President Joe Biden reviews remarks he will deliver about the situation in Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House photo by Erin Scott)
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Politics
On a mid-January evening, an interpreter for an Afghan woman, a former civic leader now in hiding from the Taliban, described the winter of discontent, desperation and despair taking hold of the safe house they both share with a dozen others.
“Believe me, we are in a very bad condition. I am selling all my [possessions], and no one wants to buy,” he told RealClearPolitics. “We don’t know what to do. From one side, the weather is very cold … and now I can’t go out [to try to sell them and get supplies] because everywhere [Taliban members] are standing.”
The interpreter and several others who have been huddled together in lockdown since the chaotic U.S. evacuation five months ago live in constant fear of being recognized by the Taliban because they worked for the former leader, a prominent woman in their community.
Back then, the U.S. publicly championed her and many others for standing up to the Taliban and taking on roles previously held only by men – even giving more than a dozen of them International Women of Courage awards, shuttling many of these heroines to Washington for meet-and-greets with members of Congress, think tank panels and media interviews.
Now the same woman often sits alone in one of the safe house rooms, guilt-ridden and expressing regret for her high-profile role that instantly disappeared when the country fell to Taliban control – as did many freedoms Afghan women enjoyed over the last two decades.
Many of her family members and former employees, all of whom had strong ties to the U.S. and other international organizations, now live in locked-down isolation, fearing for their lives and frantically seeking U.S. assistance to evacuate – to no avail.
“She says she’s so sorry for putting all of our lives in danger,” the interpreter recounted, noting that members of their group have run out of resources and are now relying on private charities’ donations for food, rent and firewood. He and many others in the group had spent thousands of dollars attaining college degrees for jobs they lost when the Taliban took control. They wonder if all the effort and money was worth it with their higher education credentials now spurring Taliban suspicion.
The groups keep in touch with the outside world via social media sites – and fret about reports of Taliban violence against other former women leaders. Over the last month, one former prominent leader, through her U.S. human rights lawyer, said she has been beaten by members of the new regime, as have two of her relatives. Just this past weekend, reports surfaced that a female activist was shot and killed at a Taliban checkpoint while coming home from a wedding. Several months ago, a woman who worked at a women’s prison went missing.
A State Department spokeswoman said the agency is aware of the reports, deeming them “deeply concerning,” though without confirming them.
(For security reasons, RealClearPolitics is withholding the women’s names and many details of their identities.) An RCP report in mid-December chronicled the catch-22 U.S. government refugee process that has left these leaders and hundreds like them stranded in the country.
The refugee application process requires Afghan citizens who worked closely with the U.S. government but don’t fall into priority categories qualifying them for Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, to travel to a third country before they can begin their application process. That process is estimated to take 18-24 months, but the U.S. does not facilitate these Afghans’ departure, so many are stranded with no way to support themselves after their government jobs disappeared and the Taliban froze their bank accounts.
Last month, a State Department spokesperson told RCP that the U.S. will continue to “support Afghans in as many ways as we can by providing humanitarian assistance in partnership with the international community.”
Last week the U.S. Agency for International Development announced an initial contribution of $308 million in humanitarian assistance for this year as part of an unprecedented $5 billion United Nations push to help needy Afghans in what has become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Nearly 20 million are on the brink of famine, and by the middle of the year, 97% of Afghans citizens could face “universal poverty,” living below the World Bank-designated international poverty line of $1.90 a day, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
With the new USAID pledge, the United States has provided a total of $782 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Afghan refugees in the region since October 2020.
“President Biden has been clear that humanitarian assistance will continue to flow directly to the people of Afghanistan,” USAID said in a Jan. 11 statement. “… The new contribution from the United States will provide lifesaving aid for the most vulnerable Afghans, and that includes women and girls, minority populations, and people with disabilities.”
Despite this broad public pledge, U.S.-directed humanitarian assistance is not reaching many of those who need it the most – former women leaders and others hiding from the Taliban in safe houses – contacts for several of these people told RCP.
One source in Afghanistan said an international organization turned him away at a food distribution center three times in recent weeks while doling out the provisions to other families with closer ties to those in charge. There are other reports that the Taliban is siphoning off the food and provisions to help feed those in their own ranks, as well as their allies.
