The People We’re Leaving Behind

There was something dismally familiar about an article in Monday’s New York Times about Afghan interpreters and the difficulties some of them have in getting visas to the United States, the country that employs them in jobs that mortally threaten their lives. For anyone who lived through the Iraqi version of this drama in the later years of that war, everything is the same. Ambitious, courageous young people attach their aspirations to the American project in their country, grow close to the soldiers and officials they work for, gradually lose touch with their countrymen, and come under repeated threats and assaults from insurgents, for whom they represent one of the biggest possible targets. Every month, a few of their Afghan colleagues are gunned down or beheaded.

As the U.S. exodus draws near, they start to realize that they have no future in their own country. They turn to the Americans for the one way out, a U.S. visa—only to get trapped in a maze of bureaucracy, caught between the Departments of State and Homeland Security, neither of which wants the responsibility. They wait months, years, with no resolution to their cases, and often no answer to their increasingly desperate inquiries. Or they might receive an auto-reply offering useless advice: “Individuals who believe they are in peril in their place of residence should consider leaving that location and moving to another nearby safe place, inside or outside the country.” Meanwhile, if an enterprising reporter like the Times’s Azam Ahmed asks questions, U.S. officials decline to comment.

It’s all exactly the same.

In fact, it’s actually worse for Afghans than it was for Iraqis. In 2008, when Congress established a finite number of “special immigrant visas” for just this emergency, it allocated three and a half times as many to Iraqis as to Afghans: twenty-five thousand as opposed to seven thousand. Only twelve per cent of the visas available to Afghans have been granted. (Iraqis, doing slightly better, have claimed twenty-two per cent of theirs—five years after the law passed.) That’s only nine hundred visas for the eight thousand Afghans whom the Times describes as eligible—my guess is that the number of those eligible is considerably higher, if you count everyone who has worked with Americans, including contractors.

The visa program ends with this fiscal year. Thousands of applicants will still be in bureaucratic limbo when the doors close. There is no way that the U.S. will come close to doing all it can under current law for its best friends in Afghanistan.

There is a reason, beyond sheer bureaucratic ineptitude, why so many Afghans are hanging by a thread, getting automatic replies or no replies at all. There is a reason why no one in the U.S. government wants to talk on the record. It’s because no one wants to own this problem. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by a consular officer, State Department diplomat, or Homeland Security official, other than the satisfaction of living up to a high standard of conduct, and perhaps saving a life. And letting in the wrong kind of Afghan could be a career killer. That, anyway, is the fear--or the purported fear. The only official Americans who habitually make this an issue are the troops who know exactly how important those Afghans are--who feel a debt of gratitude and sometimes a bond of brotherly or sisterly love. But those in uniform don’t count for much in Washington as individuals, and they aren’t necessarily adept at manipulating the levers of government.

In my experience, there’s only one way to force the career bureaucracy to take any action on this issue, and that’s for the fate of these forgotten men and women to become a political issue, a public relations problem, and a concern for the White House. It takes the White House to lean on the government departments where visa applications go to die.

The Bush Administration performed miserably on this score. It didn’t want to admit that the Iraq War was being lost, so it stuck to the line that there was no crisis for those Iraqis who were associated with the U.S. Only when Congress, the media, and pressure groups forced the issue did the Administration grudgingly open the visa spigot.

Under President Obama, the spigot for Iraqis was practically turned off. Iraq was never Obama’s war, but now he has an even worse track record than Bush when it comes to taking care of Iraqis who risked their lives working with Americans.

But Afghanistan, as any number of magazine articles and book titles have told you, is Obama’s war now. Afghans like the young man featured in the Times article have been essential to the prosecution of that war. And now we’re ending it: Obama has said that America will leave Afghanistan by next year. So there’s no time for denial, willful blindness, or wishful thinking. These Afghans are the President’s moral responsibility. Not as high as his responsibility to the American men and women in uniform who have served in Afghanistan; not as high as his responsibility to keep Americans at home safe. But they’re surely on the list. Their fates should trouble him, and those who work for him. The plight of these Afghans should provoke his Administration to act and do what, by any standard of decency, is the right thing: get America’s Afghan friends out of the country and over here before it’s too late. There will be a million excuses why it can’t be done, but not a single good reason.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: George Packer