would just bring in his mother and father and his sisters, the men would have to make their own way. But then he saw two things: the hellish conditions in Kabul and the well-heeled Afghan apparatchiks already in the terminal with their extended families. He saw the faces of the little nephews and nieces he had never met. How could he save some and condemn others to misery? He embraced his newly acquired American exceptionalism.
“Bring all of them through.”
Roufi’s family began to file through the gate two by two. A dead-tired Marine erupted with anger when he realized that Roufi was bringing in a small army of Afghans. He looked at Roufi, with his beard, and probably wondered if he was special ops or CIA. He paused for a minute and then learned Roufi’s rank — he was just another soldier.
“No fucking way. You can’t bring that many people in.”
Usually, Roufi would have made nice. This time he didn’t. “We have an order,” he said. “This is my family, and they’re in danger.”
The Marine still resisted. He’d been on the gate for hours and seen Afghans claw and scratch to move one yard closer to the gate. Now, he was asked to let in 24 people who had emerged out of nowhere. He wasn’t backing down.
“You can’t do this.”
At this point, having friends in high places changed the direction of 24 lives. A special-forces officer that Donahue had sent along in case of trouble spoke up.
“You’ll let them through, per General Donahue’s orders.”
And just like that, the Roufi family was through the gate. Neither Roufi nor his family showed any emotion until they had moved out of sight of the Taliban. His mother began to cry, but not Roufi. For the next six hours, he managed his family through the security checkpoints and bureaucracy of a mass exodus. At 2 a.m., the family joined a line and began walking toward a C-17 bound for Qatar. He noticed that his mother, his sisters, and their children looked frightened. He didn’t understand why until one of them explained it to him. None of them had ever been on an airplane before. His mother seemed calmer than the rest.
“If we crash, it will be our way to freedom,” she said.
ROUFI COMING TO KABUL did not come without a cost.
Abbey Gate was supposed to be already closed on the afternoon of August 26. From the start, it had been a ticking time bomb. It was the one entrance where the Taliban held the high ground of midlevel buildings that provided a view of all the American operations. Conversely, the American soldiers had limited sights on the men and women being checked for documents. Meanwhile, American intelligence had identified a legitimate threat targeting Abbey Gate at an undetermined hour. Donahue and senior officers on the ground decided to close down the gate that afternoon, and their decision was passed on to the Pentagon.
On the morning of Aug. 26, the British Embassy sent an email to Afghans, saying that because of security threats they should not make their way to the gate. The email was poorly worded, and it wasn’t clear if this applied to just non-approved Afghans or to everyone.
The American plan was to close the gate in the afternoon, but the closure was reportedly delayed because the British were waiting on some last busloads of refugees. (The British have denied this, saying the refugees could have been routed to other gates.)
Whatever the reason, the gate was still open shortly before 6 p.m. That’s when an Afghan man made his way toward the Marines’ checkpoint. He waited until he was asked for his papers, as close as he could get to the Americans, before he detonated his suicide vest. Within seconds, the streets were soaked in blood and body parts. In the ensuing mayhem, gunfire rang out, adding to the body count. No one was sure if the gunfire came from Americans protecting their wounded, the Taliban, or other armed actors.
It didn’t matter. This was the “extreme casualty event” that the American military had feared since its arrival. Roufi was translating back at headquarters when he heard the distant explosion. Within a few minutes, he was rushed to a makeshift hospital to translate for doctors and victims. For about 30 minutes, he helped assemble and dress the American dead. Soon, Roufi was needed for the living. A Norwegian doctor grabbed him and brought him into a triage ward filled with the screams of wounded Afghans. Roufi and the other young soldiers weren’t prepared for this kind of carnage. Some stepped outside the tent and puked before returning to help.
After a few minutes, a screaming Afghan woman came in carrying her one-year-old baby girl. She thought her baby was OK after the blast, but she kept bleeding from behind her ear. A nurse grabbed the baby and told the woman to wait outside. A doctor examined the child and identified a piece of shrapnel that was embedded in her skull. The doctor made a snap decision.
“She needs to be medevacked to Germany.”
It fell to Roufi to counsel the mother. He found her wringing her hands outside the medical tent. “She needs to go to Germany,” he told her.
The Afghan mother had never flown or been outside her own country — Roufi might as well have informed her they were taking her baby to Mars. Roufi told her she could go to Germany with her child. The woman’s face filled with anguish.
“But my husband. He is still out there. I don’t know what happened to him. He could be bleeding.”
“Go with your kid,” Roufi told her. “She needs you right now. The rest will work out.”
The woman nodded. A nurse led the mother to her daughter. A little later, the mom and baby were led out to a medevac flight for a journey to a strange new world that might just save the child’s life.
Roufi never heard what happened to the baby girl and her mother. Instead, he went back to work. For five hours, he translated for the wounded, his hands covered in the blood of his countrymen. A crying girl with a leg wound and blood in her hair asked Roufi if she could find her mother. A boy with his head swaddled in bandages did the same. Roufi went outside to a nearby tent, where terrified relatives awaited news of loved ones. It turned out the two kids were siblings, and Roufi brought in their mother. She cried as she moved from stretcher to stretcher. Roufi eventually realized all seven of the mother’s children were in the hospital.
Some time after midnight, he made his way back to the 82nd Airborne’s headquarters. He knew of a storage room with a few cots. He collapsed on one of them and fell into a deep sleep.
Roufi left Kabul on August 30, first flying to Qatar and helping his family get settled at a refugee camp. The next day, Donahue made arrangements for the last flight out. Before leaving. Donahue told Mohlis, his Taliban counterpart, that no good could come out of the Taliban taking a rocket shot at the last American plane. He informed him that bombers, fighters, and drones were still lurking above. Mohlis understood.
A few hours later, Donahue was the last American soldier to board the last plane out of Afghanistan. Somewhere in Kabul, Mohlis watched his longtime enemy depart his homeland. What he thought at that moment isn’t known. What is known is that on Nov. 2 Mohlis was killed by ISIS-K while visiting Taliban soldiers at a Kabul hospital. He outlasted the Americans by 63 days.
That Thanksgiving, the late-fall sun shone brightly in Fayetteville. Roufi and his wife Vanessa — OK, mostly Vanessa and Roufi’s sisters — were preparing two turkeys and traditional Afghan dishes for the family’s first American holiday. The house was a montage of happy chaos: someone checking if there was enough Coca-Cola; a nephew asleep with his head resting against a foosball table; and another nephew, with giant round eyes, standing on a chair and smiling mischievously, as he bit into a giant pomegranate, the purple juice running down his face.
Food was served, including Roufi’s beloved qabili palau. The table settled into a babble of English and Pashto. At one end of the table sat Roufi’s mother, dressed in a traditional long white dress and headscarf. She didn’t say much, but smiled with contentment.
Before dessert, everyone was asked to say something they were thankful for. Their answers were similar, but Abdul, the patriarch, said it best.
“A little while ago, we thought we might all be dead.” He waited for Roufi to translate. Then he spoke again, breaking into a smile. “But here we are. We are all safe and together.”
Eventually it was Roufi’s turn. He wore a red Armani T-shirt and looked shy as he spoke in English.
“For a while, I didn’t think I was making a difference with my life. Just fixing trucks didn’t seem like much to brag about. But then I was able to help bring my family here.” He looked over at his wife across the table. “No matter what else happens, I was able to do this one good thing.”
There was one more thing Roufi told me while I was writing his story. It was simple.
“I just want you to know how grateful I am to General Donahue.”
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