Betraying our Afghan friends?

The Washington Post:

How the U.S. treats Afghans who helped us

by Annie Yu Kleiman

My 9-year-old daughter still remembers August 2021 as a “horrible time.”

After the fall of Kabul that month, my husband and I, both Air Force officers who had served in Afghanistan, found ourselves pulled into a complex, unofficial operation to help evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. 

There were endless sleepless nights spent frantically sending messages over Signal and compiling enormous spreadsheets of passenger manifests. We worked as if it were a matter of life and death — because it was.

Two years later, those long days are a memory for me. But for the hundreds of thousands of our allies still left behind, the horrors continue.

As of April 2023, about 152,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants remain trapped in Afghanistan. These people, who served side-by-side with U.S. forces during the long war, face years of danger, severe economic hardship and increasingly onerous restrictions — particularly on women and girls — while applying for their SIVs through a complicated, Kafkaesque process.

A daunting list of obstacles

To create a snapshot of the absurd gantlet our former friends and allies have to run, I gathered quotations from text messages and emails that they sent to my organization, No One Left Behind, seeking help. They have been edited for clarity, and names are being withheld for the writers’ safety.

Proof of employment. To start an SIV application, applicants must submit a slew of documents through the U.S. State Department’s website. 

This requires access to the internet — not a given when one is hiding from the Taliban. The required documents include proof of employment for the U.S. government for at least one year and a letter of recommendation from a former supervisor. 

But the companies often kept poor HR records, and former supervisors are difficult to reach — and may not even remember their former employees....