Before Kabul Fell
'The reality is when collapse comes in Afghanistan, it is likely going to happen faster than Washington can react to it, and these people will be our last priority when it comes time to evacuate.'
- Matt Zeller, The Stream, Al Jazeera, April 1, 2021
In October 2020, I was watching the U.S. presidential campaign unfold in front of me.
I couldn't shake the feeling that regardless of who became our next president, our Afghan allies were in trouble.
Deep trouble.
So I picked up the phone and called the one person I thought might see what I was seeing.
Matt Zeller.
Matt and I already knew each other. We had worked together during the years I volunteered with No One Left Behind, when Matt was still involved with the organization.
But there was another reason I called him.
Matt had served in Afghanistan as an embedded combat adviser with Afghan security forces. He was a military intelligence officer and had worked as a CIA analyst focused on Afghanistan.
He understood the country. He understood the war. And he understood the people who had stood beside us.
I didn't have to convince him that we had a problem.
Matt and I spoke several times that October. Sometimes for hours.
Matt brought the perspective of a soldier, intelligence professional, and longtime advocate who knew how to make the national security case.
I came at it differently. I was the grassroots advocate, deeply embedded in the SIV community and hearing directly from Afghan allies every day. I knew what the policies looked like on paper, but I also knew what they looked like when they landed on someone's life.
Matt knew how Washington thought. I knew what our people were living.
It turned out to be a pretty effective combination.
We agreed on what worried us.
Then we started talking strategy.
How do you raise the alarm about something that hasn't happened yet?
Matt suggested we put it on paper.
So we did.
Over the next several months, we developed a white paper laying out what we believed needed to happen before the United States withdrew from Afghanistan.
We called for immediate action on the SIV backlog. But we also argued that processing alone wasn't enough.
We needed to start moving people.
Our proposal called for relocating Afghan wartime evacuees to Guam, where there was historical precedent for temporarily housing people evacuated from conflicts while the United States determined their longer-term status.
I use the words wartime evacuees deliberately.
These were not simply immigration cases sitting in a visa queue. They were people whose danger existed because of their service to the United States during a twenty-year war.
We believed they needed to be moved while there was still time.
Instead, we were told that people who had not yet received Chief of Mission approval could not, or would not, be moved.
The immigration process came first.
Our concern was that Afghanistan wasn't going to wait for the process.
On April 1, 2021, the Truman National Security Project released our white paper.
That same day, Matt and I appeared on Al Jazeera's The Stream to talk about what we believed was coming and why the United States needed to move Afghan wartime allies to safety before it was too late.
There is a detail about that day that still makes me smile, just a little bit.
I had never done television before.
My first television appearance wasn't local news or a prerecorded segment. It was live television on one of the largest global media networks in the world, talking about an issue where the stakes could hardly have been higher.
So much for easing into things.
Matt was the consummate professional.
I was the grassroots advocate, determined to keep it real about what our people were actually experiencing.
That was the interview where Matt said the words at the beginning of this letter.
Then the public campaign began in earnest.
We wrote. We gave interviews. We pushed the white paper. We used social media almost daily. We took every opportunity we could find to make people understand that the clock was running.
And eventually, we started counting planes.
We knew how many people were waiting. We knew approximately how many people an aircraft could carry. And we knew how many days remained before the United States planned to leave.
So we did the math.
How many planes would have to leave Afghanistan, every single day, to move the people who had served us before the U.S. military withdrew?
Then we published the countdown.
Every day that passed made the math worse.
At the same time, Afghanistan itself was changing.
U.S. military contractors were already closing operations. The American military was leaving. Afghan security forces were losing critical support while facing an increasing number of Taliban attacks.
And the Taliban were advancing.
District by district.
Province by province.
We watched the map change.
In May, Michael Trudeau, who was working alongside Matt, me, AWA and our partners in the Evacuate Our Allies coalition, looked at everything converging and said:
“Folks, we are going to have a bad August.”
He was right.
Michael became consumed by the work that summer. Together, we tracked the rapidly changing situation, checked and rechecked the numbers, continued the plane countdown and published near-daily updates. Sometimes information we had analyzed that morning had already been overtaken by events by afternoon.
[READ MICHAEL TRUDEAU'S FULL REMEMBRANCE]
By August 1, AWA's membership had grown to approximately 15,000, representing roughly 75 percent of all SIV applicants who had applied at that point.
Behind those numbers were people we knew.
They were sending us messages. They were telling us what was happening around them. And increasingly, we were watching the same thing they were.
The Taliban advance was accelerating.
Cities fell.
Provincial capitals fell.
The Afghan government was losing control of the country with astonishing speed.
The question was no longer whether the United States had enough time to move everyone before withdrawal.
The question was becoming whether there was any time left at all.
And then came August 15.
Kabul fell.
The thing we had spent months trying to make people understand was no longer a warning.
It was happening.
The Taliban entered the capital. The Afghan government collapsed. President Ashraf Ghani left the country.
And suddenly the twenty-year American presence in Afghanistan had contracted to a few square miles around an airport.
The crisis we had spent months trying to prevent became an evacuation we were desperately trying to keep up with.
For tens of thousands of Afghan wartime allies, reaching those airport gates became the difference between getting out and being left behind.
Our phones exploded.
Messages. Names. Documents. Locations.
People asking which gate to use.
People asking what documents they needed.
People trying to get their families through crowds.
People who had spent years waiting for the United States to process their cases suddenly had hours to figure out how to reach an airport surrounded by the Taliban.
There was no white paper left to write.
There was no media campaign that could create more time.
There was no plane countdown anymore.
August had arrived.
I wish I could tell you that because we had seen the danger coming, we were somehow prepared for what happened next.
We weren't.
What followed were fifteen days I will never forget.
But that is another letter.
For this one, I want to stop on August 15, 2021.
Ten months earlier, I had picked up the phone and called Matt Zeller because I was afraid of what might happen to America's Afghan allies if the United States left Afghanistan without moving them first.
On April 1, Matt had warned publicly that when collapse came, it would happen faster than Washington could react.
In May, Michael said we were going to have a bad August.
All summer, we watched the Taliban advance.
We counted the people.
We counted the planes.
We counted the days.
And then, on August 15, we ran out of time.
Kim Staffieri
Founder & Executive Director
Association of Wartime Allies