There seems to be no substantive disagreement over whether or not the United States needs to evacuate Afghans who worked with U.S. troops from the country before the Sept. 11 deadline set by President Joe Biden for a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the 20 years since the original U.S. invasion, thousands of Afghans allied themselves with this county to topple violent Taliban rule; now that U.S. protectors are going home, it is widely expected that those Afghan allies will be murdered by returning Taliban troops. Evacuating those allies is both a matter of base morality and a national security crisis of its own. The United States already has a reputation for abandoning its on-the-ground allies in the region, and abandoning thousands more to near-certain torture and death will surely dissuade future would-be allies from trusting that the United States would not leave them in the same position.
Coming up with an actual plan for those evacuations rather than leaving it to individual Afghan cooperators to work out an escape on their own is becoming increasingly urgent. Last week a top refugee resettlement group joined the call for an "emergency evacuation" well before the September deadline. A bipartisan group of House members introduced legislation to authorize an additional 4,000 Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan allies. Both the military itself and veterans groups have been fairly beside themselves in demanding a plan be set forth.
The problem at hand is that the Special Immigrant Visa program is swamped with an enormous backlog, and Bloomberg News has reported that the number of Afghanistan residents potentially eligible for the program could reach 35,000. It is not feasible for the existing bureaucracy to process those claims between now and September—and even this deadline undersells the scope of the problem. The majority of U.S. troop withdrawals are now expected to be completed in July; as U.S. forces draw down, the number of Afghan allies in unprotected zones increases, as does the resulting difficulty in extracting them.
CNN now reports that the Pentagon is "in the early stages" of planning an evacuation of Afghan allies, but that the White House has yet to issue a "formal request" for such a plan. This follows previous comments from a U.S. general confirming that "if directed to do something like that, we could certainly do it."
What's the holdup, then? It's not clear. We can only presume that the administration is looking for ways to evacuate Afghan interpreters, intelligence sources, and other allies that both meets immigration security requirements and does not consist solely of flying those allies to American or other international airports and telling them good luck with the rest.
But time is running out, and extracting Afghan cooperators from the country will become a more dangerous and expensive job with each passing day. There needs to be a plan, and the people who worked with U.S. forces to try to rid their country of ultraviolent theocratic rule deserve to know what it will be.