Airmen prepare to load qualified evacuees aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 21, 2021. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Taylor Crul)
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Politics
On International Women’s Day in early March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood at a lectern against a backdrop of silvery drapes and somberly rattled off a list of women leaders in Afghanistan who had died at the hand of the Taliban or other terrorist groups.
“Fatima Khalil, an official with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, was killed by an IED on her way to her office. Maryam Nawzad was a midwife in a hospital in Kabul when three gunmen attacked the maternity ward. She refused to leave her patient and was killed along with the patient,” Blinken stated.
Several other gripping but tragic stories followed. “These women paid the ultimate sacrifice while working toward a better future for their country,” he said.
This was five months before the Biden administration’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, and the State Department was honoring a group of Afghan women posthumously as part of its annual International Women of Courage awards and gala. Since 2007, the State Department has heralded 155 female leaders from more than 75 countries who have stood up for women’s rights and against oppressive forces. Most years, the awardees included at least one Afghan.
Pre-COVID, the gala experience included inviting close to 20 of these leaders and activists to Washington for the ceremony. Government officials would ferry them around the United States for leadership programs, think tank panel discussions, meetings with lawmakers, and other high-profile public events.
“The equal rights and dignity of women and girls is a foreign-policy priority for the United States,” Blinken explained at that March ceremony. “When we design our foreign policy with the rights and needs of women and girls in mind, our policy is more effective, more humane and more likely to make a lasting difference in people’s lives. And when we support women, we can help foster change on a much broader scale because it’s often women doing the hard work to make that change happen.”
Jill Biden then stepped to the microphone. While all the nominees display “herculean acts of fortitude and fearlessness,” she stressed that they are also human.
“They want what we want: comfort, happiness, good meals with friends and family – memories that make them smile long after they are made,” she said before pledging President Biden’s commitment to them. “The United States will stand with you,” the first lady promised. “We will make the choice to lead, be bold and to lift up women and girls everywhere who light our way.”
Just a few months later, the administration would break those promises to women leaders amid a frantic and frenzied U.S. withdrawal that left more than 100 Afghans trying to flee at the Kabul airport dead, along with 13 U.S. servicemen and women posted there to protect them.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of female leaders — elected officials, judges, members of the Afghan parliament, athletes and activists — were left behind to face the return to Taliban rule and the brutal group’s likely wrath, as well as an undoubtedly more constricted future for all women and girls. While many have successfully fled the country, some prominent women have been stranded there, including some whom the U.S. formally and publicly applauded.
Over the past 15 years, five first ladies, four secretaries of states and numerous other senior State Department officials have honored a total of 12 living Afghan women in addition to those whom Blinken mentioned had died untimely deaths. Throughout the last decade, more Afghan women were honored as IWOC finalists in smaller ceremonies at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, sources said.
Many had their photos taken with prominent U.S. officials, including Catherine Russell, who now serves as Biden’s director of personnel and who participated in several of the IWOC awards ceremonies over the years as President Obama’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s leadership. After the Obama administration, Russell became UNICEF director. She previously served as chief of staff to Jill Biden.
Some IWOC award winners fled Afghanistan before the August U.S. withdrawal, including the first woman pilot in the Afghan Air Force. Others, if prominent enough on the international stage, received private or celebrity assistance to evacuate in the months after the country fell to Taliban control. In late November, for instance, members of the Afghanistan women’s youth development soccer team arrived in Britain after being flown from Pakistan with the help of a New York rabbi, a U.K. soccer club, and Kim Kardashian West. Most of the women in Afghanistan’s now-disbanded parliament fled for their lives when the Taliban took over and are scattered across the globe. Nine of 69 still remain, the BBC reported this week.
Others haven’t been so lucky. Taliban members beheaded Mahjabin Hakimi, one of the best female volleyball players in the Kabul Municipality Volleyball Club, and posted the gruesome photos online, according to her coach.
‘The Waiting, the Waiting…’
Three and a half months after the withdrawal, RealClearPolitics has learned that some of IWOC award recipients, as well as other female elected leaders, judges and activists, are living a desperate existence in their home country. With reports of the Taliban going door to door looking for some prominent women leaders, they are confined in locked-down safe houses, frantically seeking U.S. assistance to evacuate – so far to no avail.
In those months since the U.S. departed, the lives of all Afghan women have changed dramatically for the worse. Prior to the Taliban takeover, women held prominent government positions and had stable incomes and could usually walk the streets without constant fear.
Amid the final days of the U.S. evacuation in late August, one such leader described circling the Kabul airport in a car for six straight days after an American contact suggested U.S. authorities would grant her safe passage. In the end, no one in her group was evacuated. They went back to their homes, quickly packed bags of clothes and, leaving the rest of their possessions behind, sought refuge in a safe house.
(For security reasons, RealClearPolitics is withholding the names of the women who remain stranded in or around Afghanistan, along with the names of some of their spokespersons.)