Some of these former female leaders have P1 or P2 referrals, meaning a U.S. or international official has recommended them for a refugee program for Afghans who had worked with certain U.S. organizations but who don’t qualify for SIV status. However, that process is languishing. The State Department has completed only 330 cases out of 11,000 referrals and none have entered the United States, Politico reported in early January.
Private U.S. charities and veterans groups have stepped into the void to support some of these locked-down groups over the last five months, including those in the safe house mentioned above. In addition to aiding in the evacuations of thousands of at-risk Afghans, 16 of the veterans groups have joined forces in forming the Moral Compass Federation, an umbrella organization dedicated to helping their Afghan allies and partners in the special operations community.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the international aid is going straight to families of the Taliban, ignoring at-risk civilian populations, such as the Hazara,” Daniel Elkins, the CEO of the Special Operations Association of America and a founding member of the Moral Compass Federation, said in a statement to RCP. (The Hazaras are a Persian-speaking ethnic group who have faced fierce Taliban persecution.)
“While the international community argues over how to provide this critical assistance, our network of veterans and volunteers provides immediate, direct support to at-risk Afghans, many who have been forced into hiding to escape Taliban retribution. For months, we’ve provided our Afghan partners with life-saving food, shelter, clothing, and medical care to help them survive the brutal winter,” he added.
The federation’s members include: the Special Operations Association of America, Aces & Eights, CEEC.CHURCH, Flanders Fields Ltd., The Lifeline Foundation, OP620, Operation Freedom Bird, Operation Recovery, Operation Sacred Promise, Project Exodus Relief, R20, Task Force Argo, Task Force Diablo, Task Force Hawk, Task Force North Star, and Task Force Pineapple.
In a separate effort, the popular ’90s rock band Pearl Jam, along with several other musicians and celebrities, united with a group of high-profile humanitarian organizations last week to urge the Biden administration to send emergency aid to Afghanistan and help the country access frozen bank accounts and other financial resources. The latter move would require the U.S. to ease harsh sanctions put in place against the Taliban since the U.S. left last year. Members of the coalition include Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, Save the Children, InterAction and several others.
After the latest USAID announcement of humanitarian aid last week, news reports indicated that the Taliban is impeding distribution of the aid. Asked about this, State Department spokesman Ned Price vigorously defended the U.S. role, arguing that the problems are decades in the making, not anything caused by last year’s abrupt U.S. withdrawal.
“It is not because of anything the United States is doing or is not doing when it comes to our support of the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people,” Price asserted, blaming the difficulties on the current drought, winter, and the “longer-term trends” over the course of two decades. “And the United States and our partners, we were very clear with the Taliban before … the fall of the previous government in Kabul that any attempt to overtake the country by force would only worsen what was already a humanitarian emergency,” he added.
A senior adviser for the United Nations Development Programme was more pointed in describing the hurdles. Manav Sachdeva, who advises the UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, cites a litany of frustrations he’s experienced in trying to channel aid to those who need it the most: “Insensitivity, apathy, broad systemic failures, political judgment, delays in understanding the need, desires to be on the right side of history rather [than] just help out, [the] story disappearing from the headlines, complicity by the world media to keep the story away from the headlines.”
“Food distribution is inherently problematic in that it faces the same problem as governance – who to partner with if not the ones in charge, as those in charge are Taliban,” he told RCP in an interview.
Sachdeva stressed that he’s willing to talk about the problems on the record out of concern for the millions of Afghan people suffering through a brutal winter. “It isn’t always a supply problem, but a governance and fairness and safety issue,” he said.
The U.S. government, Sachdeva argued, “doesn’t want pressure that we are not doing enough so it comes up with a ballpark pledge and even allocation figures, but actual disbursed and distributed are different figures.
“For the U.N. also, I can say that our partners and partner organizations are basically targets of the Taliban. It’s not easy to set up proper channels that will also not risk lives of those most in need. The August departure was a calamitous one – it has broken down barely functioning systems.”
Trying to get food and assistance to those in safe houses is the hardest part. “The Taliban has to stop hunting them – do an actual rather than rhetorical amnesty” for prominent women and former members of the Afghan government and military, he said.
The best option for the U.S. and international partners, according to Sachdeva, is to own up to the problems and publicly highlight them so they once again make front page news. That, he argues, in turn will put pressure on the Taliban to stop targeting people.
