How Kabul evacuation ended in chaos
HOW OTTAWA FAILED THE AFGHANS WHO RISKED THEIR LIVES AS OUR ALLIES
From 9,000 kilometres away, in Newfoundland, Merle could see it all unfold. A group of ex-interpreters, other former employees of the Canadian government in Afghanistan and their families had been summoned to a gas station near the Kabul airport, hoping they'd be escorted into the airfield and eventually catch an evacuation flight out of the country.
Merle, a former special forces soldier, was in contact by mobile phone with many of the Afghan employees at the station — and growing livid. An airport gate and Canadian special forces troops were just 100 metres away, but the elite soldiers did nothing to usher the would-be evacuees to safety.
“I was even brought into a conversation on Whatsapp with the (Canadian) task force commander,” recalls Merle, who was helping former employees he'd worked alongside at a special forces base in Kandahar. He asked that his last name be withheld for security reasons.
“I finally said `They're going to leave, will you please f--king show them something.' ”
But after huddling a day and a half in the searing heat, the 300 Afghans were simply advised to make the risky trip back to safe houses in the city. One former Canadian interpreter was so angry, he informed army veteran Robin Rickards that he'd tell this country “F--k you” if it flew a Chinook helicopter right to his house.
For many of those who helped such workers, the episode epitomized what they saw as a well-meaning but seriously overdue and bungled attempt to rescue imperilled former employees of Canada, part of a “long and convoluted story of government ineptness,” in the words of Rob St. Aubin, a Liberal staffer who fought for years to get the Afghans out.
There were requirements for cumbersome paperwork, long delays in processing applications and a hellish crush around the airport where evacuation flights awaited.
Thousands of the ex-employees and family members — people facing a well-documented danger of being executed by their vengeful new Taliban rulers — never got out.
But there's more to the story than the red tape and now-familiar scenes of chaos at the Kabul airfield.
Veterans, a Liberal backbencher from northern Ontario and others had lobbied the Trudeau government for years to resurrect and expand a limited program — implemented briefly by the previous Conservative government — to evacuate Canadian-employed interpreters. Until Afghanistan was on the verge of falling to the Taliban, those advocates hit a brick wall.
Then, when crisis hit Afghanistan and Ottawa finally acted, it was an extraordinary band of veterans and other private Canadians who did much to try to make the plan work. They transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to Afghanistan, set up safe houses and even opened an office in Kabul to help people fill out those burdensome forms.
When an estimated 80 per cent of the ex-employees they helped were stranded after the last Canadian flight left, those supporters slammed the operation as a shameful failure. Some are calling for an independent inquiry.
“We are going to lose more of the people and their family members,” predicted Hamilton, Ont., businessman Chris Ecklund, who funded much of the private rescue effort. “That blood is on our government's hands.”
But the government argues that much of the criticism belies what actually happened and says the operation was far more successful than the weeks of negative press would suggest.
In fact, 2,100 of the former Canadian employees and their relatives — promised fasttracked immigration in July — have already arrived in Canada, said Alex Cohen, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino.
And by Saturday, the department expects to have approved visas for a total of 6,500 of them, about 85 per cent of the number who applied under the program, he said. No other country whose military was not operating in Afghanistan at the time did as well, said Cohen.
“We pushed for as long as we could for as hard as we could to save the largest number of people,” said a senior government source, not authorized to speak on the record.
And it was an unprecedented effort, an airlift in the midst of a war and its immediate aftermath, not helped by the shockingly fast triumph of the Taliban as U.S. forces pulled out, said the source.
“It's quite unique in Canadian history to have a special immigration program and scoop people up and put them on airplanes.”
Meanwhile, Canada has accepted 9,000 other refugees from Afghanistan since 2015, said Cohen.
The government says it airlifted 3,700 people aboard the Forces' C-17 Globemaster planes before the U.S. told Canada it had to leave Kabul airport.
