The Soul-Deep Moral Injury of Forgetting Our Afghan Allies and Evacuees
Military veterans and their families bear the severest burdens associated with the wars our country asks them to fight. Those asked to answer this call are a relatively small number, about 0.5% of Americans currently serve in the US military. I intentionally say “asked,” because we have an all-volunteer military; these men and women willingly choose to face the harshest and most dangerous tasks.
This act of service does not come without consequences. Moral injury imposed on all veterans is real, whether it manifests itself outwardly or through intense inner feelings of conflict over what our country asks them to do. Veterans will inevitably face the dissonance innate in a war. Much of this conflict is dealt with in positive and productive ways and, most often, inspires continued life-long service in the pursuit of a better world.
One of the most troubling aspects of deployments to combat areas is when our own country contributes to this moral injury through a lack of understanding or willful neglect of the people whose lives are threatened because of their service with us. I mean the Iraqis and Afghans, in particular, who fought alongside us, provided mission critical expertise, became trusted team members and friends, and then faced, and in many cases still face, threats of death from our mutual adversaries.
Despite herculean efforts by veterans and others, our combat allies have been abandoned to a system that is overloaded, poorly-resourced, and laden with bureaucratic inertia. The Special Immigrant Visa, a visa category created by Congress to take our interpreters and others out of harm’s way when their lives are threatened because of that service, leaves these American allies languishing for years in a procedural morass. Many have died at the hands of our mutual adversaries while waiting. Others continue to wait in anxious anticipation, complicated by the addition of many thousands more applications from a new Congress-created P2 visa category for Afghans working for news organizations and nonprofits. Promises veterans made to not leave these friends and allies behind are being broken by our country. That is a soul-deep moral injury for many of us who continue to fight for them.
In August 2021, the Biden Administration made the decision, for reasons that can be argued, to remove the small contingency of the US military still in Afghanistan. The action caused a massive evacuation from the airport in Kabul, with thousands of Afghans desperately finding their way to flights out of Afghanistan. These were the lucky ones. Those left behind continue to be hunted by a vicious and unrelenting Taliban, whose disdain for those who supported the United States mission — and for women more generally — are inspiring intolerable levels of inhumanity. As the world looks on with the advantage of moral distance, veterans who fought for and gained incredible steps forward, in concert with the Afghan people, feel personally the great losses inflicted by the Taliban regime.
Those Afghans who made the flights out of Kabul are now living under a new kind of legal uncertainty. Currently, the pathway available to the Afghan refugees is asylum, a paperwork-intensive process with years-long backlogs that have prevented thousands of people from finding safety in the U.S. Even harder for the Afghans fleeing persecution in their country: a successful asylum claim requires proof that a person would face violence in their home country, the very documents that Afghans were advised to destroy when escaping the Taliban. To ensure that Afghans find real, lasting safety in the U.S., Congress must pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which will allow Afghan parolees to seek legal permanent residence in the U.S.
Honoring our commitments to our allies is honoring the veterans who served with them. The two are inseparable. In these times of continued and ongoing conflict in areas where our military men and women have fought, our country must do better in considering the moral injury of not protecting the people with whom our veterans serve. A yellow ribbon magnet is not enough. More is required if we are to honor the service of our veterans. A good place to start is to urge Members of Congress to improve the Special Immigrant Visa process and to immediately pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.
Note: As this article is being completed, Congress failed to include the Afghan Adjustment Act in the Omnibus Spending bill. Provisions did provide an additional four thousand Special Immigrant Visas, but no real change in the flawed process for awarding those visas.
*LTC (retired) Rick Burns is a veteran Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the founder of Karadah Project, a nonprofit supporting displaced women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan and an advocate through several organizations for the interests of Iraqis and Afghans.