Another recommendation: The international community needs to ratchet up pressure on all neighboring countries to provide safe passage through their borders and, ultimately, negotiate with the Taliban to allow for a food distribution process around the country from a local harvest area.
Yet, without U.S. aid workers on the ground, it’s nearly impossible to assess whether the Taliban can be any type of trusted partner. The U.S. government is already finding it difficult to confirm the myriad reports of Taliban members stealing humanitarian aid and brutalizing, kidnapping or even killing women.
And there are obvious reasons the Biden administration is reluctant to call attention to the spiraling humanitarian crisis: President Biden’s abysmal poll numbers on his handling of the U.S. withdrawal.
A State Department spokesperson late last week condemned any targeted violence against women human rights defenders and civil society activists in general, while continuing to stand by current U.S. policy against helping all at-risk Afghans leave the country in order to begin the refugee application process.
Since mid-December, nearly 80 U.S. citizens haven’t been able to leave the country after the Taliban grounded U.S. evacuation flights. The decision stems from a conflict between the Taliban and the Qatari government, which has partnered with the U.S. on relocation efforts, over access to their flights.
“Harming and killing women and human rights activists is not the practice of a responsible actor or one that seeks legitimacy from the international community,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We stand with the Afghan people, especially with women, children, journalists, human rights defenders, persons with disabilities, members of the LGBTQI+ community, and members of minority groups. We send our deepest condolences to any victims of abuse and their families and call for the perpetrators to be held accountable.”
In late December, Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a virtual meeting with U.N. Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths and President of the International Committee of the Red Cross Peter Maurer about efforts to strengthen humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
An official read-out of that meeting noted the State Department’s “robust and growing engagement” on women’s issues in Afghanistan at senior levels, including the recent appointment of Rina Amiri as special envoy on Afghan women, girls and human rights. On Dec. 29, Blinken announced Amiri’s appointment, along with that of Stephanie Foster as the new senior adviser for women and girls issues within the department’s Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts team.
The two appointees bring decades of public policy, diplomatic and advocacy experience to their new roles advancing the department’s “vital work to support women, girls and human rights,” Blinken said at the time. But some former senior State Department officials question whether the appointments will produce meaningful results for Afghan women if U.S. resettlement policies continue to include impossible hurdles for those who remain stranded.
“There are things the Biden administration can do TODAY to fix some of these problems & yet have refused to do for months for no apparent reason,” Kelley Currie, who served as the ambassador at large for Global Women’s Issues and the U.S. representative at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, tweeted in early January.
First, she argued, they should move the known Afghans who have an SIV or P1 or P2 status – meaning they worked closely with the U.S. or international partners over the last 20 years – from current third countries to U.S. “lily pads” (overseas bases) for processing.
These are “the people we were actually supposed to be helping during the evacuation” but are now stuck in “an Orwellian catch-22 refugee resettlement program from Hell that is both bureaucratically heavy and does nothing to improve screening or security, especially when we’re talking about <10,000 women (inc. their households) who have been previously vetted for U.S. visas, participation in U.S. exchange programs & sundry other engagements in the U.S.”
Currie added, “It is absolutely lunatic that these women & their families are sitting in Albania & other countries, facing potentially years of waiting … when they’re a well-defined, known, credibly identified population that can be easily moved into the same parole processing system used to admit +75K Afghans, a vast majority of whom didn’t meet those criteria.”
Currie said U.S. officials should heed the call from dozens of Democratic senators to establish a special parole category for Afghan women leaders to allow their refugee applications to be processed in Afghanistan rather than making them wait until they can escape to a third country to enter the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which she dubbed USRAP “hell realm.”
“If they are being pre-approved for parole, they will be able to travel & cross a border – something that is almost impossible for them to do legally now,” she tweeted.
A State Department spokesperson acknowledged “that it is extremely difficult for Afghans to get to a third country for their USRAP cases to begin processing,” adding, “We continue to call for safe passage for all those who wish to leave Afghanistan.”
When it comes to problems distributing humanitarian aid to those in safe houses, the State Department said it uses “robust monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for all humanitarian partners that provide assistance within Afghanistan.”
The spokesperson did not address the complaints by prominent international organizations, as well as Afghan women leaders in hiding, that the assistance is not reaching some of the people most in need of it.
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