We Must Help the Afghan Interpreters, Plain and Simple
Did the Biden administration think this through in its rush to withdraw our forces?
I think Joe Biden’s decision to fully withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan is a mistake. It’s mistaken on strategic and moral grounds. I hope I’m wrong. But when even administration officials and experts who favor the decision concede that our pullout—of a very small contingent of troops—could result in a Taliban takeover, it seems a safe bet that it will happen.
That decision has been made and there’s no point arguing about it anymore. But there’s still one thing the United States can do—and morally must do: Get the people who signed up to work and fight with us out of there.
Over the last 20 years, thousands of Afghans worked with U.S. and NATO forces as interpreters, cultural advisers, etc. They chose to do so knowing that they put their lives and the lives of their families at risk. The Taliban knows who most of them are and will find out about the rest soon enough. Scores have been assassinated over the years. The Taliban has lists of people it plans to kill. Interpreters are at the top of the list, but so are countless others who worked with Western organizations and governments to stand up a (sadly corrupt) democratic government, as well as schools and other civil society projects.
Even if you’re not compelled by the moral argument, telegraphing to the world that it’s not worth working with Americans is a strategic blunder of monumental proportions. And an utterly foreseeable one.
America told these interpreters that we’d get their back. We created a Special Immigrant Visa program in 2008 to expedite asylum for these people, many of whom have saved American lives on the battlefield. And the program has been an unmitigated bureaucratic catastrophe.
In 2009 there were 1,500 slots created for asylum-seekers. Three were granted. Today there are 18,000 people waiting for an SIV, not including families. The vetting process is supposed to take nine months. It always took longer. But under the Trump administration the average wait time was three years.
There are understandable reasons for the backlog. Vetting translators is difficult. The Taliban has in the past embedded sleepers in such positions so as to attack Americans or provide intelligence. No one wants to import a terrorist to America. It’s also a complicated and expensive task to resettle whole families and our resettlement agencies have been taxed for a very long time.
But even people who have literally killed Taliban on the battlefield have been denied visas or been stuck in limbo. American officers who have served side-by-side with these allies have offered to take them into their homes. If they’re willing to vouch for them, that’s good enough for me. (You can find many of these stories at the website for No One Left Behind, an organization dedicated to getting these people out.)
More importantly, there’s no one of any importance out there arguing that we shouldn’t prevent the slaughter. Republicans and Democrats alike agree that we need to do this.
The British understand this, which is why they’ve just announced an all-out effort to rescue as many of their interpreters as possible before the images of allied Afghans clinging to helicopters get beamed to the world.
There’s a bipartisan effort to do something similar here, but it’s been slow to start and time is running out. The White House told CBS News that there is an “intensive policy process to improve and surge resources, including adding capacity to process applications at Embassy Kabul, while continuing to ensure the integrity of the program and safeguard national security.”
That sounds great and I hope this “process” produces something more concrete than more than years of bipartisan failure.
But the fact that the White House seems to have been surprised that this might be a problem doesn’t inspire confidence. In neither the administration’s briefing of Biden’s decision to withdraw nor in his address to the nation did Biden mention that we would help those seeking asylum. This is probably because to acknowledge that this might be necessary in the first place is to acknowledge that our withdrawal could be very bad for Afghanistan.
But it could also be because the administration didn’t think this through as it sought to check a political box for domestic consumption.
Regardless, the decision to admit defeat in Afghanistan is a done deal. Hopefully it’s the right decision. But betraying these people would be the wrong decision, and a stain on our national honor, no matter how it works out for us or Afghanistan.
Thanks for this. This problem was extreme after Iraq as well. As a Foreign Service Officer detailed to the Marine War College staff in 2012-13, I got to know a great student obsessed with the issue of saving our closest allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. This Army Colonel had seen terrible combat, lost several soldiers, and will be forever scarred from the casualties he felt somehow responsible for and the families he tried to support. After all this, he was determined to save as many local interpreters and advisers as he could. He worked within the army, lobbied Congress, and pushed military support organizations to get involved. He said seeing his former local staff denied help in the face of death threats was almost like seeing more soldiers die and he was devastated. It is sad to see how bad the problem remains.
On a lighter note, interpreters and translators are not at all the same thing. In many circumstances, using the terms interchangeably isn’t really a problem, just a minor inaccuracy. But...at the Clinton-Yeltsen summit in Helsinki, I witnessed a funny example of where the difference matters. As a political officer at our Embassy, I was assigned to “mind” Deputy Secretary Talbott (who was amazed when I used a cell phone to connect him to DC!). Near the end of the summit, U.S. experts were finalizing an agreement on a tight deadline and called for translators. They nervously waited as a staffer went and returned with...interpreters. As they hurriedly asked for clarifications on the document as the interpreters looked at each other sheepishly...a State Official shouted “come on, the President is waiting for this!) The bravest interpreter said quietly “sir, I think you need translators for the document, we do spoken interpretation. A (different) staffer ran off to search the hotel for translators.
Whichever form of life-saving support these brave folks provided us in our time of need, it is a national disgrace that we can’t or won’t get our act together to help them. In a time when everything seems partisan, here is something that isn’t. Contact your reps or anyone you know who can help, please.
This is so incredibly disconcerting.
A few years ago, I hired a guy that was an interpreter in Iraq. He told me his story. After being an interpreter, he and his family were abducted and held for ransom. The U.S. govt paid the ransom, and subsequently got him a visa to come to the U.S. - but his family wasn't granted visas right away.
He decided to come to the U.S. to find a place to live, get a job, etc. His family was abducted, AGAIN, 2 weeks later. Again, the U.S. paid the ransom, and this time, finally got the visas put together for his family.
How utterly embarrassing this is, and for reasons I find specious. Almost every terrorist attack of the last 20 years has been carried out by people that grew up in the U.S. - even when they were radical-islamist in nature, they tend to be carried about by LOCAL radicalized americans, and not by foreign actors.
Get these damn people out of their home countries. Show them we can keep promises. Otherwise we deserve every epithet thrown our way.