Where Do I Go To Say "I'm Sorry" to Afghans?
Read this Bari Weiss Post About What Normal Afghans Are Going Through Right Now. It's Important.
The blame game is easy right now, and everybody’s playing it, especially the suits in charge. But put yourself in Afghan shoes, on the feet of scared people, saying goodbyes hunkered down in homes with crazed fanatics running around with AK-47s, bloodied knives, and severed heads. Unimaginable.
It is impossible for any of us in the United States or Canada to know what it feels like to be a normal Afghan right now - especially a young woman, or the parents of one. Hostile forces you thought you'd been liberated from 20 years ago are back and with a vengeance. If you're a woman between the ages of 15-45, you're about to be placed into an arranged marriage to a Taliban fighter. You're at least on a list. And it will be a one-sided affair. He can decapitate you anytime, without penalty, if you don't capitulate. In every way. Just as they've done to hundreds of others deemed remotely disloyal to radical Islam or the new overlords.
It's nothing remotely like we experienced, even from the worst public officials among us - think Governors Andrew Cuomo (NY), Tom Wolf (PA), Phil Murphy, (NJ), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), and others - who gleefully shut down our lives and businesses and sent us scurrying to stores to stock up on toilet paper and cleaning supplies 16 months ago. We were told to lockdown, stay home, shut down schools, not wear masks, wear masks, and watch helplessly as Governors Cuomo, Wolf, and Murphy, especially shoved COVID-positive elderly back into nursing homes. Tens of thousands died. Millions more, especially children, continue to suffer emotionally and physically with never-ending mask mandates.
But even now, under these circumstances, we should bend a knee, count our blessings, and thank the Almighty.
No, Afghanistan today is much worse, much more deadly, more depressing, and with repercussions bigger than a once-in-a-century pandemic that kills way less than 5% of the people it infects. They have nowhere to turn, and no hope for the immediate future. None. No vaccines, no Dr. Fauci’s, and no American troops.
The Afghan people have been betrayed, and not just by the Biden Administration and their "suits." They have been betrayed especially by their own government, their own corrupt society, and now by the rest of the world. They are now prisoners to a malevolent, misogynist, tyrannical, emboldened, and a murderous regime that promises a return to the worst of the dark ages. In every respect. Perhaps you've read the stories. It's worse than that.
This post from Bari Weiss’s superb Substack account (you should support her work) will give you a feel for what it is like to be in Afghanistan right now. You don't want to read it, but you must. We need to fully understand what is happening, right now. Afghanistan, their region, and frankly the world is a bit less stable than we were just a few months ago. You know it is true.
How long before we see ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups emboldened with money and resources from Chinese Communists who are poised to quickly officially recognize the "new government," no doubt with plans to add them to their "belt and road" initiatives, extract rare earth minerals and pad Taliban coffers and their allied terrorist groups? Oh, by the way, how’s our US southern border doing?
US policy, especially under Joe Biden, is to blame for much but not all of this. If only the US had lived up to its part of the deal that Trump negotiated and didn't cut tail and abandon Afghanistan's poorly led military. After all, just 2,500 US troops helped keep peace in Afghanistan for many years, after a couple of surges. Joe Biden sent 5,000 troops in hurriedly to extract an estimated 10,000 Americans and blamed Donald Trump for it. If only Afghanistan has lived up to its potential and understood what it was really fighting for. It has tried in past years to enjoy western-style freedoms, and Kabul was a charming and modern international city in the 1970s. You can look it up. That's over.
(I was criticized elsewhere after publishing this by a journalist I respect, with a strawman argument, that the Trump-Taliban accords from a year ago said nothing about holding the Taliban accountable for violating them. The accords required, and called for, additional negotiations, and the Trump Administration developed separate plans to ensure enforcement of the agreement, including making sure those “action items” occurred. It is also true that the accords effectively died when Trump left office - they were never “confirmed” by the US Senate. Biden effectively ignored them. More on the accords here and how Biden failed here.)
This had less to do with "nation-building" - something we really never did - and everything to do with having smart leaders with a game plan they were willing to live up to. Just read what former Sec'y of State Mike Pompeo and the Trump Administration negotiated and were prepared to do if they had been in charge the past 7 months. It's not what happened; Biden would not enforce the deal and the Taliban smelled weakness (noticed by other countries, no doubt). That is indisputable, no matter the gaslighting we can all see-through in the media.
For Americans, we'll never be trusted anytime soon, especially in the Middle East, and we don't deserve to be, at least not now. Biden cut tail and scampered, but no worse than Afghan's own leaders and military. For Afghans, their lives turn to misery, religious totalitarianism, and tribalism.
If we had a real President, he would apologize, admit it was his fault, learn from it all, point out the errors (going back to the Bush and Obama Administrations) and find new paths forward with resolve and leadership. He would especially apologize to the 2,500 or so Gold Star moms and dads who lost sons and daughters, and the 20,000 or so wounded from service in Afghanistan. We are not so blessed with such a President, sadly, not remotely close. I would respect him or her very much if we did.
Our diminished President won't do it, but where can I tell the Afghan people how sorry I am?
