Perspective on Afghanistan and How to Help

Photo credit: United Nations

Like so many, I’ve been attempting to process the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. As a friend of mine messaged me yesterday, “We have been suffering like this for forty years.” Not that our presence assuaged any of that suffering, but withdrawing they way we are certainly isn’t helping.

I haven’t looked at polls to see how this is tracking with American citizens but I do understand that Republicans are pig-piling on Biden for the mess that this exit is. Frankly, in terms of the actual mechanics and operational aspects, I wouldn’t expect anything else. Our departure from Vietnam wasn’t exactly elegant. I would argue that this is far worse, though.

For humanitarian reasons alone, leaving behind a country to deal with the Taliban and now, ISIS-K, is a horrible failure of policy and a miserable act of bad faith. We are not going to be able to grant everyone safe harbor or for that matter, a guarantee of safely making it out of the country. Releasing names of people to the Taliban of refugees is undoubtedly one of the stupidest moves I’ve ever seen in any context.

The original mission of neutralizing Al-Quaeda, and rebuffing the Taliban was ill thought-out and worse executed. I’m not faulting the military personnel that were deployed to carry out these operations except to say that this should do have never escalated to a war. The training of Afghan forces to deal with the Taliban makes sense, I suppose. But not understanding the fragility - which is to say, incompetence and corruption - of the Afghan government? Well, this shows a willful lack of comprehension and foresight, to say the least. 

Every president involved with our project in Afghanistan has blood on their hands and as is often the case, once we’ve gone in with a chainsaw for brain surgery, we are shocked as a nation to learn that we’ve left a bigger, uglier mess behind in the O.R. 

That Biden agreed to support the deal Trump made with the Taliban (while ignoring the legitimate - if incompetent - government of Afghanistan) may appear honorable to some. However, it is as I said above, morally indefensible. Releasing 5,000 of Taliban operatives back into the field is doing the very thing that Republicans tout so highly that they’d never do: i.e., business with terrorists. Trump capitulated to a terrorist group with no concern for what this means for the Afghan people or for that matter, what it means for the countless humanitarian aide workers in the country collaborating with Afghan people to make a difference. Nor perhaps, did it cross his mind that he set into motion a retreat that will forever paint the U.S. as a moral coward. 

That Biden supported this deal is, perhaps, understandable in the sense that yes, we’ve been there for a very long time, have spent over a trillion dollars, and seen little support by or any significant headway of the government standing on its own. However, the collapse of U.S. trained Afghan forces in the face of the Taliban’s attacks and Ghani’s flight speak to either a breakdown in intel on our side or quite frankly, a lack of care or concern for the entire enterprise.

Everything we’ve done in that country was wrongheaded and this has been a colossal quagmire that was a human rights tragedy in the making. Brown University’s Watson Institute’s Cost of War website notes “About 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians.” Much of this could have been avoided if we - as a nation - weren’t to tethered to our “might makes right” mentality. From Bush to Obama to Trump, and in another way altogether, to Biden, each administration has failed the Afghan people and worse, levied uncalculable misery and trauma on them. 

The wouldas, the shouldas, the couldas are gone; Biden coulda said no to dealing with a terrorist state and its representatives or renegotiated withdrawal with other conditions. From what we’ve seen, that wasn’t even a consideration. Recently, after the ISIS-K bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and 169 or more Afghan civilians, a drone strike took out two high profile operatives. Given that kind of surgical precision, how is it that you don’t use that as a bargaining chip to keep the Taliban in check? Well, we know. You don’t. Your predecessor makes a gutless, half-assed deal with them and instead of renegotiating, you just go along with it out of either fatigue or frustration or both.

However, our fatigue and frustration both stem from our hubris and ignorance and once again, an entire population is paying a price because they’re on the other side of the world, because their culture is so much less than ours in many Americans’ eyes, because when all is said and done - we don’t care.

Domestically, Biden will be fine. Some people will take him to task for this, maybe even some in his party while the Republicans will try to paper over their part in two decades of stupidity and especially their last guy’s deal and what a callous and cowardly deal it was. Internationally? I don’t know. Honestly, no one has genuinely cared about Afghanistan. Or I should say, few have. 

At one point, Kabul was a destination and the country had seen a great amount of prosperity. However, history is not static; other players decide to shuffle the board and places like Kabul, Tehran, and Baghdad become zones of fundamentalism, oligarchs, dictators, and terrorist regimes. In almost all of those cases, these shifts come about as responses to interventions/interference from larger players, principally, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. 

The easy out is for people to throw their hands up and say, “it’s all too complicated! We should leave anyway! Leave them to their own devices!” Again, as I hope I’ve made clear, this is abdicating responsibility to the very people we’ve left in this mess. 

It is a failure of imagination to say that there is no solution to the suffering visited upon Afghanistan and that perhaps even worse is on the horizon. It is a failure of our self-proclaimed morality to turn away from those we have put in harm’s way and this is worse.

Once again, I don’t intend to write stuff and not propose things we can all do to at least try to address a situation. Already, several organizations have mobilized to assist with refugee transfer and in some cities, municipal engagement is already taking place to receive refugees into their communities. Check around to see what type of organization is taking place in your town or city.

The organizations listed below have specific operations in place and could use funding and probably volunteers. 

Before I post those, I want to bring attention to my friend Farhad Zaheer who maintains his own NGO and is attempting to continue working as the situation unfolds around him. You can contact him directly on Facebook via Farhad’s Charitable Works here: https://www.facebook.com/FarhadsCharitableWorks/. Most of his work is small-scale to midsize humanitarian relief. I’m sure there are others on the ground that are going to continue doing what they can and I hope that they receive the support they need.

A good place to start is with Charity Navigator for vetted non-profits and NGOs.

The New York Times has a list of resources and organizations.

Please consider UNICEF and the Office of the UN HIgh Commissioner for Refugees (UNCR).

GoFundMe has direct links to verified non-profits assisting Afghan refugees.