This woman and her family still have no assurances from the State Department or other U.S. authorities that they will ever be able to leave. “We have to all live together, in a cramped safe house. There is no electricity, and the weather is really cold. We cannot afford the groceries and bringing wood here,” said a spokesman for one IWOC awardee. “Also, the waiting, waiting, waiting. I don’t know ’til what time we have to wait, but we only have two weeks left of money [and resources] to survive.”
The awardee said she feels particularly vulnerable because of her public profile in the Afghan news media. “Day to day, I was talking about women’s rights, women in government, women in politics,” she told RCP in an interview. “I also supported the U.S. government, the American people – they were always generous with their taxpayer dollars, support. I was proud to do so.”
At least one IWOC recipient managed to escape to a nearby country without the U.S. government’s help, but she is stranded there with quickly diminishing resources. She too has tried to contact the U.S. consulate many times and has yet to receive a response, according to a source with first-hand information.
The Taliban has frozen at least some of these women’s bank accounts along with most former Afghanistan government employees. With their nation’s harsh winter setting in and prices of basic consumer goods skyrocketing, these women are pleading for the U.S. to help them evacuate. Some say they only have a few weeks before their resources are gone.
In several cases, private airlift operations have offered to help evacuate them to another country or the U.S., but there are many hurdles, including a bureaucratic regulation making safe passage to America untenable: The women, their families and colleagues cannot apply for prioritized U.S. refugee status until they are out of the country. Many other countries that have accepted Afghan refugees in the months since the withdrawal have either stopped doing so or are not providing any assistance for food and housing once they arrive.
One woman, who served as a prominent local elected leader for several years before the withdrawal, says she has been brutalized by the Taliban several times, as have at least two family members. While they managed to survive, their resources are quickly drying up, and their health is deteriorating without access to doctors and the medications they need.
Human rights lawyers and other advocates for these women say their pleas for State Department action have gone unanswered even though private teams are ready and willing to evacuate them. The problem? Afghans who are not a part of the Special Immigration Visa program — slots mainly allotted to translators and others who worked for the U.S. government — cannot apply directly for resettlement in the P1 or P2 referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. U.S. family members or advocates for them must apply for those referrals on their behalf.
Those specialty refugee statuses also require those wanting to leave Afghanistan to privately evacuate to another country that can help support them while they await admission to the United States. With only a few countries helping Afghan refugees with basic food and housing costs, arriving in any other host country would make subsistence even harder.
“All Afghans eligible and referred to the USRAP must be outside of Afghanistan in a third country for their cases to be processed,” a State Department spokesman told RCP, adding that the U.S. government “does not facilitate the travel to a third country.”
The State Department has made similar statements for weeks, but Afghan advocates are starting to aggressively push back in a more organized and vigorous way.
Pressure Mounts to Help Women Afghan Leaders Evacuate
Pressure on the Biden administration to take steps to protect these women ratcheted up this week with complaints about the inaction growing on Capitol Hill and prominent advocates, including Angelina Jolie, urging the U.S. to do more to fulfill the president’s promises of assistance. Asked why there are still prominent women in Afghanistan who want to leave, including IWOC recipients, the State Department told RCP its current focus is supporting the departures of U.S. citizens and permanent legal residents and their families, as well as “certain locally engaged staff, SIV holders, and their immediate families.”
“We continue to receive and process submissions for Afghans who may be eligible for referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program through a P1 or P2 referral,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue to support Afghans in as many ways as we can by providing humanitarian assistance in partnership with the international community.”
The spokesperson acknowledged that it is “extremely difficult for Afghans to get to a third county for their USRAP cases to begin processing,” but didn’t offer an internal way to streamline it. Instead, the spokesman appeared to call on the Taliban to allow refugees’ safe passage, as well as third countries to allow entry for Afghans seeking protection.
“There are a number of countries that have been very generous in supporting relocated Afghans, with which we have been coordinating,” the spokesman said. “But members of Congress and human rights advocates argue the Biden administration could and should be doing far more to address visa barriers and prioritize women the U.S. government has long promoted, encouraged and applauded.”
Visa Requirement Is a Catch-22
Matt Coburn, a retired Green Beret and leader of a group of veterans, known as Task Force Pineapple, who have helped more than 1,000 Americans and Afghans evacuate, describes an impenetrable impasse at the State Department. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has started denying the broad humanitarian parolee status that allowed tens of thousands of Afghans to evacuate in the final days of August. Many of them had not worked closely with the U.S. government, he said. But others, who had spent years risking their lives doing so and therefore have the biggest targets on their backs, were still left behind.
“It’s a Catch-22 because now all of these different statuses require you to leave Afghanistan before the U.S. government will even consider [allowing] you to come to the United States,” Coburn said in an interview. “Sometimes State gives you a referral number, but then it stops there until the people can depart Afghanistan.”
