How long were “we” in Afghanistan? I mean, how long were American troops there, battling the insurgent Taliban? 25 years? Something like that?
I’m reading a novel now (THE GOOD SON by Michael Gruber – highly recommended!) which is partially set in wartime Afghanistan in the late aughts (that is, the first decade of this century). At one point, the narrator is on a bus passing from rural Pakistan into Afghanistan and they’re stopped at an Afghan army checkpoint. He describes “an hour baking in the oven of the little bus while the soldiers inspected our baggage and papers.”
And then:
While we were waiting, another bus pulled up and the soldiers passed it right through without pulling people off or checking it out… Bribes again, the whole bus could have been packed with Taliban and weapons and dope, the whole country was bribed to the nipples, every public office was for sale, but what could you do? There WAS no Afghanistan the way there was a France or a Canada, there were only individuals and families and clans, and the Americans trying to make it different was like assembling a fighter plane out of wet toilet paper.”
Yeah, so what was the point?
I don’t know what the point was, frankly. I wondered about it for years. What were we doing there?
And yet, there is no question that the Taliban are, and were, an utterly brutal terrorist force. They were a cohesive, ruthless, and ultimately triumphant coalition in a fractured, fragmented country, but they were not popular. One of the Tajik Afghans in THE GOOD SON refers to them as “the shit-eaters, the pigs, the sister-rapers.”
Indeed, today, since they’ve taken over Afghanistan, girls are barred from schooling past the 6th grade, and women are disallowed to show themselves in public without a burqa and an accompanying male “guardian.” Women have also been banned from nearly all forms of employment. For the entire population, including men, unemployment has doubled and poverty has surged. Mental illness is epidemic, and 97 percent of the country is food-insecure … you get the picture.
So while it may have always been a doomed effort to try to “stabilize” Afghanistan, it does make sense that some Afghans tried to work with the United States in opposing the Taliban. And about 1660 of these U.S. “assets” – including interpreters, journalists, and aid workers, and their children – are currently stranded in a refugee camp in Pakistan.
All of these people were cleared for entry into the United States and had completed security and medical vetting. But literally hours before their flights were scheduled to take off and bring them here, back in late January, Trump issued an executive order suspending the refugee admissions program, thus pulling the rug out from under them and cancelling their flights.
One has to wonder if Trump took pleasure in the sheer cruelty of the timing of his order.
These people risked their lives to make common cause with the United States, and the U.S. made a promise in return that we would receive them. Thanks to Trump, the United States of America went back on its word and betrayed its courageous allies. Good honest people, simply left to languish, or to die.
Now the threat of deportation back to Afghanistan – to the tender mercies of the Taliban – hangs over them like death’s shadow. Pakistan’s government has ordered all those without specific required documentation to leave (which would likely be more than half of them, based on data from Refugees International). In fact, deportations from Pakistan have already begun, and though the data isn’t clear, it is highly likely that some number of the 1660 refugees in the camp, though already long-cleared for resettlement in America, have already been sent back to (god help them) Afghanistan.
This story has largely faded from the news, because the ongoing brutalization and detention of both legal and illegal immigrants who are already in this country has overshadowed the plight of these 1660 heroic refugees.
Nonetheless, they are still there, they deserve to be welcomed into our country, and I don’t want to forget about them. I cannot forget about them.
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