This nation has also promised to take in as many as 20,000 Afghan refugees, making it one of the West's most generous recipients of individuals fleeing the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
But private groups say they suspect most of those airlifted out of Kabul were Canadian citizens and permanent residents. And the 20,000 are people who have already — or will — flee Afghanistan. They then will have to be declared convention refugees by the United Nations or other governments before applying to come here, a process that can take years.
Somewhat lost in those details is the fact that on July 22, Canada announced it would welcome immediately a very particular group of Afghans — those who had put their lives on the line by working for our soldiers or government.
“We do have a responsibility for those people, more so than anyone else, because of their connection to Canada,” says Wendy Long, founder of the group Afghan Canadian Interpreters. “They protected our men and women and we are responsible for protecting them.”
Efforts are still underway to spirit the former Canadian allies and their relatives to safety, as reports abound of the Taliban hunting down the West's collaborators.
This is the story of how they got left behind.
There was never much doubt that Afghans who worked for Canadian Forces or other NATO militaries were marked people.
Even in the first years of Canada's 2006-2011 combat mission in Kandahar province, there were numerous reports of the Taliban murdering interpreters. And they were not alone.
A locally hired cleaner at a Canadian forward operating base in Kandahar told the National Post in 2007 that Talibs routinely visited his nearby village after dark with notices warning of death for those who worked with the foreign troops. “When the Taliban catch me they would just slit my throat. No talk, no investigation, just slit,” he said.
Merle said he collected hundreds of those notices — called “night letters” — from Afghan employees of FOB Graceland, the special-forces base in Kandahar City where he worked. “Our job was to take out the leadership of the Taliban, so it made everybody a target,” he said.
Chillingly, 28 former interpreters, mechanics, cooks and other workers there have actually been murdered since, his records indicate.
Recognizing that danger, the Conservative government launched a program in 2009 to bring interpreters to Canada, ended it in 2011, then reopened it for a time in 2012.
About 800 interpreters immigrated here, but the program was criticized for being too restrictive. It applied only to those who had worked for Canada from mid-2007 on — though some of the Canadians' heaviest fighting occurred in 2006. They had to have been employed for a consecutive stretch of 12 months. And other types of employees were excluded entirely.
“My life is in danger,” an interpreter rejected by the program told the National Post's Joe O'connor in 2011. “The guys that I worked with, the Canadians, they have left for their own country and they left me behind and for what?”
But the Conservative government never revived the policy, and efforts to get the Liberals to do so after they were elected in 2015 seemed as fruitless.
The U.s.-based interpreters group Red-t had released an open letter to then-immigration minister John Mccallum as long ago as 2016, urging Ottawa to expedite resettlement here of “your left-behind interpreters.”
Veterans appealed to Mccallum successor Ahmed Hussen — a refugee himself from another war-wracked country, Somalia — to bring in individual interpreters or reopen a broader plan. But Hussen repeatedly “stonewalled” them, saying there was nothing the government could do, said Long.
She herself took up the cause and organized a letter-writing campaign to Hussen in 2018 calling for the government to set up some kind of fast-track process to bring translators to Canada.
There was no response, says Long.
Rickards, of Thunder Bay, Ont., began advocating for an interpreter he worked with in Kandahar, a man who nearly died in 2017 when the Taliban slashed his throat.
Three years of effort foundered in 2018, though, when Hussen's office — through Thunder Bay MP Patty Hajdu — said the translator could only apply under regular channels, noting in an email that the Afghan special-immigration measure ended in September 2011 and “cannot accept any further applications.”
Rickards, a staunch NDPER and former riding-association president, convinced Don Rusnak, another Thunder Bay Liberal MP, to go to bat for his interpreter.
But when Rusnak distributed an open letter in early 2019 among fellow Commons members urging action on the file, Hussen chastised him for openly lobbying his own government, recalls St. Aubin, the MP'S legislative assistant. The minister took no action on the issue itself.
Hussen could not be reached for comment.
Rusnak didn't run again but his successor, fellow Liberal Marcus Powlowski, hired St. Aubin, who convinced his new boss to take up the cudgel.
