XPost: seattle.politics

(Yes, the regularly liberal The Atlantic,
is calling Afghanistain Joe Biden's Siagon & Betrayal,
a typical long Atlantic story.)

from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/biden-afghanistan-exit-american-allies-abandoned/621307/

THE BETRAYAL

America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan added moral injury to
military failure. But a group of soldiers, veterans, and ordinary
citizens came together to try to save Afghan lives and salvage some
American honor.

By George Packer
JANUARY 31, 2022
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I.
THE END
it took four presidencies for America to finish abandoning Afghanistan.
George W. Bush’s attention wandered off soon after American Special
Forces rode horseback through the northern mountains and the first
schoolgirls gathered in freezing classrooms. Barack Obama, after
studying the problem for months, poured in troops and pulled them out in
a single ambivalent gesture whose goal was to keep the war on page A13.
Donald Trump cut a deal with the Taliban that left the future of the
Afghan government, Afghan women, and al‑Qaeda to fate. By then most
Americans were barely aware that the war was still going on. It fell to
Joe Biden to complete the task.


On April 13, 2021, the day before Biden was to address the country about Afghanistan, a 33-year-old Marine Corps veteran named Alex McCoy
received a call from a White House speechwriter named Carlyn Reichel.
McCoy led an organization of progressive veterans called Common Defense,
which had been waging a lobbying campaign with the slogan “End the
forever war.” McCoy and his colleagues believed that more American
bloodshed in a conflict without a definable end could no longer be
justified. “The president has made his decision,” Reichel told McCoy, “and you’ll be very happy with it.” She explained that it was now too late to withdraw all troops by May 1, the deadline in the agreement
signed in early 2020 by the Trump administration and the Taliban in
Doha, Qatar. But the withdrawal of the last several thousand American
troops would begin on that date, in the hope that the Taliban would not
resume attacks, and it would end by September 11, the 20th anniversary
of the day the war began.

On April 14, Biden, speaking from the White House, raised his hands and declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.” The withdrawal, he said, would not be “a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” The president ended his speech, as he often
does, with the invocation “May God protect our troops.” Then he went to
pay his respects at Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where
many of the dead from the 9/11 wars are buried.

Afterward, Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said, “When someone writes
a book about this war, it’s going to begin on September 11, 2001, and
it’s going to end on the day Joe Biden said, ‘We’re coming home.’ ” With
firm resolve, Biden had done the hard thing. The rest would be
logistics, while the administration turned its attention to domestic infrastructure. Alex McCoy framed the front page of the next day’s New
York Times and hung it on the wall of his Harlem apartment.

But the war wasn’t over—not for Afghans, not even for some Americans.

A week after Biden’s speech, a group of refugee advocates—many of them veterans of the 9/11 wars—released a report on the dire situation of the thousands of Afghans who’d worked at great risk for the United States
during its two decades in their country. In 2009, Congress had created
the Special Immigrant Visa to honor the service of qualified Afghans by bringing them to safety in the U.S. But the SIV program set up so many procedural hurdles—Form DS-230, Form I-360, a recommendation from a supervisor with an unknown email address, a letter of employment
verification from a long-defunct military contractor, a statement
describing threats—that combat interpreters and office assistants in a
poor and chaotic war zone couldn’t possibly hope to clear them all
without the expert help of immigration lawyers, who themselves had
trouble getting answers. The program, chronically understaffed and
clogged with bureaucratic choke points across multiple agencies, seemed designed to reject people. Year after year, administrations of both
parties failed to grant even half the number of visas allowed by
Congress—and sometimes granted far less—or to meet its requirement that cases be decided within nine months. By 2019, the average wait time for
an applicant was at least four years.

Toward the end of 2019, Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat,
visited the U.S. embassy in Kabul and found a skeletal staff working on
visas only part-time. “This was no accident, by the way,” Crow told me. “This was a long-term Stephen Miller project to destroy the SIV program
and basically shut it off.” Miller, the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
Trump adviser, along with allies throughout the executive branch, added
so many new requirements that amid the pandemic the program nearly came
to a halt. By the time Biden gave his speech, at least 18,000 desperate
Afghans and tens of thousands of family members stood in a line that was
barely moving. Many feared that the Americans would now leave without them.

