When the Cruelty is Just Dumb

Why do congressional Republicans want to deport Afghans who helped the US military?

Photo by Wanman uthmaniyyah on Unsplash

Congress has agreed on a basic framework for an omnibus spending bill, ending (for now) the threat of a government shutdown. But the spending bill is missing one huge, crucial component: the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would put evacuees who got out of Afghanistan during the US military’s swift and chaotic withdrawal on the path to permanent residency. Without it, tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the US in the war and who believed in our promises of democracy, freedom, and protection could face deportation back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

At the same time many Republicans are blocking this bill, they’re also gearing up for an investigation into the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, partly under the guise of concern for the many Afghans we abandoned.

I was critical of Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal for exactly this reason: Thousands of Afghans who helped the US and who believed our promises and risked their lives to advocate for democracy, women’s rights, and greater freedoms were abandoned. The pullout was chaotic and horribly planned; while I don’t fault Biden for wanting to get out (and for having his hands tied on the timing, thanks to the Trump administration) , Biden could have and should have made better-laid plans — or really any plans at all — for the mass evacuation of tens of thousands of innocent people. Many Afghans did eventually get out, but that wasn’t thanks to the Biden administration’s planning; it was thanks to service members, human rights activists, and journalists who were jumping up and down and screaming about this.

Now, a year and a half later, there are still tens of thousands of people stuck in an Afghanistan that is descending further and further into inhumane darkness. Girls are no longer allowed to attend secondary school, and women cannot attend university. Women cannot go out in public unaccompanied; they can’t work many jobs; maternal mortality rates have shot up. The Taliban have targeted women’s rights advocates, journalists, and anyone they suspect helped the US. They’ve murdered and tortured perceived political opponents.

Why are so many Republican so willing to send our Afghan allies back into the Taliban’s hands?

If Congress doesn’t pass the Afghan Readjustment Act, then the lucky Afghans who did get to the United States during and after the withdrawal will be stuck in limbo. Some will obtain grants of asylum, a process that the Biden administration has laudably sped up. But many others won’t — asylum applications generally require having a lawyer and some English language skills; they require documentation of mistreatment or threats, which may have been left behind in Afghanistan (many of the people who fled weren’t allowed so much as a suitcase). And Afghans who don’t make it into our confusing and difficult asylum system may wind up on track for deportation.

This is all just a giant, unenforced error. Yes, it’s cruel — too many Republicans have simply embraced reflexive xenophobia, opposing anything and everything that appears to help immigrants. According to the Washington Post, while the Afghan Adjustment Act is a bipartisan one, “some of the same Republican lawmakers who once championed America’s responsibility to its allies have begun to question whether those guided onto U.S. evacuation flights last year had sufficiently demonstrated their allegiance. Others have come to view the idea of citizenship for thousands of Afghans as part of a larger liberal immigration agenda that they oppose. Republicans in recent days stripped a provision from the annual defense policy bill to extend a special visa program for Afghan allies.”

But it’s also just dumb and short-sighted. The US needed our Afghan allies. Our troops relied on them. And many of the Afghans who pressed for democracy and women’s rights did so because they thought the US had their backs, and that it might finally be safe to try to build the Afghanistan they wanted. To betray these people — among the best and bravest in their country — isn’t just an insult to these brave Afghans, but a wholly self-defeating move that will make the US a far less trustworthy partner in any future mission or conflict.

That’s why some two dozen former military leaders wrote to Congress in support of the act, saying, “As military professionals, it was and remains our duty to prepare for future conflicts. We assure you that in any such conflict, potential allies will remember what happens now with our Afghan allies.”

If we want people to risk their lives to help the US in the future, we need to keep our most basic promises to the people who helped us in Afghanistan. And if we want to be just plain decent, we need to offer Afghan refugees some future stability and not deport them back to Afghanistan.

This is what many Republicans in Congress are doing: They are setting us on a path to deport Afghans who risked their lives to help the US back to Afghanistan, where they very well may be killed. This is cruelty without a point: cruelty that ruins and potentially ends the lives of innocent people, and ultimately hurts US interests, too.

The Afghan Adjustment Act costs the US very little, and benefits us tremendously. We already broke so much in Afghanistan, including many of our promises. The least we can do is keep this one.

IRC has a handy little template you can use to email your senators. It takes about 15 seconds to tell them: Do the absolute minimum for our Afghan allies by giving them a path to permanent residency in the United States.

xx Jill

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