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 medical examinations, costing thousands of dollars. The family didn't escape until 2021.

Another of Fenton's interpreters is still trying to leave the region. A member of Afghanistan's Hazara ethnic minority, the interpreter served in the Afghan army until he began to experience beatings due to his background. He quit—something that Fenton knew about, but it raised the hackles of visa adjudicators.

"He put in for an SIV and kept getting denied because it had this derogatory file that said that he was not trustworthy," says Fenton. "Granted, I had a stack of probably 25 certificates from colonels and majors and one-star generals for the work that he did." The interpreter's application was denied repeatedly but with little clarity offered beyond form letter responses.

"We must've done…I think two or three full applications, trying to narrow down, 'What is the thing that is kicking this back?'" Fenton recounts. Eventually, all was resolved and the application could progress, but the interpreter was now at the end of the queue. "Even though his first SIV case he started in probably 2017, 2018, his approved one is 2023," says Fenton. "They're priority evacuating 2021 right now." The interpreter—like so many others—has spent the intervening years on the run, spending time in Pakistan before returning to Afghanistan, unable to find work or secure legal status.

Congress mandates that SIV applications be adjudicated within nine months, but processing times have usually defied that time frame. As of 2021, someone applying for an SIV could expect the process to take three to six years, according to a report by Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Slow processing times in turn caused a huge backlog. By May 2021, there were 18,000 pending SIV applications, not including family members. (According to an October 2023 State Department report, more than 135,000 applicants were in just the earliest stages of the process.)

Thousands of Afghan allies and their family members made clear well before the Taliban takeover that they wanted to leave the country. But the U.S. government prepared poorly for the coming storm. During the August 2021 airlift, the U.S. relocated about 76,000 Afghans, many of whom never served the U.S. mission. A February 2022 report by the Association of Wartime Allies (AWA) estimated that 78,000 of the 81,000 SIV applicants in Afghanistan as of the Taliban takeover—96 percent—were left behind.

'The Most American Thing'

"I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner," said Biden in August 2021. "Part of the answer," he claimed, was that some Afghans simply "did not want to leave earlier." He also said that "the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence."

Publicly, the Biden administration had its excuses. Privately, many SIV advocates worried that there could be a slaughter ahead.

The White House had been "meeting with folks who still believed that the standing government in Afghanistan would hold, who still believed that the U.S. would have a [diplomatic] presence there," says Kim Staffieri, co-founder and executive director of the AWA. Evacuating SIV applicants quickly would have "played into a different narrative," she argues. But she knew things were heading south: "We did not have faith that the Afghan government would hold….We saw the army just falling to pieces."

The U.S. government's chaotic withdrawal in August 2021 helped jumpstart the nongovernmental effort.

"When Kabul fell, this cross-section of American society—people that served in Afghanistan and didn't—saw the images. They said, 'What the fuck? This does not comport with our American values,'" says Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who chairs #AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations that helps Afghan allies. "All of these people stood up, and what we did very effectively was get them all rowing in the same direction."

Humanitarian efforts have taken many forms. At Staffieri's AWA, the work has involved providing SIV applicants with educational advice, helping them understand translations, and conveying the application requirements in nonlawyer language. At Kashon's Evacuate Our Allies, it has involved refugee program referrals and coordination between different humanitarian organizations. At VanDiver's #AfghanEvac and Sullivan's NOLB, it has involved coordination with U.S. politicians and policy makers and relocating Afghan allies from dangerous territory.

Congress had years to fix the dysfunctional SIV program, but reform fell to the wayside for the usual reasons. One of the advocates' main jobs—on top of the more immediate work of advising or relocating Afghans—has been to keep the plight of Afghan helpers a live issue. "The role of civil society in this really has been in agitating the federal government to make sure this is a priority," says Kashon. "They had no choice but to listen," VanDiver explains. "We surrounded them."

A major advantage that the nongovernmental actors have over their government counterparts is their ability to work quickly, largely unhampered by bureaucracy and politics. "We bring ground truth from Kabul or ground truth from various sites where people are processing…to the highest levels of government," says VanDiver. "It's not filtered by the bureaucratic morass in the middle. We get real information to decision makers."