As the prospects of a Taliban victory grew, they lobbied initially for three interpreters who wanted out. Then in a detailed briefing note Powlowski provided in October 2020 to Mendicino, the new immigration minister, they called for a broader program, as outside groups had been doing for years.
Yet it was not until midmay of this year — following eight months of dogged backroom prodding and another open letter, signed by over 20 Liberal MPS — that Powlowski got word the government was willing to implement a program, says his assistant.
It took almost two months more — as Afghanistan teetered on the brink of collapse — for the new special immigration measure to be announced on July 22.
A Parliament Hill source and the senior government source both said the delay was partly caused by department officials who pushed back at Mendicino's desire to set up an open-ended program. Officials wanted more restrictive conditions, similar to the old Conservative policy, they said.
“There was resistance in the department and Minister Mendicino really pushed for this,” said the government source. “There was a real will to get this done at the top (but) translating this into action may not have always worked out.”
St. Aubin said it leaves him to wonder who runs the country, “our elected officials or ... technocrats who are accountable to no one?”
If the program was long in coming, its implementation would present a whole new array of obstacles.
The first in a series of what Rickards calls “disastrous” mass emails came six days after the policy was announced. Long's group and St. Aubin had provided the government with an initial list of scores of possible evacuees. Unbeknownst to the helpers, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) sent them all a letter explaining the application process — in English only at first — and warning they had to submit a range of forms within 72 hours — or give up their chance of escape. Panic ensued.
“My inbox just ... exploded,” recalled Rickards, as would-be evacuees wondered how they could possibly meet the deadline.
The 72-hour demand was soon rescinded, but the mere task of completing the forms — which required printing out Adobe files, filling them in and then scanning them — was a Herculean task in a war-torn country with shaky internet and power.
Ex-interpreter Aziz told the Post it took him 20 hours non-stop. Some had to visit internet cafés in Kandahar, potentially exposing their risky pasts. Others with little or no English paid third parties huge sums to fill them out, said Long.
As the forms circulated in that fashion, Merle said, wealthy Afghans with no Canadian connections got hold of blank documents and tried to bribe the helpers to support them in applying. One person offered him US$200,000. (He refused.)
In Kabul, a Canadian veterans group called Aman Lara — Pashto for Sheltered Pathway — opened an office with equipment that could help in the form-filling.
But Cohen says IRCC made changes throughout the process to respond to paperwork complaints, waiving some requirements. “We made it so you could take a picture of your application on your phone to submit it,” said Mendicino's spokesman.
Meanwhile, the non-governmental groups say there was virtually no communication between them and federal officials running the program.
Afghan civil servants and others huddled at home when the insurgents entered Kabul on Aug. 15, but that didn't stop another head-scratching IRCC email going out. That evening — though the heavily backlogged Afghan passport office had actually closed before the insurgents occupied the city — the department told applicants “we strongly encourage you to apply for a passport if you are able to safely do so.”
At the same time, no one in government ever actually informed the potential evacuees they would have to travel to Kabul from Kandahar — where most lived — to be evacuated, their advocates say. But the implication was clear — the process required them to try to obtain Afghan passports and undergo fingerprinting and other biometric registration at the Canadian embassy.
So groups like the Veterans Transition Network (VTN) and Canadian Heroes Foundation set about moving hundreds of allies and their families to the capital. Much of the work was supported by an initial donation of half a million dollars from the Foundation's Ecklund, who went on to spend thousands more on the effort, said Tim Laidler of VTN.
Funding plane and bus tickets and a network of safe houses meant frantically transferring money to a country with a creaky banking system. Volunteers used Western Union and Moneygram, which operate in Afghanistan, but the firms put limits on how much individuals could send.
To circumvent the restrictions, Rickards remembers finding people in the middle of the night willing to transfer money under their names, then be reimbursed by Ecklund. The entrepreneur himself says he asked Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau if they could use diplomatic pouches to move money into Afghanistan. There was no response.
Cohen said IRCC is working with veterans groups on ways the government could support their efforts.
