By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, October 06, 2021
Large swaths of the American media world have
psychologically moved on from Afghanistan. Big news organizations still have a
few correspondents in the country or in the region, but the stories are
relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers and way down the page on the
websites.
What is going on in Afghanistan is apparently just not as
interesting as, say, yet another former Trump administration staffer coming out
with a book and declaring, to her shock and horror, that Donald Trump was
erratic, full of rage, only listened to his family, and was obsessed with the
notion he won the 2020 election. Thank goodness Stephanie Grisham is coming
forward with this shocking exposé. How could Americans have possibly known this
without her coming forward and blowing the whistle?
A week ago, the Sacramento
Bee revealed that even more American children are still
trapped in Afghanistan than was originally believed:
San Juan Unified School District
officials last week said 41 students were trapped in Afghanistan — a sharp
increase from the two-dozen-or-so the district had previously identified. Of
the 41 kids, three were evacuated over the weekend from the war-torn country
but remain overseas, district officials said.
Sacramento City Unified officials
last week said eight students are stranded in Afghanistan. Initially,
they’d identified just one family who The Sacramento Bee interviewed.
Attendance records as the school year has progressed showed more students were
missing, and staff traced their whereabouts to the country.
Principal Nate McGill of Ethel I.
Baker Elementary school has been involved in getting the students out. He texts
with family members and has been coordinating staff members who are trying to
cobble together a plan.
But, he said, progress has been
slow. Sometimes it feels nonexistent.
Why are we relying on elementary-school
principals to help get American citizens out of a country run by
hostile extremists? America really does expect its educators to do too much.
People become teachers and principals because they want to help people, but
managing an overseas hostage-rescue operation is asking far too much.
What do we have a federal government for? What is its
purpose? What duties should it prioritize? Rescuing American civilians from
Taliban territory really seems like a responsibility that should be at the top
of the list.
Why is the federal government under President Biden
contemplating creating a “Civilian Climate Corps,” building 500,000
electric-vehicle-charging stations, upgrading 4 million commercial
buildings, offering cash rebates for purchasing energy-efficient appliances,
and hiring 87,000 new IRS agents . . . when it is failing
its most basic duty of getting our citizens out of harm’s way overseas?
Before our government expands into vast new
responsibilities and duties, is it too much to ask that it complete the task
on this duty?
Despite the claims of U.S. officials that government
efforts to get Americans, green-card holders, and Afghan allies out of
Afghanistan are continuing, even mild-mannered, even-tempered GOP lawmakers such as senator
Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania have concluded that the
administration’s policy amounted to abandoning American civilians behind enemy
lines:
A group of military veterans helped
a Lehigh Valley mother of four who is a U.S. citizen escape from
Taliban-overrun Afghanistan last month after the U.S. government “abandoned
her,” U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey said in public remarks Tuesday.
Speaking at a U.S. Senate Banking
Committee hearing in Washington, Toomey referred to a “Pennsylvanian American
citizen, a mother of four” who “works at a middle school in the Lehigh Valley.”
It was a clear reference to Mujda
Tajdar, a Palmer Township mother of four whose status as a U.S. citizen trapped
in Afghanistan was brought to public light in several Morning Call
articles published after the Taliban overran the country.
Her husband, Whadat Tajdar, told the newspaper his wife escaped Sept. 10 on
a flight from Kabul to Qatar.
“The only way she escaped
Afghanistan was because a veterans group operating on the ground found her,
protected her, and got her on a flight on Sept. 10,” Toomey said. “It’s
unbelievable to me that a group of Americans — civilians — had to save this
woman’s life because her own government abandoned her.”
Credit the Los Angeles Times for tracking down a
potential U.S. Fulbright scholar now trapped in the country:
Maryam Jami wanted to dedicate her
life to helping Afghan refugees, one of the largest groups of displaced people
in the world after more than four decades of war.
That ambition led the 23-year-old
human rights advocate to apply for a Fulbright scholarship this year to earn a
master of laws in the United States, a life-changing opportunity to bring
much-needed international legal expertise back to her native Afghanistan.
She was told in April that she was
one of only about 100 applicants in Afghanistan named a semifinalist for the
prestigious U.S.-funded program. All Jami needed to do was sit for an online
interview. Six months later, with her country in disarray and her safety in
jeopardy as a woman living under Taliban rule, Jami is still waiting to hear
about that interview. . . .