That advantage, along with advocates' strong grasp of the situation on the ground, has enabled them to propose novel, better-targeted policy changes. VanDiver rattles off a list of successes from the past few years: #AfghanEvac has helped the government reduce timelines for Afghan refugee processing; it has prodded the National Security Council to ensure that communications to and about Afghans are consistent, reducing confusion; it has helped get a family reunification mechanism established.

Behind the scenes, several organizations have been working to get Afghan helpers out of the region. "Last year, we helped 2,400 Afghans get to safety out of Afghanistan," Sullivan says, describing a collaboration with the State Department and other nonprofits. "This year we have a goal of 7,000 and we actually already hit 1,000 this calendar year [as of late March], so we're still full steam ahead on trying to move people to safety."

The relocations provide a lifeline not just for Afghans trapped in Afghanistan but for those who fled to nearby countries that haven't necessarily been accommodating. United Nations agencies estimate that at least 600,000 of Pakistan's 2 million undocumented Afghans moved there after the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan; it has been difficult for them to attain or maintain legal status there. "I applied for a Pakistan visa thrice," shares Baryalai. "Thrice my visa was rejected and every time it took me two to three months." The Pakistani government has announced plans to deport many Afghan refugees, citing security concerns.

The civil society actors are often motivated by their personal connections to Afghanistan and the helpers trapped there. As the general public and government officials pivot to other conflicts and policy battles, it's been on advocates to get "people to realize that the mission did not end when we left in August of 2021," Sullivan says. Many veterans have taken it upon themselves to keep promises to the interpreters they served alongside.

"We have the trust of Afghans, which the U.S. government squandered and is rebuilding now," says VanDiver. "But we act as expanding capacity, and it's all volunteer and it's the best example of civic engagement."

"This is the most American thing I've ever been a part of," he continues. "And I served in the Navy for 12 years."

'It Shouldn't Have Been Our Job'

For all the progress that civil society actors are making (and for all the ways they've pushed the government to be more effective), they're working within a system that can be ambivalent or outright hostile to helping the Afghans.

Congress authorized only a certain number of SIVs when it established the program. By spring 2024, "we'd gotten down to the point where there were probably less than 7,000 visas available, while still having over 130,000 applicants," Sullivan says. Without action, it looked like the program would run out of visas by August or September 2024.

That would obviously impact the effort to relocate Afghans from overseas, eliminating one of their main visa options. But it would also impact Afghans already living in the United States. Thousands of the Afghans brought to the U.S. in August 2021 came here on a temporary status called parole, which allows certain people to stay in the country without a visa for "urgent humanitarian reasons." Parolees don't automatically receive a pathway to lawful permanent resident status. They need to adjust to a different status—for the Afghans, usually asylum or the SIV program.

Every domestic SIV adjustment removes a visa from the general SIV count. In other words, every domestic adjustment limits prospects for overseas Afghans, and every relocated SIV limits the status prospects for stateside Afghans. If the U.S. runs out of SIVs, VanDiver says, "nobody who's here on parole [could] adjust their status" and Afghan helpers still in Kabul wouldn't "be able to leave."

Congress and the White House took a welcome step to address the visa shortage in March. A compromise deal tacked an additional 12,000 SIVs onto a bipartisan funding bill and extended the SIV program through 2025. "We're thankful that we got those visas authorized," Sullivan says, but he argues that it doesn't make sense to have "this artificial cap" on the number of SIVs that can be issued. "The idea that…it's going to be the first 58,500 through the door, and if you don't get through in time, too bad—I don't think people will agree with that."

Lawmakers are considering two bills that would provide more relief. The Afghan Allies Protection Act, introduced by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D–N.H.) and Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), calls for 20,000 additional SIVs and would extend various application deadlines. It would also extend eligibility to people who couldn't otherwise fulfill employment requirements due to injuries sustained as a result of their work. The Afghan Adjustment Act, sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), and 15 other senators, would provide green cards to thousands of Afghans who supported the American mission and now live in the U.S. without lawful permanent resident status. This would help ensure that available SIVs can go to Afghan helpers still stuck overseas.

