Tracey Jacobson, the former State Department official in charge of the special-immigrant visa program that was supposed to get our Afghan allies out of Afghanistan safely, is Joe Biden’s nominee for the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Eli Lake reports for the Free Press:

Since the withdrawal, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have fled to Pakistan. But in September, Pakistan’s military began a brutal campaign to force these migrants back to the country they left. It has been particularly perilous for Afghans who sided with America in its war against the Taliban. They now live with a target on their back.

The SIV process, which involves obtaining letters of recommendation from U.S. officials, a labyrinth of official forms and paperwork, and protocols that have changed over time, is nearly impossible to navigate for people living underground in fear of the Taliban. . . .

State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told The Free Press that “Ambassador Jacobson is proud of the Afghanistan task force she led from mid-July to mid-August 2021, which created streamlined processes from bringing SIV applicants to the United States.” He added, “As a result of her work and the work of others, we have been able to issue nearly 38,000 SIVs to principal applicants and their eligible family members since January 2021. The work is not complete and the Department will continue to demonstrate its commitment to the brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with the United States. The Department has also taken a number of steps to improve the SIV program, including continuing to streamline the application and adjudication process.”

But Simone Ledeen, a former Pentagon official who has worked with veteran groups to rescue Afghan allies since 2021, told The Free Press, “If the goal of the task force was to effectively help our Afghan allies become American citizens, then it has utterly failed.” She added, “It is shocking that someone with such a profound, demonstrated history of failure gets appointed to this job.”

Jacobson is currently the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and has served as a U.S. Ambassador to the Republics of Kosovo, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. She has no “experience serving at a senior level in an Arabic country,” Lake notes, which could be a disadvantage given rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran-proxies in Iraq. This week, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched a drone attack that killed three U.S. servicemen, and wounded 34 more.

Around 150,000 Afghan allies are still waiting for their SIVs. The stunted and complicated process is another failure in the Biden administration’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, which in addition to killing 13 Marines, abandoned Afghans who we asked two decades ago to fight our war.

The Free Press‘s cover-photo for Lake’s story was the once-viral photo of Marines lifting an infant over a razor-topped fence at Hamid Karzai International Airport. One of the Marines in that photo, Gregory Whalen, said that the airport was overrun with Afghans and civilians trying to escape, and described the chaotic scene to me a couple of years ago.

“Sometimes, there were women and fathers trying to pass their kids up to us, because they were worried about them getting dropped and trampled and crushed in all the bodies,” Whalen, a member of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said. “And so it was normal for a little bit. We eventually got the order to stop doing that because there were too many parentless children in the waiting area behind us.”

“We were wondering, ‘Could we have been there for a whole month more, what more could we have done if we had been there earlier?,'” he added. “I am going to assume that our command and the people in charge of those decisions made the best decision they could with the information and intelligence that they were receiving because nobody expected the Taliban to take over the entire country in a matter of days.”

Many Afghan allies now live with targets on their back, Lake reports, fearing that the Taliban might harm them or their families. Stateside, the families of 13 American soldiers who were killed by a suicide bomber outside of Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26, 2021, still wonder why not one government official has been punished for conducting the failed operation in Afghanistan.