This was not supposed to happen. The combustible Donald Trump was so mercurial that critics feared he might bluster America into a foreign war. Joe Biden’s election was supposed to deliver a seasoned foreign-policy hand, who with his team of Washington insiders was supposed to foresee problems and prevent international meltdowns.
Tell that to the Afghan people — like Mohammad Reza Kateb who worked with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugee and Migration and similar entities for more than a decade. He’s has been working to get himself, his wife and children into the U.S. for years.
In the course of that work, the Taliban threatened him five times.
Journalist Jessica Stone met Reza when she was embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009. She’s been working to help him and his family the SIVs (Special Immigrants visas) needed to earn admission to a country he risked his life to support — efforts thwarted by what officialdom cites as a lack of documentation and insufficient work history, which may be short by as little as one day.
I asked Stone if U.S. embassy officials perhaps were being careful about not admitting someone who could be planning on hurting Americans some day.
No, Stone told me. “He had the opportunity to hurt people. If he wanted to hurt Americans, he’s had a lot of access to Americans over the last 10 or 15 years.” Instead, she said, he chose to work to support the U.S. mission.
As members of Congress are pushing the administration to get more Afghans to safety, Reza’s fate is uncertain.
During remarks Monday, President Joe Biden said that he would focus on evacuating people who like Reza have worked for US-linked NGOs, which is good news to the extent the administration can deliver. (See Fin Gomez tweet.)
A US official who has been actively involved in US efforts to evacuate Americans, and SIVs from Afghanistan describes the situation in Kabul as “worse than Saigon.” “ We can’t leave these people,” the official said to @CBSNews “This is awful. This is so bad.”
An Afghan Air Force pilot told The Bulwark.
Many Afghan soldiers died bravely. I’ve been fighting for over fifteen years. We did not all just give up and quit. Yes, some did. Once the Americans left, we weren’t ready to start doing all the logistics. The logistics, the maintenance, and corruption really hurt us.
I know people in the U.S. are upset that we didn’t fight longer. But we’ve been fighting for decades—and some of us, even longer. When the U.S. left, it really affected morale, especially how quickly it happened. We woke up one day, then Bagram was gone. Everyone got scared. It got out of control.
I’m mad at many of the senior leaders who lined their pockets and simply vanished from the country. However, thousands of Afghan officers were not responsible for that. We were simply doing the best we could.
There are a lot of Afghans who trusted the United States. Not just translators. Not just civil society activists, but also Afghan soldiers. We loved fighting alongside Americans.
Please don’t leave us behind. Please. We will be great Americans
Social media critics fault the Biden administration for not handling the situation better, and there will be investigations to come.
I wonder if this sort of quick collapse was inevitable once Biden announced he would pull out U.S. troops out of the Islamic Republic (now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) before 9/11. The Taliban seized the moment.
I asked former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow if this would always get ugly. He responded, “Once the decision was made, it would have been ugly no matter what.”
So, bad decision. America looks weak and untrustworthy.
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.