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Najeeb Monawari had been waiting for his visa for more than a decade. He
was born in 1985, the oldest son among 10 children of a bus-mechanic
father and a mother who devoted herself to keeping them alive amid the
lethal hazards of Kabul. He grew up in a neighborhood turned to
apocalyptic rubble by the civil war of the early 1990s. He and his
friends took turns walking point along mined streets on their way to
swim in the Kabul River. During the Taliban’s rule, his family was under constant threat because of their origins in the Panjshir Valley, the
last base of the Northern Alliance resistance.

With the arrival of the Americans in 2001, power flipped and Panjshiris
became the top dogs. “We were the winners, and Panjshir Valley people
were misusing their power,” Monawari told me, “driving cars wildly in
the road, beating people. We were the king of the city.” In 2006, barely
20, Monawari lied to his parents about his destination and traveled to Kandahar, the Pashtun heartland of the Taliban, where he signed on with
a military contractor as an interpreter for Canadian forces. “I spoke
three English words and no Pashto,” he said. But his work ethic made him
so popular that, after a year with the Canadians, Monawari was snatched
away by U.S. Army Green Berets. He spent much of the next four years as
a member of 12-man teams going out on nonstop combat missions in Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces.

In the Special Forces, Najeeb Monawari found his identity. “I was
dreaming to go to America, to hold the flag in a picture.”
In the Special Forces, Monawari found his identity. The Green Berets
were so demanding that most interpreters soon washed out, but the
Americans loved him and he loved them. On missions he carried a gun and
used it, came under fire—he was wounded twice—and rescued other team members, just like the Americans. He wore his beard full and his hair
shaved close like them; he tried to walk like them, bulk up like them,
even think like them. In pictures he is indistinguishable from the Green Berets. The violence of the missions—and the fear and hatred he saw in
the eyes of local elders—sometimes troubled him, and as a Panjshiri and
a combat interpreter, he carried an automatic death sentence if he ever
fell into the hands of the Taliban. But he was proud to help give
Pashtun girls the right to attend school.


In 2009, when a team leader told Monawari about the SIV program, he
applied and collected glowing letters of recommendation from commanding officers. He wanted to become an American citizen, join the U.S.
military, and come back to Afghanistan as a Green Beret. “This was
totally the plan,” he told me. “I was dreaming to go to America, to hold the flag in a picture.”

Monawari’s application disappeared into the netherworld of the
Departments of State and Homeland Security, where it languished for the
next decade. He checked the embassy website five times a day. He sent
dozens of documents by military air to the immigration service center in Nebraska, but never received clear answers. His medical exam kept
expiring as his case stalled, so he had to borrow money to take it again
and again. “We have reviewed the State Department records and confirm
that your SIV case is still pending administrative processing in order
to verify your qualifications for this visa,” he was told in 2016.

In January 2019, Monawari was summoned for an interview—his third—at the embassy in Kabul. By then he had gone to work for Doctors Without
Borders as a logistician, managing warehouses and supply chains. The
carnage of fighting had traumatized him—he found it impossible to be alone—and he liked the gentle, unselfish spirit of the humanitarians. He
rose through the organization to overseas positions in Sierra Leone,
Lebanon, and finally a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. He flew back
to Afghanistan for the interview at the embassy and found himself faced
with a consular officer who had been angered by the previous applicant.
When it was Monawari’s turn, she almost shouted her questions, and other Afghans in the room could hear the details of his case. “Can you calm down?” he asked her.

“Oh, am I too loud?” The interview was brief and unfriendly.

In April, Monawari received a notice from the Department of Homeland
Security, headed “Intent to Revoke”: “It was confirmed by Mission Essential Personnel that you failed multiple polygraphs and background investigations.” Monawari had taken regular polygraphs with the Green
Berets, and a few times they had come back inconclusive before he
ultimately passed. He wrote to explain this to DHS, though he didn’t
know what long-lost evidence he could submit to prove it. “It is very
sad, I have been waiting more than 8 years to move to a safe place
(USA),” Monawari wrote. “Please be fair with me I was wounded twice in
the mission and I worked very hard for US special force to save their
life please check all my recommendation letters (attached) don’t leave
me behind :(”

Mike Jason: A military officer on what we got wrong in Afghanistan

A month later, a second notice arrived: “The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has determined that you worked as a procurement manager and not as a translator/interpreter.” To limit immigration, the Trump administration
had restricted SIVs mostly to interpreters. Monawari had served for
three years as a combat interpreter with the Green Berets, but his final
year as a procurement manager was used to disqualify him. To deny him a
visa, the U.S. government erased all his shared sacrifice with Americans
who might not have survived in Afghanistan without him. He would have to
try again from zero.

