Ahmad Haidari last saw his wife and four children on a warm summer day in early August 2021, in Kabul. His 1-year-old daughter followed him around the house, hugging him whenever she could.
When it was time to return to his mission as a pilot with Afghanistan’s air forces, Haidari carried the little girl down the stairs to the parking lot and kissed her one last time. Then he went back to the “forever war” the United States had committed to pulling out from and that the Taliban were about to win.
“The small one, she was so interested in me,” Haidari told me earlier this year from his new American home.
Haidari is one of the allies the U.S. vowed to protect after its withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago. But for tens of thousands of Afghans like him, who fought side by side with U.S. forces, this protection never materialized. A systematic analysis of the available government data suggests that by April 2023, at least three out of five petitions by Afghans who sought protection for their role in the war were still pending. Case processing has ticked up since then, but many allies remain in Afghanistan, some living in acute danger while they wait for administrative roadblocks to be cleared.
Haidari joined the Afghan Army in 2008, when he was 21. He did so against the advice of his father, who had fled the Taliban when they first ruled Afghanistan before 9/11, returned when the U.S. installed a new government, and preferred for his sons to stay out of harm’s way. But Haidari was freshly married, and making ends meet was difficult. He learned to fly a helicopter and, in 2014, joined the Afghan Army’s elite 777th unit, which the U.S. had spent several hundred million dollars establishing. American instructors taught Haidari how to land in confined areas, on hillsides, on dust. “They are very good pilots,” he told me. For years, he worked in mixed teams made up of both Afghan and U.S. soldiers, sharing cockpits and army bases. Afghan pilots like Haidari would drop American special forces and fetch them out after their night raids.
“Then, in 2019, our mentors said they were done here,” Haidari said. The Trump administration had intensified negotiations with the Taliban and decided to scale back U.S. engagement. The security situation soon grew worse across Afghanistan.
On Aug. 1, 2021, in the southwestern province of Helmand, a rocket-propelled grenade flew at Haidari’s helicopter, missing narrowly as he attempted to land. A bullet hit the hydraulic system. Alarms went off, lights blinked. “There was no time to think,” Haidari said. “The good thing was that the ground was wet with water, and we just sank in.” Another pilot managed to land next to Haidari, despite the mud, and rescued the pilot and his crew before they could be captured by Taliban troops. In shock, Haidari was sent home for what would be the last time. As his little girl followed him around the house, Haidari was haunted by the thought of what the Taliban would have done to him had he been captured.
Back in the air a week later, Haidari frantically tried to evacuate military bases before the Taliban overpowered them. On Aug. 15, 2021, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and the Taliban seized the presidential palace. At 6 p.m. that day, Haidari’s commander ordered him to fly government officials out to Uzbekistan. Haidari expected to drop them off, return to Afghanistan, and rescue his family, he told me. But when he landed across the border, Uzbek soldiers confiscated his cellphone and logbook. They transferred him to a military base that felt like a jail to Haidari, with no way back.
For the duration of the 20-year war, the best hope for Afghans who faced threats for supporting American forces was to win a special immigrant visa to the United States, known as an SIV. From the start, securing one depended on American political whims, with visa numbers fluctuating under different administrations and U.S. ambassadors to Kabul.
In spring of 2021, around the time President Joe Biden announced U.S. troops would be out by September, the number of SIVs issued picked up. But officials only shifted into emergency mode after the Taliban already controlled half of Afghanistan’s districts, with the first evacuation flight for SIV applicants and their families leaving Kabul in July 2021. On Aug. 2, 2021, the State Department introduced priority treatment for Afghans under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, USRAP, a scheme to resettle vulnerable refugees. In parallel, officers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, scrambled to process cases of Afghans who had applied for humanitarian parole, a status that grants emergency access to the U.S. for a limited period of time.
“It is a crucial life and death situation for the parole beneficiaries in Afghanistan, and we need to complete these cases as soon as possible,” USCIS branch chief John “Wally” Bird wrote in an email to his team on Aug. 14, 2021. “Please stop work on everything except the Afghan cases.”
It was too late. On Aug. 15, 2021, for every Afghan who had received an SIV since the inception of the program, another ally was still in Afghanistan waiting for their application to be processed, according to government data and estimates by the Association of Wartime Allies, a veteran group. Meanwhile, many more Afghans like Haidari now faced retaliation by the Taliban.
As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, thousands of U.S. soldiers flew back to Afghanistan to organize a dramatic airlift out of Hamid Karzai International Airport. “We’re gonna do everything, everything that we can to provide safe evacuation for our Afghan allies, partners, and Afghans who might be targeted because of their association with the United States,” Biden promised on Aug. 20. Meanwhile, Haidari, who had been in the jail-like military base in Uzbekistan for 10 days, was still desperately trying to reach his U.S. contacts. Without his phone, he relied on an Afghan commander held with him, who eventually managed to connect with the U.S. military. “They promised to take out our families,” Haidari told me. “They promised a hundred times.”
