Veterans who spoke to NR were outraged by the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal.
Many veterans who served in Afghanistan are furious following the Biden administration’s decision to pull out of the country with seemingly with little forethought, leaving many they fought and bled with in extreme danger. Former Army Green Beret and Black Rifle Coffee CEO Evan Hafer is among them.
In an interview with National Review, Hafer voiced concern not only for the living — Afghan linguists who fought alongside him — but for the dead and maimed. He recited the number of American dead and referenced the uptick in veterans calling the VA’s suicide hotline since Kabul’s fall. But in the same breath, he noted a less-frequently used stat: the tens of thousands of feet, legs, and hands that Americans lost to explosions.
The veteran community is reeling not because the U.S. pulled out, but because of the manner in which it did, according to a series of interviews with veterans conducted in the days after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. The veterans questioned what the U.S. gained from 20 years at war if the Taliban were able to return to power the second the U.S. absconded. Servicemembers felt they had made a difference, and to see their hard won achievements topple in a week’s time has been legitimately depressing.
Former Army officer Steve Miska has been working to evacuate Americans and Afghan interpreters as part of his role with the Pacific Council on International Policy. A former member of the Obama national-security council, Miska explained in a phone call with National Review that while the Taliban are still permitting the airport to continue operating, those looking to escape Afghanistan are finding it difficult to get to the airport in the first place because of Taliban checkpoints and home invasions.
The paperwork Afghans need to prove their relationship with the United States is an omnipresent danger for those who remain outside the airport. The Taliban are searching for those very documents to identify and punish those who worked with the U.S. and her allies over the last 20 years.
It is this failure to anticipate obvious security issues that prompted feelings of indignation on the part of stranded allies and veterans alike.
According to Miska, some evacuees are resorting to backing up their documentation to Western parties before deleting their own digital copies and burning the physical ones, hoping that the digital copies will be recoverable once at the airport. Those fleeing must entrust their lives to unseen parties and the vagaries of technology to avoid beheading or a bullet, hundreds of yards from the airport.
The 80,000 or so people believed to be in most need of extraction are a heterogeneous bunch. Ten thousand American citizens, 20,000 interpreters, and their families round out that sum. Miska dismissed the notion that there were potential security concerns associated with taking in so many refugees from a combat zone so quickly.
“These are people who went on [combat] patrol. They’re more vetted than any refugee anywhere, having taking polygraphs and undergone in-depth background checks. They’re being hunted by the Taliban,” he said.
Those who are to come directly to the U.S. have Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) with the attendant intensive background checks, while those whose applications are still pending will wait in friendly countries.
Miska worked first-hand with many such interpreters during his time deployed in the mid-2000s and grew frustrated as the “interpreters were being killed [by the Taliban] right out from underneath me.” This concern for the interpreters ultimately drove him to write a book about the “Baghdad Underground Railroad,” an effort dedicated to relocating allied interpreters to the U.S.
Six of the interpreters assisted by the Railroad, having landed in the United States, turned around and enlisted in the U.S. military to redeploy to Afghanistan to aid in our efforts there. Their natural grasp of the language and the region’s customs was indispensable for war-fighting and public relations.
Robert Ham was 18 on September 11, 2001. An aspiring filmmaker in Hollywood and the son of artists, he nonetheless believed in the Iraq War and wanted to serve. He joined the army in 2007 as a combat videographer with the Airborne 4th Brigade, 25th Infantry — coincidentally serving with Bowe Bergdahl before the latter’s disappearance. The unit operated in the Khost, among other locations, in the southeastern part of the country near its border with Pakistan.
According to Ham, the strategy at the time was one of counter-insurgency, which operated under the assumption that if we provided schools, hospitals, and food, the populace would be won over and self-sort from the terrorists. But hearts and minds couldn’t be won by a camera-toting California boy alone. Locals Saifullah and Ismail, brothers and interpreters, made his job possible.
Saifullah was “one of the smartest most well-spoken guys. He’d do radio and news broadcasts, and help with my videos, and had earned a degree from a top Afghan university. We were in mortar attacks together and became very good friends.”
“We were initially wary of all [Afghan] people and quickly learned how wrong we were. They were absolutely necessary for success,” he added.
As his deployment wrapped up, Robert revealed to Saifullah just how excited he was to be leaving Afghanistan, a country that “was like being warped back into Jesus’s time, it felt so ancient.” Sailfullah responded to the Rob’s relief by remarking that he, Sailfullah, would be stuck in the deployment forever. This was his home, and there was seemingly no end to the struggle against the Taliban for him and his family.
In 2014, while stationed in Hawaii, Ham received a Facebook message from Saifullah asking if there were any way to nudge along their visas, as the U.S. embassy was incapable or unwilling to move their paperwork efficiently. In correspondence shared with National Review, he noted that other interpreters found success with their applications after media attention and wondered if Ham could help drum up publicity for him. Ham agreed, but immediately ran into the reality of American apathy concerning Afghanistan. Despite videos explaining the dire need for efficiency, his pleas didn’t play with politicians because the voters didn’t care.
Hollywood felt similarly. To increase the public’s awareness of what has and is going on in Afghanistan, Ham has pitched a movie about the subject for years to groups like Netflix, Amazon, and HBO. While left-leaning, they are most interested in making money and finding stories that sell. No one wanted the project because the American people had no evident appetite for exposure to what was happening to U.S. forces and its allies half a world away, Ham said.
Hafer, the former Green Beret and Black Rifle Coffee founder, is another vet whose passion has been to get allied linguists and interpreters out of Afghanistan. Through his company, he has been able to secure visas for men and women who “put their asses on the line for us, in direct action, for years.”
Hafer explained how the linguists would work on the U.S. force’s behalf, countering Taliban propaganda against the American military in the tongue of the locals and establishing who were civilians and who were Taliban. It was a job for which the US military was ill-suited, and the linguists were necessary for the safety of our forces and the locals.
All three men who spoke with National Review made clear just how irritated they were with U.S. policy in Afghanistan, not only of late but for the last decade. But now that the situation in Afghanistan is rapidly deteriorating, they’re setting aside their longstanding anger toward American policymakers to focus on getting “their people” out of the country. The first step, they said, is to get their compatriots to a triage state like the one in Qatar, and ultimately to long-term safety here in America.
When asked what concerned Americans can do to help, Miska noted that while citizens can contact their representatives, the best thing long-term is to “adopt” these families. “When Afghan families start arriving, their reception and inclusion is a long ongoing effort. [They’ll be] coming into a cash society and leaving a wholly different culture behind. Assimilation will be difficult. Family adoptions will be enormously helpful.”
Just as there are those overseas in need of help and compassion, so too are many in one’s city. Immersed in the veteran community, Hafer expressed informed concern for the decades of veterans who served in Afghanistan and their difficulty processing their sacrifices in the light of this debacle.