The subject is almost too unbearable for Monawari to discuss. “When I received the revocation—denied for nine years, 10 years—it’s so painful,” he said. “SIV is like a giant, a monster, something scary.
There is no justice in this world. There is no justice, and I have to
accept that.” By 2019 his beard was going white, though he was only 34.
He attributes every aged hair to the Special Immigrant Visa.


In october 2020, Kim Staffieri, an SIV advocate with the Association of
Wartime Allies, phoned her friend Matt Zeller, a former CIA officer and
Army major. Zeller had made the cause of America’s Afghan allies his full-time passion as a means to atone for an air strike in Afghanistan
in 2008 that had killed 30 women and children, for which he felt some responsibility. His frenetic work on the issue had made him so sick with
ulcers that he’d had to step away in 2019. Staffieri was calling to get
him back on the field.

“Matt, it doesn’t matter who wins the election; we’re leaving next year,” she said. “The SIV program is broken, and we don’t have enough time to get them all out. We’re going to need to evacuate.”

Zeller proposed that they draft a white paper with ideas for the next administration. They wrote it over the holidays. Their recommendations
included the mass evacuation of SIV applicants to safety in a U.S.
territory, such as Guam, while their cases were processed. The “Guam option” had two successful precedents: Operation New Life, in 1975,
which evacuated 130,000 South Vietnamese to Guam when their country fell
to North Vietnam; and Operation Pacific Haven, in 1996, when the U.S.
brought 6,600 Kurds facing extermination by the army of Saddam Hussein
out of northern Iraq.

Staffieri and Zeller were finishing their white paper as President Biden
took office. Three of Zeller’s friends occupied key positions in the administration, and on February 9 he sent them copies. Two of them—one a
good friend of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser—never
replied. The third promised to bring the proposals to a top aide of the
newly confirmed secretary of state, Antony Blinken. But nothing came of it.


The report was published on April 21 by the Truman Center for National
Policy, Human Rights First, and Veterans for American Ideals. The ties
between these organizations and the new administration were nearly
incestuous. Blinken, a longtime supporter of refugees, had been vice
chair of the board of Human Rights First; Sullivan had served on the
Truman board, as had his top deputy, Jon Finer. A former correspondent
with The Washington Post, Finer had helped start an organization called
the Iraqi (later International) Refugee Assistance Project in 2008,
while he was in law school. IRAP had become the leading legal-assistance
group for SIV applicants. Samantha Power, the author of “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, had sat on IRAP’s board; she was the new head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The
highest level of the Biden administration was staffed with a
humanitarian dream team—the best people to make Afghan allies a top
priority.

The outside advocates drew on their personal relationships with insiders
to lobby for urgent action. “By every back channel available, we let
people know,” Mike Breen, the chief executive of Human Rights First, and
an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, told me. Breen was a co-founder
of IRAP in law school with Finer. “The Guam option has been in the ether
for a long time. It’s something that we talked about a lot.”

Many of the advocates were in favor of ending the war. With the sand now running out, they made their case for early evacuations on moral and
strategic grounds. If, on the way out of Afghanistan, America broke its promises to people at great risk of revenge killings, its already
battered international reputation would be further damaged. Such a
failure would also injure the morale of American troops, who were now
staring at a lost war, and whose code of honor depended on leaving no
one behind.


The advocates omitted one person from their calculations: the president.
But Biden’s history in this area should have troubled them.

On April 14, 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions raced toward Saigon,
the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware was summoned to the
White House. President Gerald Ford pleaded with him and other senators
for funding to evacuate Vietnamese allies. Biden refused. “I feel put-upon,” he said. He would vote for money to bring out the remaining Americans, but not one dollar for the locals. On April 23, as South
Vietnam’s collapse accelerated, Biden repeated the point on the Senate
floor. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats, he said.
That was the job of private organizations. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”

This episode did not define Biden’s career in foreign affairs—he went on
to build a long record of internationalism. In the 1990s he pressed for
U.S. military intervention in Bosnia during its genocidal civil war. In
the winter of 2002, after the fall of the Taliban, he went to Kabul and
found himself confronted by a young girl who stood straight up at her
desk in an unfinished schoolroom with a single light bulb and no heat.
“You cannot leave,” she told the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee.