Closing the program would be
especially devastating for female hopefuls who face a new era of discrimination
under the ultra-conservative Taliban. The leadership has yet to allow girls
past sixth grade to return to school and has blocked access to universities for
women until they can be segregated in classrooms from men.
Jami said female friends who were
on the cusp of graduating from the law program at her alma mater Herat
University will no longer receive their diplomas. Under orders from the
Taliban, the women are barred from campus until further notice. The law
program, which had spent years trying to garner more international recognition,
has been converted to a sharia school.
“It’s really so hard to be a
woman,” Jami said. “We’re expected to be robots here; just do what you’re told
and cover yourself from head to toe.”
The bland U.S. State Department statement in response to
this story would be almost funny if the situation were not so horrific: “We are
tracking events in Afghanistan closely and are reviewing the future of the
Fulbright program. We are committed to the aspirations of Afghan students and
scholars, and appreciate the continued interest of the semifinalists in study
in the United States. We know that this is a challenging time for these Afghan
students and their families.” Your call is important to us. Please stay
on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.
Late last month, The New Yorker profiled a 33-year-old Afghan father of five children who had worked as
a translator for U.S. military forces since 2007. He applied for a Special
Immigrant Visa in 2013, but kept running into bureaucratic roadblocks until
eventually, he’d reapplied three more times. He is still hiding in Kabul:
In April, Biden had vowed to
withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of
September 11th. Veterans groups and other advocates — including Irap — urged
the Administration to immediately launch massive evacuation efforts. Officials
countered that it was impractical to bring large numbers of Afghans with
pending applications to U.S. territory, and that a premature exodus could
undermine the standing of Afghanistan’s then beleaguered President, Ashraf Ghani.
Gee, good thing the U.S. government didn’t help the
Afghans who had spent years sticking their necks out to help our forces, and
risked undermining the standing of President Ghani, huh? Why, if we had risked
undermining the standing of President Ghani, maybe the whole Afghan government
would have quickly collapsed!
The New Yorker article continues:
Later that night, he sent me a
series of tweets posted by other Afghans. “An SIV holder was beaten and
tortured by the Taliban,” one journalist reported. A former government official
announced that the “Taliban have started mass house to house and door to door
search operations” across Kabul, “looking for ‘foreigner collaborators.’” We’d
spoken for several hours by this point, but it was the first time he told me
outright that he was scared.
At the moment, there’s nothing he
can do but wait.
My reader nicknamed Samaritan doesn’t have much to
report; the endangered Afghans he knows are still hiding, still desperately
trying to find some way out of the country, still dreading the knock on the
door in the middle of the night. Yesterday, Amnesty International released a new investigation,
concluding the Taliban had executed 13 ethnic Hazaras, including a
17-year-old girl, in Afghanistan’s Daykundi province after members of the
security forces of the former government surrendered:
“These cold-blooded executions are
further proof that the Taliban are committing the same horrific abuses they
were notorious for during their previous rule of Afghanistan,” said Agnès
Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. “They repeatedly violate
the rights of those they perceive as their adversaries, even killing those who
have already surrendered. The Taliban say they are not targeting former
employees of the previous government, but these killings contradict such
claims.”
Finally, U.S. intelligence has revealed a brutal lesson about
what the Taliban’s return to power meant for Americans in uniform:
The ISIS-K suicide bomber who carried
out a terrorist attack at Kabul international airport in late August, killing
13 US service members and dozens of Afghans, had been released from a prison
near Kabul just days earlier when the Taliban took control of the area,
according to three US officials.
Two US officials, as well as Rep.
Ken Calvert, a California Republican who said he had been briefed by national
security officials, said the suicide bomber was released from the Parwan prison
at Bagram air base. The US controlled the base until it abandoned Bagram in
early July. It had turned over the prison to Afghan authorities in 2013.
The Parwan prison at Bagram, along
with the Pul-e-Charkhi prison near Kabul, housed several hundred members of
ISIS-K, as well as thousands of other prisoners when the Taliban took control
of both facilities hours before taking over the capital with barely a shot
fired in mid-August, a regional counter-terrorism source told CNN at the time.
The Taliban emptied out both prisons, releasing their own members who had been
imprisoned but also members of ISIS-K, which is the terror group’s affiliate in
Afghanistan.
If the U.S. had not chosen to abandon Bagram Air Base,
the suicide bomber would not have been released. If the suicide bomber had not
been released, 13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans would probably be
alive today.
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