The Afghan Allies Left Behind in the Graveyard of Empires
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan,” argued President Joe Biden in July 2021 as he prepared to end America’s 20-year war there. It was “highly unlikely,” he claimed, that the Taliban would be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.”
Biden was proven wrong just a month later. That August, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the Afghan forces outmatched.
Desperation engulfed the capital, Kabul. Afghans intent on escaping the impending regime clung to the side of a U.S. military plane leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport, several falling to their deaths. Outside the airport gates, scores of men, women, and children crowded together in the mud and summer heat in hopes of safe passage. More than 160 of them—along with 13 U.S. service members—would die in a suicide bombing carried out by an Islamic State affiliate.
One Afghan man who worked closely with the U.S. military was in Kabul during the fall. He spoke to Reason from his new home in the United States. Out of privacy concerns, he asked to go by the pseudonym Baryalai. (It means “victorious,” he explained, adding a smiley-face emoji.)
Back in August 2021, Baryalai was tending to business at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs when he was urged to take an alternate exit out of the building. “By the time I got out of the ministry, the government vehicles were rushing here and there. I did not know what was happening,” he says. “The Taliban were not supposed to enter Kabul. There was supposed to be a transfer of power.”
The city had fallen into “a nightmare,” he continues. “The president escaped and it looked like a whole army was left without any commander.”
Baryalai spent the next two and a half years on the run. Since he had worked with the U.S., the risk of Taliban retribution was high. Interpreters have been hunted down, tortured, and killed since the Taliban took power. “I was living in hiding with my family. From one city to another, changing locations,” he says. Eventually, he had to leave the country.
Things weren’t supposed to go this way. In return for his service to the U.S., Baryalai was eligible for a sanctioned escape—a visa pathway specifically designed for allies like him, a reward for years of faithful military service. If that pathway wasn’t backlogged and addled by bureaucracy, he might have gotten out of Afghanistan far earlier.
Instead of cashing in on a promise made by the U.S. government, Baryalai and thousands of other Afghan allies were forced to fashion their own paths forward. Some now struggle to maintain legal status in neighboring countries. Others have become unwilling nomads in their own country, on the run to avoid detection. The burden has been on them to escape Taliban rule or become invisible in Afghanistan.
They haven’t been alone: They’ve been aided by an impressive civil society movement that organized itself around keeping the promise that the U.S. government broke. Veterans and others have banded together with nonprofits to help allies get out of Afghanistan, complete their visa applications, and build new lives in the United States. They stepped in to pick up the pieces of a yearslong government failure, something that never should have been their job to fix.
Three years after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, thousands of Afghan allies still depend on civil society to keep their cause alive and keep making progress. But the government could stop that progress in its tracks.
‘Faithful and Valuable Service’
Afghanistan has been called the “graveyard of empires,” a reference to the string of great powers that have tried and failed to control the country. The U.S. eventually joined that list. But before then, as it attempted to avoid that fate, it relied on a vast network of Afghan helpers who could help American forces navigate uncharted territory.
“There was a huge language barrier, so there’s very little we could’ve gotten done” without interpreters on the ground, says Jim Fenton, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan for several years. Interpreters were “critical” in “getting that communication going,” he explains—everything from translating locals to deciphering radio communications, but also in understanding cultural differences and the dynamics between Afghanistan’s different ethnic groups.
During the two-decade war, the International Rescue Committee estimates, some 263,000 Afghan civilians helped the U.S. mission in some way. Afghans who served Western militaries risked infuriating the Taliban. An interpreter who spoke with Reason in 2021 shared that he once found a letter from the Taliban in his yard, threatening to kill him as “a lesson” to other Afghans working with the U.S. military.
A 2020 report by No One Left Behind (NOLB), a nonprofit that supports interpreters and other allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere, “identified over 300 interpreters or their family that were killed in Afghanistan because of their service to the U.S.,” explains Andrew Sullivan, the group’s director of advocacy. That’s an undercount, he adds—it’s just what the organization has been able to find. In 2022, another NOLB survey turned up 242 reports of reprisal killings.
These risks prompted Congress to create the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, which was launched in 2009. The SIV program provides an immigration pathway to certain Afghans who assisted U.S. military forces, framed as a reward for “faithful and valuable service to the U.S. government”—a recognition of the great risk they undertook to facilitate the American mission. Afghan interpreters who worked for the U.S. for at least a year are eligible.
“This is really the lifeline for Afghans who worked for the U.S. government, who fear Taliban reprisal because of that connection,” says Amie Kashon, program manager at the Evacuate Our Allies Operations Center at Human Rights First. Unfortunately, she continues, the SIV program and other pathways available to Afghans are “often quite slow, they’re often quite bureaucratic, they often take advocacy from outside stakeholders, [and] they’re processes that are difficult to navigate as a pro se applicant.”
During the intensive 14-step application process, Afghans must detail their record and time of service to the U.S., provide a letter of recommendation from an American supervisor, and describe threats they’ve received as a result of their employment. They must also attend an in-person interview at an embassy—because there are no U.S. consular services in Afghanistan now, that means visiting an embassy in Pakistan or a third country—and undergo security and medical screenings. Advocates point out the huge logistical and financial risks that applicants must undertake to fulfill those requirements, a process that might involve traveling through hostile territory and attracting unwanted Taliban attention.
The complex, lengthy application process leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong. “Our original senior interpreter” in Afghanistan, Fenton says, “was a week out from his flight and they shut everything down for COVID.” By the time the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, his medical materials were outdated. The interpreter and his family had to redo their medic
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