“I promise I’ll come back,” Biden said.

“You cannot leave,” the girl repeated. “They will not deny me learning
to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will.
America must stay.”


Biden recalled the encounter for me in an interview the following year.
He interpreted the girl’s words to mean: “Don’t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave
me now.” It was, he said, a “catalytic event for me,” and upon his
return to Washington he proposed spending $20 million on 1,000 new
Afghan schools—modest nation-building. But there was little interest
from either the White House or Congress.

George Packer: A debt of honor

When I interviewed Biden again in 2006, the disaster of the Iraq War and
the persistence of corruption and violence in Afghanistan were turning
him against armed humanitarianism. At a dinner in Kabul in 2008, when
President Hamid Karzai refused to admit to any corruption, Biden threw
down his napkin and walked out. He was finished with Afghanistan.

In late 2010, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy for Afghanistan and
Pakistan, came into Vice President Biden’s office to talk about the
situation of Afghan women. According to an audio diary Holbrooke kept,
Biden insisted, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights.” (Biden’s son Beau, a member of the Delaware National Guard, had recently been deployed to Iraq for a year.) He
wanted every American troop out of Afghanistan, regardless of the
consequences for women or anyone else. When Holbrooke asked about the obligation to people who had trusted the U.S. government, Biden said,
“Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam;
Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” During the 2020 campaign, an interviewer repeated some of these quotes to Biden and asked if he
believed he would bear responsibility for harm to Afghan women after a
troop withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. Biden bristled and his
eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t!” he snapped, and put his thumb and index finger together. “Zero responsibility.”

“Where are the American forces to save you? Where are their helicopters? Where are their airplanes? You’re an infidel, a traitor! You helped them
for a decade! Where are they now?”
Human rights alone were not grounds for committing American troops—it
was a solid argument, based on national interest. But it didn’t explain
the hardness, the combativeness. Questions about Afghanistan and its
people made Biden rear up and dig in. During the 2020 campaign he was
seen as deeply empathetic, but the fierce attachments of “Middle-Class
Joe” are parochial. They come from personal ties, not universal
concerns: his family, his hometown, his longtime advisers, his country,
its troops. The Green Beret interpreter and the girl in the unfinished schoolroom now stood outside the circle of empathy.


II.
“TRAITORS”
On January 20, 2021, an Afghan named Khan was waiting to celebrate the inauguration of President Biden when he received news he’d been awaiting
for three years: His SIV application had cleared an important step,
approval from the U.S. embassy. (For his family’s safety, I’m not using
his full name.) Khan, a 30-year-old employee of a U.S. military
contractor, lived in a village in southeastern Afghanistan with his
wife, their 2-year-old son, a dog, two cats, and extended family in a
house next to an orchard of almond and apple trees. He had received
three death threats from the Taliban and survived three suicide bombings
and four armed assaults that had killed scores of people. The Trump
years had been disastrous for SIV applicants like Khan. Ten minutes
after receiving the longed-for email, he was thrilled to watch the
swearing-in of the new American president.

Mina, Khan’s 22-year-old wife, who was pregnant with their second child,
had 10 family members working for the Americans. This was unusual for a
family of Pashtuns, and dangerous in a region where the Taliban
controlled much of the countryside. Her sister’s husband, Mohammad, had worked for several years at the U.S. embassy and was now employed in the
same military office as Khan. Mohammad had been waiting on his SIV
application for 10 years. The previous October, Taliban insurgents had
killed his uncle, nephew, and cousin at a wedding ceremony where they
had intended to kill him. On January 27, Mohammad was driving to the
office with his 10-year-old son when a Toyota Corolla blocked his way.
From behind a low concrete wall two gunmen opened fire. Mohammad
managed to drive 50 feet before a stream of bullets cut him down. When
his wife heard the news, she ran a mile barefoot to the hospital, but by
the time she got there Mohammad was dead.