Despite the bipartisan nature of the bills, they've languished for years. An effort to include the Afghan Adjustment Act in an omnibus spending bill in December 2022 failed. The Hill reported that it's been blocked twice by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), including in August 2023. A sprawling border bill introduced in early 2024 would have enacted much of what the Afghan Adjustment Act calls for, but that bill was quickly abandoned. The Afghan Allies Protection Act faces even longer odds.

"This is meant to be an entitlement. These people served alongside us. They took up arms in our name," VanDiver says. "These folks have done incredible work and…Congress made it so hard for them."

Beyond Congress, advocates have seen some wins. "It's a testament to the value of civic engagement, the impact, but it's also a testament to the Biden administration's willingness to engage these folks," says VanDiver. For all its faults during the August 2021 withdrawal, he argues, the administration has "done extraordinary work to try to make it easier for [SIVs]." Kashon notes that "we're seeing pretty significant improvements in approval timing" for certain Afghan asylum applications, "especially compared to other asylum applicants." A re-parole process rolled out in mid-2023 has generally worked well, she adds.

But policies implemented through executive discretion and at the agency level can be easily reversed by future administrations. Some presidents simply haven't treated the program as a priority, letting it fall into disrepair. Then there was the Trump administration, which took a machete to the nation's immigration infrastructure. "The last administration purposefully set this up for [the Biden administration] to fail," says VanDiver. "They deconstructed the resettlement and refugee systems, fully broke them. And broke them in ways that we're still discovering." Without congressional reform, a future administration—under Trump or another restrictionist—could scrap the progress that's been made.

Hostile circumstances encouraged—or perhaps forced—the civil society effort to take root. "It shouldn't have been our job to do this," says VanDiver, "but we did." And it may very well continue to be their job if congressional foot draggers and executive saboteurs have their way.

Promises Made, Kept, and Broken

"I arrived in the U.S. on February 6," Baryalai says. By the time all was said and done, the process took him about five years and brought him across many borders, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Qatar and finally to the United States.

"After almost three years of living in hiding, I could say who I was to everyone," he explains. "I felt the real freedom here. Finally, I felt I was home."

NOLB was instrumental in getting Baryalai to safety. In its 10 years of operation, it has evacuated more than 5,500 Afghans. The U.S. "left tens of thousands—when you look at family members, probably hundreds of thousands—of Afghan allies behind," says Sullivan. Though the March authorization of 12,000 additional visas is "just a start," he explains, "it means that 12,000 allies—and then also their family members, who aren't counted against that 12,000—they're going to be safe." It means that the work of relocation and resettlement can continue for now.

It's difficult to keep public attention on Afghanistan as other overseas conflicts and domestic policy disputes dominate the news cycle. Foreign policy officials have turned their attention to Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Hamas; immigration officials have set their sights on the Mexican border. It's been three years since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and there are thousands of Afghans still waiting for the U.S. to hold up its end of the bargain, to reward the risk they undertook. "It's a damn shame how difficult it is for us to remember the promises that we made," says Fenton.

The civil society effort hasn't faltered. "Hundreds and hundreds of organizations [are] still pushing for this, almost three years later," says Staffieri. "No one takes their foot off the gas. No one releases the pressure on the U.S. and Department of State to live up to these promises."

The government should have acted with urgency years earlier. It should have looked at the giant application backlogs and the many reports of Taliban retribution against Afghan allies and realized that the visa program meant to provide relief was instead leaving people in danger. Much of the harm done to those helpers can never be undone.

But advocates decided to forge a better path forward. "This is about the people. It's about thousands of people across the country who stood up, said, 'I'm going to do what I can do. I'm going to communicate with Afghans, because the federal government won't or can't—they don't have the capacity, they don't have the staff, or they don't have the inclination,'" says VanDiver.

"We made them," he says. "We made them do this."