When I heard only a week ago that the United States was consolidating the entirety of its presence in Afghanistan to the airport, just one single airport, one of my first thoughts was an odd one: there aren’t enough toilets. There just couldn’t be. After being modernized more than a decade back, it might not be the Kabul Airport I first saw covering the Soviet invasion more than 40 years ago, but still, with thousands of desperate Americans and Afghans and other allies panicked and pouring into the terminal, there couldn’t be enough toilets, or cots, or creature comforts of any kind— unless they’re flown in from abroad— to make life endurable during the indeterminate period that people have to wait.
Then I saw pictures. Pictures of anxious Afghans clamoring to get in— those who made it through the gunfire— so that hopefully they can fly out. Which led to another dispiriting thought: some had packed what little they could in a single suitcase. Others evidently didn’t even have time for that. They were heading for a future they could not foresee. They will end up in places they’ve never been. With no home, no job, no doctor, no teacher, no food, no car, no bed, no local language, no money. Many will be dependent on the goodwill and generosity of people they don’t know. They will start new lives with just the clothes on their backs.
The toilets at Kabul Airport will be an afterthought.
And that moved my mind from Kabul to Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, where the background was vastly different but the scenes were eerily the same. Covering that crisis, I remember one man wading out of the foul refugee center that had been the New Orleans Superdome, boarding a bus to some safe haven, some future home, but he didn’t know where, carrying a baby in one arm, a three- or four-year-old girl in the other. He told me that as the water raced to the roof of his house, he barely got out with the two kids and the shirt— the wet shirt— on his back. It struck me that he held what amounted to his whole life in his arms.
It was a scene I saw repeated there many, many times. The young, the old, the healthy, the infirm, all were equal. All were powerless over their fate. Just like the people lucky enough, if luck comes down to this, to escape the Taliban and get out of Afghanistan.
But this wasn’t Afghanistan, it was the United States of America. Yet it felt as much like a war zone as a storm zone, because these were citizens who couldn’t stay home, fleeing an enemy they could not defeat. They were heading for a life they couldn’t yet define but knew it would be hard, shocking, frightening, incomprehensible. They had a new plight to endure, not as victims, but as refugees.
Just as so many Afghans are about to find out.
One woman who’d been bussed to the Astrodome, the refugee center in Houston, told me when I later went there that her safe deliverance was the beginning of the nightmare, not the end. “To go from sleeping in a nice comfortable bed to sleeping on a cot, not knowing where your next dollar is going to come from, and if these guys didn’t feed us, half of us wouldn’t know where our next meal would come from, clothing, you have no clothing, so you don’t know how you’re gonna get dressed the next day, I mean it’s the small things, it’s things you take for granted, it’s the luxuries we didn’t realize are luxuries.”
So it will be for those escaping Afghanistan. The luxury of survival might be the best they get.
Another 3,000 people were flown out yesterday, Americans and Afghans alike. The Afghans, like these who just landed in Spain, have no way to know what to do next. No way to know what faces them next. No way to know how far they’ll have to go to get back on their feet, and how tough it will be to get there. If they can at all.
It’s fair to say that some of this was inevitable. As commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote, “There is no elegant way to lose a war.” But for those Afghans who helped the United States and expected better when the world came crashing down, some of it also is inexcusable. They are learning that promises are empty until they see them fulfilled.
Those who did get through are luckier than those taking refuge outside the airport because they can’t. The lucky ones are escaping hell.
But only for a different kind of hell just ahead. If there’s a heaven in their future, it’s too far off to see.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
I enjoy your passionate writing!