The effort to rescue the Afghans that the U.S. government has abandoned
The day our lives fell apart, Sunday, Aug. 15, I received a call from a close friend in Kabul. Usually cool and confident, vital skills for a community leader in a complex, conflict-ridden place like Afghanistan, my friend now whispered in desperation. “I need to get out,” he said. “Help me.” In the background, I could hear the city bustling nervously as millions of people absorbed the fact of the Taliban’s conquest.
My friend, a vocal activist who has spoken out against the Taliban’s oppressive rule, is one of the thousands of Afghans currently fighting to find a way to escape the country. For the past week, I’ve been working from Los Angeles, where I live, to support and coordinate their efforts. Together with a coalition of Afghan American organizations, many community members and I have been trying our hardest to evacuate our friends and family.
It’s fiendishly difficult. A network of veterans, private sector workers, human rights activists and other volunteers, we’re coordinating on different platforms and languages, often all at once. We’re figuring out what Taliban checkpoints to avoid and what gate at the airport is the most accessible, if any are. We’re raising money, millions of dollars overnight, to charter planes. We’re endlessly compiling spreadsheets with information about Afghans who are under threat from the Taliban.
We’re doing this because the American government isn’t. United States officials claim they’re presiding over an orderly exit, but the chaos on the ground suggests otherwise. Those evacuated in the past 10 days — approximately 58,700 people, according to American officials — appear to be mostly American citizens and the situation, fluid and frenzied, is far from under control. Friends and family we’ve tried to evacuate have been shot and beaten up by the Taliban, despite American promises of security at the airport. In the absence of guidance, it has fallen to us, using our phones and laptops, to figure out how to rescue Afghans scrambling for their lives. [Continue reading…]