As the Taliban closed in on Kandahar, leaving for Kabul could be treacherous. One interpreter's family home was caught in a gunfight between police and Taliban just as they were heading to the airport, the house later firebombed by the insurgents, said Laidler.
Once people arrived in Kabul and settled into safe houses set up by Aman Lara and other Canadians, their trials were far from over. Overwhelmed with applications, IRCC took days to respond even when forms were submitted. VTN estimates that less than 20 per cent of the people it vetted and helped had received visas by the time the last Canadian plane left.
As Taliban fighters spread throughout the capital, immigration officials told Afghans to stay hidden until asked to travel to the airport.
St. Aubin said a government source told him a single IRCC employee — who seemed never to answer her phone — sat with a clipboard inside the airport, deciding who would be summoned and when, something the Post could not independently verify.
“Who the f--k is she,” he asked, “and how can we get her to testify?”
For those who received the lucky call, getting into the airfield could be an impossible challenge, one that involved navigating huge, chaotic crowds, violent Taliban fighters and an open sewer.
“Taliban started shooting towards the people,” interpreter Ajmal told retired lieutenant-colonel Quentin Innis about his third of four attempts to get into Kabul's airport. “Many were killed and injured. We scared, even didn't get (out) of the car and returned back home.”
It was amid the frenzy at the airport that some of the veterans decided to invite Afghans with Canadian transit approval to gather at the gas station, hoping that the nearby Canadian troops would usher them the short distance from there into the compound.
But it appears the special forces — though well-qualified and likely eager to help — were barred from venturing even that far away, said Merle. British and French troops, meanwhile, led bus convoys of evacuees from the city to the airport. So did a Ukrainian unit, rescuing Canada-bound Afghans after this country had left.
“I was told the British (paratroopers) were driving around Kabul like they were on vacation — no interference from the Taliban,” he said.
In the end, VTN estimates that only 18 per cent of the 2,000 ex-employees and family members it is helping managed to get onto flights to Canada. For the Canadian Heroes Foundation, it was just 100 of its 2,500 people.
Still in Afghanistan is the interpreter whose throat was slashed four years ago, one of the first cases to spur some action. Another translator whose case helped draw attention to the issue — he had been with artillery officer Nichola Goddard when she was killed in 2006 — did get out, but thanks only to American forces, says Merle.
As the rescue program sputtered, St. Aubin says he fielded anxious calls from retired soldiers whose PTSD had been triggered by their former interpreters contacting them in terror.
“Why is the government putting this burden on our veterans?” asks Merle.
The program's failings seem clear. But apart from dispatching special forces inside Kabul, what else could have been done differently?
Implementing a new program for Afghan allies much earlier — as groups like Afghan-canadian Interpreters and Red-t had been urging for years — would have lessened the mad, last-minute rush, says Long.
“We could have gotten those people out in economy (airline seats) rather than on Globemasters,” laments Andrew Rusk, Goddard's brother-in-law and co-founder of the group Not Left Behind.
Given that Canada waited until the eleventh hour, though, it ought to have carried out only basic screening while people were in Afghanistan — like asking for local ID cards and proof they had worked for Canada — then finished the vetting in a third country, instead of over the internet before they left, say advocates for the ex-workers.
In fact, the government did exactly that after the first few flights, taking people to a third country where biometric and other processing was completed, said Cohen.
Rickards said he always favoured a different approach entirely. Instead of funnelling everyone to Kabul, Canadian officials should have encouraged them to head to safety in neighbouring countries.
The Canadian Forces could even have sent C-17s into Kandahar before the Taliban occupied the city on Aug. 13, evacuating former employees from the place where most of them actually lived, he said.
The end result of it all — despite the government's rejection of some of the critiques — has left the veterans and others who devoted themselves to the cause not only angry and bitter, but also ashamed for their country.
“The people who had the most courage and stood up to the Taliban are the ones who are now in most danger,” said Laidler, a retired infantry soldier who did a tour in southern Afghanistan in 2008.
“We were in Kandahar telling the Afghans to trust us, and they shouldn't have.”