Evan Hafer spent a combined 20 years as a Green Beret and a CIA operative, much of it in Afghanistan.
NR’s Luther Abel sat down with former Green Beret, CIA operator, and now CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company, Evan Hafer, to discuss the plight of Afghan linguists in light of the Taliban’s lightning offensive.
Abel: Evan, who are you and what’s your relationship with Afghanistan?
Hafer: I’m the CEO and Founder of Black Rifle Coffee, based in Salt Lake, San Antonio and Nashville. I spent about 20 years of combined service between the U.S. Army — I was a Green Beret — and then in the CIA about nine years. My relationship to Afghanistan is I spent about three years on the ground in Afghanistan, working directly with the Afghan…we’ll call them the intelligence service for the most part. When I made the transition to Black Rifle in 2014, I started trying to reach out to former Afghan commandos and intelligence officers that I worked with there. I’ve been able to hire a few here at Black Rifle over the course of several years. I’ve been working with them to not only receive citizenship, but make sure that they’re moving through the refugee process correctly, providing English lessons, housing, insurance, vehicles and things like that.
Abel: So the Afghan interpreters who U.S. military forces have worked with for two decades with at this point, what is their situation? What was your experience working with them?
Hafer: We have to go a little bit further back. There’s a saying in the military: plan for the worst, hope for the best. Every person who fought the war over there knew that this was a possibility. Once we started withdrawal, we had a [contemporary example] of how our nation building process went. So if we just go back within my lifetime to Iraq and say, okay, once we withdrew from Iraq, what happened? ISIS essentially moved out of Syria. They went through the west and then from the north all the way through Mozul and almost got to the banks Baghdad. So we know what’s going to happen in Afghanistan.
You have to prepare to evacuate not only your people, but the people that have fought to your left and right, who have been our direct support structure within the country. Because they will be targeted by our enemy, which is like a fourth grade concept. You don’t need four stars to understand this. The government and coalition allies will be targeted for prison, torture execution. They will be marginalized within the entire government infrastructure. And not only will they be marginalized, but they will be punished.
So regardless of political rhetoric, it is an ethical obligation to protect the people who have protected our people for 20 years. And they didn’t process the special immigrant visas. They didn’t align a process that would at least provide coverage for the ANA for another 180 days to 365, because they wanted the political point that they were withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. That’s what they wanted. Uh, so you can’t do that until you protected your people. This, this entire show is completely avoidable. All the Afghan military needed was the ability to continue to have air support and special operations advisers. When I say that with a special operations advisor footprint in air support, to make sure that we can do a proper withdrawal. So even from the tactical perspective on the ground, you do not withdraw without cover. You have to cover, like it’s a basic concept, which is if you’re going to move and withdraw from a firefight, you have to have coverage while you’re withdrawing, until everybody is off, we’ll call it the X.
It’s no different on a large scale country capacity. We’ve been in an active, engaged firefight with the Taliban for 20 years. How is it that nobody understood what was going to happen? Every E-4 that’s ever fought in Afghanistan — E-4 meaning a kid that’s probably the average age of 22 with it just above a high school education — knew this that was going to happen. So how is it that supposed professional diplomats and we’ll call it diplomatic, elite Military officers didn’t understand that. I’ll tell you why, because they’ve been disconnected from the reality of war for 20 years, sitting in board rooms with pressed uniforms and thick coffee tables, drinking Perrier, talking about what it’s like to fight a war. they’re not asking the right questions because they’re not warfighters. They’re empty suits that continue to espouse political ideology that has been failed over and over and over again. We can’t fight a war with politically correct agendas.
Abel: Could you provide a personal account of your time with Afghan interpreters?
Hafer: I’ve had multiple linguists. That’s what they’re called, linguists. You can call them interpreters. You can call them “terps.” But when you call them interpreters, it’s an inaccurate representation, they’re linguists. My experience goes back to my first trip in Afghanistan, which was 2007. The linguists have a very important mission. They have to communicate directly with we’ll call them the military advisor relationship, which is now we’re training. So selecting and training Afghans for war, they have one element of that. Then you have the linguists out in the war, in conflict. They’re right with the platoon or company. [The linguists] are helping to direct our Afghan counterparts as we’re actively engaged.
So they’re putting their asses on the line, not only for a year, right? So when U.S. Forces do a rotation over, it could be three months to a year, depending. But the linguists are the guys that are continuing to go out year after year after year. They are to the left and right of the command element structure. If we’re going house to house or doing direct action, [the linguists] are on target — both female and male. They’re talking to civilians, countering Taliban misinformation against the American military.
They’re talking to the women, the children, the men, everybody to deescalate the situation, especially when you’re killing people. You can imagine the emotional aspects of that. They’re on the front lines every day and have been on the front lines every day with the American service members through multiple rotations. And not only that, but there’s a representation by the United States military in the state department, that if you [a linguist] serve with us, we [the U.S.] will appreciate that by expediting your visa process to the United States. It is a stated fact that commanders and other people like the CIA. It is used as a carrot to keep these guys constantly engaged. That’s also a very important fact. These guys are putting their asses on the line with the expectation that if they do that, they will probably receive at least a refugee or an ask or an invite; that their visas will be processed so they can come to the United States.
Abel: There are some, interestingly, both on the right and left, who are concerned about the vetting of Afghan refugees, especially their linguists. Do the linguists get vetted, where we know who they are and their backgrounds already?
Hafer: Yeah, it depends. It depends on who they are and where they’re coming from. If you have a CIA linguist working with you more than likely that person has had a background check. He’s got multiple different recommendations from multiple people. You understand the network, understand the people that he’s directly connected with his family members. He’s probably taken a polygraph — a lot of these guys have security clearances. If they’re working for the state department or the CIA, they have security clearances, which means they’ve already had a background check — a background check that is much higher than that of 99.9% of civilians in the United States. As you get into the military and you get into the conventional military and large-scale military, I’m not as familiar with that vetting process. We’ve had 20 years to get our act together vetting these guys to make sure that when the day comes we have them ready. When you’re occupying a nation, it’s not a matter of whether or not you’re going to leave; eventually you’re going to leave.
[Service members and Afghan linguists] have been frustrated with the application process for years — the state department has failed. They failed in Iraq, they failed in other countries, And now they’ve failed in Afghanistan. When they fail to process the applications on time it’s because there’s bureaucracy and political layers of bullshit that we have to continue to go through. So even if I have 20 guys who are former special operations guys that have gone out every night, who’ve done thousands of targets with us that would actively give their life any day for ours. And they probably love this country. When they say they love America, they love America. I have a hard time, and I’ve had a hard time, trying to get those visas pushed through. We’ve had 20 years to get that vetting process done. This should not be a problem right now.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for an Afghan refugee to be a terrorist but I’m saying now it’s going to be much more difficult to vet than before because the Taliban is in control of who is leaving compared to two months ago. Now it’s going to take even longer to process the backgrounds because these guys [the Taliban] are in charge.
If we would still had air bases there that were active, this would have been much easier to accomplish, right? We know that there will be bad actors, which I think will be in an extreme minority of the applicants. But it’s going to be much more complex. And now we have to build a much more complex system to safeguard the country and make sure that we’re doing proper vetting while getting enough people out.