(Dobbs) The Poor Souls Left Behind In Afghanistan
Not every story has a happy ending. Sometimes there's no chance for one.
“Of course there is going to be a bloodbath for all who supported the U.S.”
Not disenfranchisement. Not exile. Not imprisonment. A bloodbath.
That is how one reader began his comment to me after seeing yesterday’s column about Afghanistan, titled “What Did We Learn In Afghanistan? Was it right to stay? Is it wrong to go?”
He’s worried with good reason. And he’s not the only one.
A woman wrote, also fearing a bloodbath, “Difficult moral questions are raised as we leave allied Afghans who helped the U.S., and women, to the Taliban’s violence.”
Another foresees that “we will continue to see the slaughter of innocents and once again genocide.”
These readers and others wrote to me because the aftermath of our withdrawal won’t be pretty— for interpreters who helped our military, for Afghans who guided American journalists, and frighteningly, for females in a nation that could slip back into a medieval way of life.
Yesterday’s piece, however, was primarily about the implications for the United States of leaving versus staying. The fate of those left behind, logistically if not morally, is secondary to that. But it is not of secondary importance, not at all, so let me put some perspective on the predicament.
I have seen firsthand what local citizens who help Americans during a war have to do if the other side wins. At the end of Vietnam, some of ABC News’s Vietnamese camera crews and their families became “boat people,” joining hundreds of thousands of refugees who opted to escape their own nation in rickety boats on the high seas rather than face banishment in so-called “re-education camps” created by the conquering Communist government.
(Parenthetically, I’m proud to say that ABC and most international news organizations found these dislodged people in places like Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, and brought them and their families to the U.S. and gave them jobs in news bureaus across the country. They’d had to flee their own homeland because they had been loyal to us. We owed them that.)
Then just half-a-decade later, Iran. When it became clear that this key American ally was threatened, ABC and others opened bureaus in Tehran for the long haul where we needed local camera crews and interpreters and drivers who knew the language and knew their way around. I hired some of them myself. But after the revolution put the ayatollahs in charge, sure enough, these people were targeted. Not for re-education, but for execution.
In a repeat of the impossible choices the Vietnamese had faced, some opted to get out. One, once an executive with the Iranian Television network, walked east for months with his family across Iran into Afghanistan. It was hell, but a lesser hell than any other direction. Another, once a cameraman with Iranian TV, got out through Turkey, but he couldn’t get his father, a disbarred general in the Shah’s Imperial Guard, to go with him. Not long after, his father was shot.
(Again though, proud to say, when anyone got out, they got a job in Europe with us. As with Vietnam, we owed them that.)
Fast forward now to Afghanistan. The part of our withdrawal with which I most take issue is this: we all but completed it without extracting those Afghans who’ve risked everything to work for us. There are many job categories that qualify but the focus has been on interpreters, some 1,800 of them. As Pulitzer Prize winner Farah Stockman wrote in The New York Times about one who’d worked with her, “Nearly everything foreign journalists knew about Afghanistan was filtered through guys like Fareed, who ferried us around and explained, between drags on their cigarettes, what was really going on. Without them, we were helpless— blind and deaf.”
Her and me both.
Whether Afghans worked for American companies or the American government, they worked for the devil and so, if those like Fareed are apprehended by the Taliban, they won’t be put on trial and sent to prison. They’ll be killed. Shot, hanged, or beheaded. That’s what the Taliban does.
These newest refugees might not have to board a rickety boat or trek halfway across the country to escape. Operations have begun to fly them to undisclosed safe havens. Yet that doesn’t put them in the clear, for one simple reason: to fly to safety, they first have to make it safely to the planes. Which brings me to another experience that puts their plight in perspective.
After the revolution in Iran, there were westerners stuck in the country, desperate to get out. Several entities conspired to help, among them the U.S. government, Pan American Airways, and of all ironies in light of the new Islamic Republic, the Israeli airline El Al.
Convoys with heavily armed guards carried the westerners about 30 miles from the center of Tehran to the airport. Along with other journalists, I was with one of them. Several times rebels in buildings along the route fired on us. One man, an American, was hit. He died. No one was safe until they were physically on an airplane.
I can only assume that with the United States now down to protective platoons of troops in Afghanistan, just getting interpreters and others onto those planes will be dangerous. I hope I’m wrong but I also assume, some won’t make it. We might have started too late.
We owe them better than that.
And the women and girls? No airplanes wait for them. No future, either. As another reader wrote yesterday, “It is so devastatingly sad to leave the women and girls to go back into Taliban servitude.” From a different reader, “The lives of those little girls and women that are truly facing horrendous treatment, if not slaughter, deserve our help just as much as those that live in different parts of our own country would.”
But they won’t get it. Not much of it anyway. That was the choice President Biden had to make. We’d have to spend lives to save lives. A bloodbath of a different sort. Then, there might be no end to it.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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 “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
A sad commentary indeed, but a necessary one. Thank you!