Their son stopped speaking for a week. When he was finally able to
describe the attack, he repeated the words that the Talibs had yelled:
“Where are the American forces to save you? Where are their helicopters? Where are their airplanes? You’re an infidel, a traitor! You helped them
for a decade! Where are they now?”

If not for an errand in Kabul, Khan would have been in the car with his brother-in-law. He started working from home, and he and Mina left his
village and moved between rented houses in the provincial capital. They
took shifts on the roof day and night to keep watch for strangers who
might try to plant an explosive in the yard. In the spring, the Taliban
closed in on the city. One night in May, Khan’s dog barked incessantly,
and the next morning Khan found a note at his back gate. It said: “You
have been helping U.S. occupier forces, and you have been providing them
with intelligence information. You are an ally and spy of infidels. We
will never leave you alive and will not have mercy on your family,
because they are supporting you. Your destiny will be like your brother-in-law’s.” He went around to check the front gate. A grenade was wired to the bolt, set to explode when the gate was opened.

Khan and Mina moved to another rented house. In June, Talibs raided his
family home in the village. They expelled Khan’s parents and siblings, smashed windows, destroyed furniture, stole Mina’s jewelry and Khan’s
car, and burned all of his books.

Siv applicants and their families numbered about 80,000 people. But
after 20 years, far more Afghans than these had put themselves in danger
by joining the American project in their country: rights activists, humanitarian workers, journalists, judges, students and teachers at American-backed universities, special-forces commandos. A full
accounting would reach the hundreds of thousands. Many of them were
women, and most were under 40—the generation of Afghans who came of age
in the time of the Americans.


The U.S. and its international partners had failed to achieve most of
their goals in Afghanistan. The Afghan government and armed forces
remained criminally weak, hollowed out by corruption and tribalism;
violence kept increasing; the Taliban were taking district after
district. But something of value—always fragile and dependent on foreigners—had been accomplished. “We created a situation that enabled
the Afghans to change their own society,” Mark Jacobson, an Army veteran
and former civilian adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, told me.
“We created a situation that enabled the Afghans to nation-build.”

After the U.S. and the Taliban signed their agreement in Doha in
February 2020, attacks against American troops stopped—but hundreds of Afghans in civil society, especially women, were targeted in a
terrifying campaign of assassinations that shattered what was left of
public trust in the Afghan government and seemed to show what lay in
store after the Americans left. Carter Malkasian, the author of The
American War in Afghanistan, who worked for years as a civilian adviser
to the U.S. military and later spoke with Taliban negotiators during the
peace talks, told me they never expressed any mercy toward Afghans who’d worked with the Americans: “The Taliban have always been very lenient
toward the killing and execution of people they consider spies.”

Caitlin Flanagan: The week the left stopped caring about human rights

In a restored Islamic Emirate, everyone’s fate would be up to the
Taliban. Not just to the political leaders in Doha and Kabul, but to
local gunmen in remote provinces with no media around, carrying out the
will of God, settling scores, or just enjoying themselves. Some Afghans
would be marked for certain death. Many others would face the
destruction of their hopes and dreams. No law required the U.S.
government to save a single one—only a moral debt did. But just as
ordinary Talibs could act on their own to punish “traitors,” so could ordinary Americans try on their own to help their friends.

Woman in blue head scarf looks down, eyes closed, her left eye wounded
and sealed shut
In July, the Taliban conquered the home district of Wazir Nazary, a
40-year-old Afghan woman. Taliban assailants broke into her home and
shot her in the face, wounding both eyes. (Victor J. Blue)
A U.S. Army captain I will call Alice Spence knew a group of Afghan
women who were especially endangered. (Because she is still active-duty military, she asked for anonymity.) Spence, from a nonmilitary family in
New England, had attended an Ivy League college. At 27, in the summer of
2014, she quit her job at an accounting firm and joined the Army. The
recruiter warned that she wouldn’t get very far—she was too old and
barely made the minimum weight requirement (her wrists and biceps were
about the same size). But Spence became an officer and deployed to
Afghanistan, where she trained Afghan units called Female Tactical Platoons.


