We must welcome Afghan refugees
Resolve doesn’t mean betrayal of the allies who stood with us and now stand to be executed.
The crisis in Kabul is visible from space.
Satellite images released this week show thousands of cars lining the streets outside the Kabul airport and marooned crowds clamoring desperately to flee after the Taliban, in a matter of days, erased two decades of American efforts to bring security, stability and civil liberty to Afghanistan.
The relentless footage of Afghans storming an airport tarmac and clinging to planes, some apparently falling to their deaths, shocked and angered the world and shamefully caught our nation’s leaders off guard. The horrific scenes persist days later, with frantic parents passing children over walls to soldiers amid a haze of gunfire, tear gas and sheer panic.
This is the disastrous outcome — every bit as wrenching as the fall of Saigon in 1975 — that President Joe Biden assured Americans we would not see. Because of his compassion, common sense and decades of foreign policy experience, perhaps more than any other president, many believed him. He failed us.
Yes, the president was right to act on his promise to the American people to withdraw from Afghanistan, which has cost more than $2 trillion and more than 2,400 lives. And the president’s no-strings-attached approach seemed more pragmatic than lenient; after all, the best way to ensure the “forever war” never ended was to insist that a murderous group of seventh century thugs adhere to the stipulations of a gentleman’s agreement first.
Likely no level of caution and planning could have prevented the Taliban from reclaiming the country from a half-hearted military whose allegiance to inept, corrupt and opportunistic leaders was never as formidable as their advanced weaponry.
But a steadfast exit plan didn’t have to mean a fiasco. Biden’s bravery didn’t have to mean blindness. Resolve didn’t have to mean betrayal of the many Afghan allies who stood with America and now stand to be executed as soon as the last U.S. soldiers depart.
Biden’s miscalculations — on Afghan soldiers’ ability and will to fight without American support, on timing the withdrawal in the height of fighting season, on the amount of time, planning and military support needed to evacuate diplomats, aid workers and Afghan allies — are catastrophic.
America can’t undo the damage that’s been done. We can only control how much worse it gets.
In leaving Afghanistan, Biden gave us clear insight into his foreign policy doctrine: we won’t meddle indefinitely in another country’s civil wars.
Now, he needs to re-commit America to another doctrine: Refugees are welcome here. We have a moral obligation to help Afghans who risked everything to help us. The president must be willing to extend the arbitrary withdrawal deadline of Aug. 31 not just for the evacuation of Americans but for the brave interpreters, fixers and other Afghans who worked and fought through fear alongside American soldiers.
We agree with a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators who wrote Biden on Thursday that “American inaction would ensure they become refugees or prime targets for Taliban retribution.”
Even before Afghanistan fell, Biden’s support for refugees had been spotty. He initially waffled on his promise to raise Trump’s low refugee cap, although he quickly reversed himself under pressure from progressives. But a president who ran largely on the virtues of inclusion, compassion and improving America’s moral standing in the world needs to walk the walk. Never more so
than now.
Biden said this week that “the buck stops with me” on the botched pullout, and it does, so he should stop blaming others, including his predecessor and Afghan leadership for the crisis. He owns this moment, and what comes next.
We expect Biden to give us what other wartime presidents wouldn’t: the truth, no matter how ugly. No more exaggerating Afghan military strength or downplaying how many translators and other Afghan workers who helped America are caught in the backlog of some 18,000 Special Immigrant Visa applications. Vetting these folks is essential for U.S. security and Biden has increased staff to cut processing time but advocates complain his administration has moved too slowly to expedite applications. There’s got to be a way to further streamline a process that involves five agencies and still averages nine to 12 months to complete.
The U.S. military has the capacity to evacuate 5,000 to 9,000 people per day, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Thursday,
but in the most recent 24hour period, just over 2,000 people got out of Kabul safely via aircraft. The State Department said Thursday afternoon that 6,000 more people there would “soon” be boarding planes. Since Saturday, officials said, about 7,000 people have been flown out of Kabul, and 5,200 U.S. troops are at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Amid countless reports of violence and intimidation at Taliban checkpoints, U.S. leaders said they cannot guarantee safe passage to the airport, even for Americans still in Afghanistan.
Some right-wing commentators have predictably pivoted to xenophobic rhetoric in arguing against welcoming refugees. But this is no time for Biden to worry about optics or people who can’t tell the difference between Southern border asylum-seekers and battlefield allies.
Women and girls in Afghanistan are already receding from public life in the days since the Taliban’s ascendance. The youngest have no memory of a country where education, jobs and free movement were punishable by death, where women were not citizens but chattel.
The Taliban has assured women they’ll be allowed to participate in society “within the bounds of Islamic law,” which, considering their perverted interpretation of it, is about as comforting as the phrase “with all deliberate speed” was to Black Southerners working to end school segregation in 1955.
Biden rightly said on ABC Wednesday that the U.S. can’t militarily engage everywhere in the world to protect women’s rights — but our inability to do everything doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to do something.
In Houston, where about 11,800 Afghans with Special Immigrant Visas and others have resettled since 2007, several organizations are preparing to receive more.
“These are dedicated people who want to work and get their life restarted,” said Dan Stoecker, CEO of The Alliance, which expects to welcome 75 Afghans this month. “These are people who have been proven to make Houston thrive.”
Houstonians looking to help have plenty of options. Stoecker says his group and others need volunteers. Employers can consider hiring the arriving Afghans, and refugees often make great tenants.
Whether or not this moment defines Biden as president, we cannot let it define America. Our commitment to our allies must be even more enduring than the haunting images of Afghans clinging to military aircraft for salvation. Biden needn’t dwell on poll numbers or politics. He must be the president we elected him to be: an experienced leader who owns his mistakes and then opens his arms to the huddled masses who kept their end of the bargain with America and are waiting for America to keep ours.