The entire refugee vetting process, he said, could take up to 12 to 24 months, requiring Afghans with frozen bank accounts to have enough personal resources to remain in third countries until it wraps up, an impossible scenario for most still trying to leave. Senators on both sides of the aisle for months have been pressing the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to create a humanitarian parole category specifically for women leaders, activists, human rights defenders, parliamentarians, journalists, and former members of the Afghan military.
On Aug. 16, before the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal ended, a bipartisan group of 44 senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, called on the Biden administration to take “swift and robust action to protect and support Afghan women leaders facing unparalleled danger following the Taliban’s’ violent sweep across the country.”
In a letter to Blinken and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the senators urged administration officials to “streamline the paperwork process to facilitate referrals to allow for fast, humane, and efficient relocation to the United States.”
The State Department this week did not respond to questions about why it hasn’t met those congressional demands nearly four months later. Jason Poblete, president of the Global Liberty Alliance, a human rights nonprofit, says his client, a female Afghan leader, has “a network of willing, capable and caring Americans who have been ready for months to get [her] out of Afghanistan.”
“[My client] has visited the U.S., the Department of State, Congress and Washington D.C. think tanks,” he wrote in a letter to Blinken Nov. 28. “In better times, she was heralded by U.S. policymakers and experts, rightly so, as someone who was committed to a new Afghanistan and the success of U.S. policy. But, with very few exceptions, previous champions have not stepped up to help.”
“The Taliban tried to assassinate her once many years ago. They want to do so again,” Poblete wrote. “…The U.S. government is failing [my client], her family, and people like her.”
Lip Service in Support
At the White House Tuesday, press secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. is “absolutely” committed to protecting and supporting female Afghan leaders, especially those who have received the IWOC award and are especially exposed.
“We celebrate, we honor the courage of these women,” she told RCP during her Tuesday briefing with reporters. “We are committed to continuing to provide a range of assistance and to working with a range of nonprofits and NGOs around the world.”
A senior administration official followed up in a lengthy emailed statement, noting that the administration had resettled approximately 35,000 women and girls since Aug. 15 and pledging that “our commitment will not stop there.”
“We are deeply concerned about reports that women leaders and human rights defenders have become targets with the fall of Kabul and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan,” the official said. “We continue to press the Taliban in all of our engagements on the need to uphold the rights of women and girls.”
Critics, however, point out that many of those 35,000 were part of the last-minute exodus amid the deadly Kabul airport crush. In order to avoid additional bloodshed after the suicide bombing, the Biden administration was not rigorously verifying claims that those attempting to flee had worked for the United States in any capacity before allowing them to depart on U.S. military planes. Coburn and others cast the late airlift operations as a free-for-all to help prevent another suicide bombing.
The senior administration official, while appearing to rely on the Taliban to allow refugees safe passage out of the country, issued a series of threats if the new government did not comply or, worse, imposes a more widespread violent crackdown on women’s rights.
“We, along with the world community, have made clear that any nation that wants international legitimacy — and that does not want to be deemed a pariah state — must not interfere with the universal human rights or fundamental freedoms of its people, and should demonstrate respect for and inclusion of women and girls, in all their diversity, including supporting their education, access to health and other services, and employment opportunities,” the official continued. “We are closely watching the Taliban’s actions across the country and will work with Congress and with our allies and partners to support women and girls and promote accountability for the perpetrators of human rights abuses and violations.”
Critics: Talk Is Cheap
Those words were little solace for those who have been trying to facilitate the evacuations and visa processes for several women leaders. Influential Republicans in Congress on Tuesday dismissed the statement as hollow without immediate action to back it up.
“The U.S. government spent years encouraging women to step up and lead in Afghanistan, telling them that their voices mattered and asking them to jeopardize their safety for the sake of their country,” Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, who serves as the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told RCP. “Now, these same women have become targets for doing exactly what we encouraged them to do. We have a moral obligation to help the people that the Biden Administration put in harm’s way – all because he needlessly and haphazardly withdrew from Afghanistan without a plan.”
Rep. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, offered an even harsher assessment.
“Talk is cheap: President Biden’s State Department gave these Afghan women awards but not plane tickets,” he said in an emailed statement. “After putting a target on their backs, the Biden Administration has abandoned these women to the Taliban. This grotesque moral cowardice is exactly what happens when the Biden administration sees the catastrophe in Afghanistan as a PR crisis rather than a life-or-death situation for those left behind. This is sickening.”
Others pledged to work with their Senate colleagues and administration officials to help avoid an even bigger humanitarian disaster in the coming winter months. After meeting with Angelina Jolie on Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen issued a joint statement Tuesday calling on “our nation and the international community to work together to assist women and religious minorities who remain in Afghanistan.”
“We will be working with our colleagues and administration officials to develop a coordinated U.S. response, hopefully in conjunction with the international community, to help the Afghan people through this winter and beyond,” the two senators said.
Philip Wegmann contributed to this report.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
The post U.S. honored Afghan women who led, then left them behind appeared first on WND.