FTPs were attached to Special Operations Forces and went on missions
with male commandos—American and Afghan men and women flying on the same helicopters, humping heavy kits up the same mountains, the women joining
the men on violent night raids against Taliban or Islamic State targets.
The main job of the female troops was to search and question local women
and children, but they also fired their weapons and were fired upon. The
FTPs were particularly hated by the Taliban for being elite troops, for
being women, and for being overwhelmingly Hazara—the Shiite minority
that the Taliban continually targeted with suicide bombings and
assassinations.

George Packer: Biden’s betrayal of Afghans will live in infamy

Hawa, a young Hazara woman from Bamiyan, in the center of the country,
joined the army at age 18, in 2015. She loved watching war movies, and
when military recruiters visited her high school she was drawn to the
uniforms, the weapons, the bravery, the chance to serve her country. (I
am using only her first name for her family’s safety.) Hawa’s parents vigorously opposed her choice—the army was too dangerous for their
daughter. But she was determined. “It doesn’t matter if you say no,”
Hawa told them. “You will see when I go there.”

Lieutenant Hawa met Captain Spence at Bagram Air Base. “Oh my God,
you’re an FTP?” Spence asked her, laughing. “You’re so short. How did you get into the military?” Hawa replied that Spence looked like a
skeleton and gave her the call sign Eskelet; Spence’s for Hawa was
Tarbooz, for the watermelon she loved to eat at the base’s dining facility.


Spence formed a close bond with Hawa and another FTP member named
Mahjabin. The women exchanged language lessons, and Spence learned a
variety of jokes and vulgarities in Dari. They worked out together,
shared midnight meals, and fell into hysterics over whoopee cushions.

The Afghan women saw the war with the fatalism of hard experience. They expected no final victory, only a long, perhaps permanent struggle to
hold on to the gains for which they’d sacrificed so much. “I truly
loved, admired, and respected them,” Spence told me. “There’s very few bonds that exist on this Earth like those between people who walk
towards death together.”

After the Doha agreement, American Special Forces stopped going on
missions against the Taliban with the Afghans. In the summer of 2020,
Spence, now stationed in Hawaii, got a message from Hawa. Talibs had
told the imam of the Shiite mosque in her family’s Kabul neighborhood
that they would kill any local Hazara soldiers they might later find if
he didn’t give up their names now. Hawa asked for Spence’s help to get
out of Afghanistan. Spence put together an SIV application, but it was rejected—as a member of the Afghan National Army, Hawa lacked a letter
from a U.S. employer.

After Biden declared the end of the war in April, Spence began to panic. “Hawa my friend are you still in Afghanistan?” she wrote in June. “I
need to get you out somehow. I will try.”

Read: The Taliban’s return is catastrophic for women

“Please talk to a lawyer tell him/her how you can help me to get to the USA,” Hawa replied. “I know it is difficult but I need you to go out.
Here is very dangerous for me now I need your help dear. I will
compensation when I come to there.”


“No compensation, you are my azizam,” Spence wrote—“my dear.”

Spence and a few other female soldiers collected a list of FTPs in need
of visas. They wrote their own employment-verification letters on Army letterhead. With Mahjabin’s help, they tracked down elusive birth dates, regularized spellings of Afghan names, and gathered details about
threats. “Two months ago, the Taliban made three big explosions in the
school nearest my house,” Hawa wrote in her statement. “My younger
sister was there, but survived. Many of her classmates died in the
attack.” (The bombings killed at least 90 people, most of them Hazara schoolgirls.) “She is very scared and cannot go to school anymore. They
also killed my cousin in the explosion. I know they will kill me too if
they find me.”

Spence and her colleagues assembled packets of documents and fed them
into the sluggish gears of the bureaucracy as the last American troops
left Afghanistan.

III.
“OPTICS”
On April 21, one week after Biden’s speech, 16 members of the House of Representatives—10 Democrats and six Republicans, led by Jason Crow and
Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat—announced the formation of the Honoring Our Promises Working Group. Its purpose was to offer bipartisan support for bringing Afghan allies to safety. “The goal was: Let’s not
let politics get wrapped up in this,” Peter Meijer, a Michigan
Republican and an Iraq War veteran, told me. “ ‘Honor our promises! This shouldn’t be that hard’ was the sentiment that many of us had.” The next day, April 22, General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. of Central Command
affirmed that the military, if so ordered, would be able to bring
Afghans out of harm’s way as it withdrew.



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