On Aug. 30, 2021, as the last evacuation flights left Kabul, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. had gotten many Afghan allies out, but many still remained. “Our commitment to them has no deadline,” he told the world in a televised statement.
U.S. officers transferred Haidari to another base in Uzbekistan, then to Abu Dhabi. In November 2021, he reached Pennsylvania. It was his first time in the United States, and he had nowhere specific to go. A resettlement agency brought him to Birmingham, Alabama, where he had to apply for asylum to reach permanent residence status. (Haidari, employed by the Afghan military rather than the U.S. directly, was never eligible for an SIV.) At this point, Haidari was still hoping to swiftly reunite with his family, but to no avail.
Today, the outlook for the Afghan allies left behind is bleak. Individual U.S. soldiers and veterans still have lists of people they try to evacuate. But with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul closed, reaching a U.S. representative for the required interviews is a major hurdle.
“Please be advised: The United States is unable to provide protection or support to you while you await a decision on your refugee case,” the Department of State communicates in an information sheet for Afghans. “Case processing can be lengthy (potentially 12-18 months), so please be aware that this process could require living in and supporting yourself and your family in a third country for a substantial amount of time until case processing is complete.”
By April 2023, more than 840,000 SIV applicants and family members were still in Afghanistan, according to the State Department’s own estimates. The Biden administration hired additional people to process Afghan cases, but the department “has considered the SIV program a series of individual steps without an overall strategy,” wrote its internal auditors in August 2023.
It could take more than three decades to get back to all the Afghan allies in need, estimated the Association of Wartime Allies. “They really can’t imagine the bureaucracy they are running into,” said Kim Staffieri, the group’s executive director. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told members of Congress in November 2023 that “it’s either a funding problem or a morale problem or a not-interested problem.”
A spokesperson for the State Department said the Biden administration had streamlined processes and was issuing SIVs to Afghan partners at record rates. More than 28,000 Afghan refugee cases were being processed as of July 2024, the spokesperson added.
The plight of wartime allies has mobilized an unlikely coalition of veterans and human rights organizations that have rallied around the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill pending in Congress. It specifically mentions Haidari’s unit. New processing centers would speed up the treatment of pending applications. Afghan allies in all categories would have a clearer path to permanent residency.
A small cohort of lawmakers blocked the bill. They were building on anti-Muslim sentiments from former President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, said Alise Coen, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, who studies U.S. approaches to refugee protection. Meanwhile, Coen observed, Biden’s focus has shifted to Ukraine and Gaza. The plight of Afghans in a bureaucratic quagmire is unlikely to be a high priority under a Trump administration, but it’s also not clear that momentum would happen under Democratic presidential candidate and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris, Coen said. “I am concerned that neither administration will be prioritizing the protection of Afghan allies.”
When I talked to Haidari from his home in Birmingham in January 2024, he was on one of his days off from his two jobs: shipping DHL and UPS orders from a warehouse, and driving for Uber. Haidari, now 36, spoke in a calm and precise manner, with an undertone of grief and anger. His asylum request had been pending for over a year at that point, far exceeding the limit of 150 days Congress set for Afghan evacuees back in September 2021.
The Taliban had been looking for Haidari. “They went to my house and found some military stuff,” he said. They smashed a TV and other furniture. His wife only told him of the assault months later, for fear that he would put himself at risk to rescue them. In Haidari’s hometown, the Taliban started a fight with his father and shot at his cousin. “This all happened because of me,” he said.
Shortly after we talked, Haidari finally received a response from USCIS and was granted asylum, allowing him to file a “follow-to-join” request for his family in February 2024. In July, Haidari was informed that a previous application to reunite with his family, filed as an Afghan parolee, was “still being processed.” By August, a plea to speed up the cases of Haidari’s wife and four children remained unanswered.
Haidari’s youngest daughter is now almost four and refuses to talk to him when he calls on WhatsApp. “She told me to come home so many times,” Haidari said. “I explained the situation to the older ones, but the younger one, she doesn’t know.” Haidari’s other daughter, now 13, spends her days drawing. His two boys learn in school that people outside of Afghanistan are not Muslims, Haidari told me. “Their minds are being changed.”
Sometimes, Haidari’s wife tells him she is growing tired of this life. They both know that going back to Afghanistan is too dangerous for Haidari, while inviting her and the children to the U.S. is not yet possible. Without a green card, meeting in a third country is not an option, either. “There is no choice but to be patient,” Haidari said. “We have to wait for the right time.”
Before we hung up on our last Zoom call, Haidari asked me to write about the families of the pilots who were killed, who had no one to support them.
“We did a lot,” Haidari said. “But our families, our colleagues, they are totally forgotten by the United States. They gave us orders. But they are not standing by their word.”
The post ‘They Promised to Take Out Our Families’: The Afghans America Left Behind appeared first on Foreign Policy.