Here’s the post from Bari Weiss. Stick with it, read it all. To the end. Have tissues nearby. And it’s OK to get really angry. I am.
We Once Waltzed in Kabul
The U.S. abandoned my friends. Now they are trapped in Afghanistan and hiding from the Taliban.
5 hr ago81
Catastrophe. Calamity. Chaos. Humiliation. Tragedy.
All words that can be used to describe what we are witnessing right now in Afghanistan, 20 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
You can believe, as many people I respect do, that this war should have ended long ago. You can believe that it was always unwinnable and should have never started in the first place. You can believe that it was utterly naive that America ever thought that something resembling human rights could take root in this foreign land.
But the disgraceful, haunting scenes we are now witnessing— were those also a fait accompli? Of course not.
And I cannot look away from them. From the helicopters evacuating Americans from the U.S. embassy. From the Taliban flag flying over the presidential palace; and from the terrorists who hoisted it hosting a press conference inside. From the supposed leaders of the free world beseeching medieval barbarians to recognize “the international community,” warning them that “the world is watching.”
The most shameful and dishonorable part of this shameful and dishonorable exit is Washington’s abandonment of those Afghans who helped us, trapped by American bureaucracy and now by the Taliban itself.
The email inbox for emergency visa requests for Afghans who worked with American forces has reportedly crashed. “This is murder by incompetence,” said one former sergeant trying to get apply for Special Immigrant Visa on behalf of his Afghan counterpart.
There is so much to say about this unfolding catastrophe. In the coming days I will have pieces from the likes of Gen. H.R. McMaster, Justin Amash, Thomas Joscelyn, Nikky Haley and others explaining what this unraveling means for America and the world. If you haven’t yet subscribed, now is a great time to lend us your support:
But before the day was out I wanted to share this moving essay by the journalist Kathy Gilsinan, whom I have long admired, about her friends trapped in Kabul.
We hear a lot about privilege these days in America. Reading Kathy’s moving essay, I am overwhelmed by my own.
I am a free woman — a freedom hard-won and so very far from inevitable.
It’s a freedom that Afghans tasted and will now lose. A freedom that so many of them sacrificed to secure. Surely we owe them something more than abandonment? — BW
“The Taliban have entered Kabul from the south and east.” I saw the note on my Facebook messenger app when I woke up Sunday morning, but by then it was all over the news. “We can’t do anything kathy jan,” wrote my friend, a young Afghan man in Kabul. “The Taliban have taken over all of Kabul. They are like wild animals with long hair and dirty outfits. We all have taken shelter inside our houses . . . Everyone is panicked.”
I’m not using names here, because I believe my friend when he says no one is safe. We met in 2011, when we were both working for an Afghan news organization. He was 19 then and had never known a country at peace. He was also very cute, and the other American girl and I would anticipate prayer times because he would roll up his sleeves to do his ablutions. We surreptitiously called those moments “muscle o’clock.”
Once, when we thought there was a Taliban threat to our office, he told me not to worry. “I will protect you,” he said then. “And Allah gave me the heart of a lion.”
The Taliban didn’t hurt us that day, but on Sunday they took over his city. “I cried so much,” he told me.
He was trying to get a visa to leave — everyone in his neighborhood knew he’d worked for the Americans, it was only a matter of time before the Taliban learned it, “and then you know what will happen to me.” He needed one more document: a letter from a supervisor who had stopped returning his emails. On Saturday, I got help from some D.C. friends to track the supervisor down. The supervisor responded immediately, saying the young man had “worked tirelessly to help the U.S. mission in Afghanistan,” and had “regularly placed himself in harm’s way without any objection.”
I was relieved he’d gotten this ticket out. But by Sunday it was clear it was too late; the Taliban weren’t letting anyone leave.
Another friend, a translator, had all his paperwork filled out. He had been telling me for months of his plans to leave, asking about what it was like in the United States. He’d already done his interview in July and gotten a medical exam on August 7.
But he hasn’t heard from anybody since. He doesn’t know where his visa is. For the past week, he’s been listening to Chinooks fly over his house. They’re not stopping for him.
A friend of a friend, this one a female journalist, made it to the airport after being stopped on the way and robbed at gunpoint. She didn’t get to say goodbye to her family. Like so many other women in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, she dared to build a life for herself based on promises we made. Now she’s hunkered down at the airport, which is under fire. She is awaiting an escape that may never come.
In 2011, I lived in a guest house in the Shar-e-Naw neighborhood, which is now full of refugees who fled the Taliban blitzkrieg throughout the country only to have it follow them to the capital. The proprietor of the guest house also became a friend; he found me a guitar to play, and he smuggled me alcohol. We smoked and waltzed and read poetry. He introduced me to Hafiz and Rumi, and I introduced him to Elliott Smith. He smelled like cigarettes and Axe body spray and spoke English with a pretentious British lilt.
I wrote to him today, saying we’d waltz again soon, inshallah. He, too, is in Kabul, with no idea what will happen, just trying to stay sane for the next phase of the resistance. “Thank you for everything,” he wrote back. “I truly lived a good life.”