The Record of Those Left Behind
Dear Friends,
There is a strange thing about the word evacuation.
It sounds like an ending.
August 2021 was anything but.
When the last U.S. military aircraft departed Kabul, thousands upon thousands of Afghan allies remained behind.
AWA's first report following the evacuation found that more than 96% of SIV applicants were not evacuated in August 2021.
Behind that number were interpreters, engineers, drivers, cultural advisors, contractors, and others who had served the U.S. mission. There were spouses and children. Families who had spent years navigating the Special Immigrant Visa process suddenly found themselves living under the very people they had helped us fight.
The planes stopped flying.
The waiting did not.
Neither did the danger.
The chaos of the evacuation gave way to a quieter and much longer task: understanding who had been left behind, where they were in the SIV process, where that process was failing them, and whether the systems designed to keep America's promise were actually working.
So we started documenting.
We conducted voluntary surveys of our members. We analyzed State Department data and processing trends. We compared what the government was reporting with what applicants were experiencing.
There were just three of us constructing that first report.
We brought very different expertise to the work: data analysis, firsthand military experience from veterans who had served in Afghanistan, and former U.S. intelligence expertise on the country.
And we had something else few organizations possessed: a direct connection to thousands of SIV applicants telling us, in real time, what they were experiencing.
The numbers told us one part of the story. The experience behind those numbers helped us understand what they meant.
We questioned the data. We tested our assumptions. We looked for explanations that might contradict our conclusions.
And then we checked again.
There is something I have told our members for years:
I will always tell you the truth, even when I don't like what it is.
That standard applied to our reporting too.
If we knew something, we needed to be able to support it. If the evidence wasn't there, we said so. If we didn't know, we said we didn't know.
And sometimes that meant being prepared to defend our work.
In early 2022, NBC News was preparing to report on AWA's finding that approximately 78,000 Afghan SIV applicants had been left behind.
The State Department disputed our numbers.
They said we were wrong.
NBC did exactly what a responsible news organization should do.
They challenged us.
Our calculations and methodology went under a microscope. NBC's editorial and legal teams reviewed the work. We went back through the data, explained how we reached our conclusions, and showed our work.
Maybe that's the accountant in me.
Numbers have to reconcile. Conclusions need support. And if you're going to make a claim involving tens of thousands of human beings, you had better be prepared to prove it.
AWA held the receipts.
NBC ultimately accepted our calculations and published the story.
That mattered.
Not because we had won an argument with the State Department.
Because the numbers represented people.
Over time, AWA's reporting and analysis would be cited by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, referenced in the Congressional Record, and relied upon by journalists, policymakers, attorneys, veterans, advocates, and others trying to understand what was happening to America's Afghan allies.
But the work served another purpose.
It created a record.
A record of who was left behind. Of how many were still waiting. Of where the SIV process was failing. Of the years that followed the evacuation and what those years meant for the people America had promised to protect.
Just as The Afghan Digest now preserves a running record of life under Taliban rule, AWA's reporting preserves part of the record of what happened to America's Afghan allies after the August 2021 evacuation.
Someday, when the history of those weeks and the years that followed is fully examined, the numbers will be there. The data will be there. The experiences of the people left behind will be there.
I am enormously proud of the credibility that work earned, and enormously grateful to the people who volunteered their time and expertise to work alongside me to earn it.
But recognition was never the point.
The people represented by the numbers were.
Five years later, the circumstances have changed. AWA's standard has not.
We follow the evidence. We tell people what we know. We tell them what we don't know. And we continue documenting what is happening to the people America promised not to leave behind.
But there is a reason we became so relentless about documenting what happened after August 2021.
We knew what had happened before it.
Tomorrow, in the final Letter from AWA in this series, I need to take you back there.
Before the airport gates.
Before the crowds.
Before the world was watching Kabul.
Back to the months when we were watching the numbers, listening to Afghan allies, and watching Afghanistan begin to unravel.
We were trying desperately to make people understand what we believed was coming.
That is the hardest part of this story for me to tell.
But it is time.
With gratitude,
Kim Staffieri
Founder & Executive Director
Association of Wartime Allies