When I served with the U.S. Army as a combat engineer in the remote city of Farah, Afghanistan, from 2004 to 2005, my fellow soldiers and I kept one final emergency bullet in our pockets in case we were about to be captured by the Taliban. There are worse things than death.
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Luckily, I survived the war and returned home in 2005 physically unscathed. In the years since, I have kept in contact with many of the Afghans I’d met over there, even cowriting one of my novels, Enduring Freedom, with one of them, Jawad Arash. But while I spent my book advance on a hot tub, Jawad spent his on building a house in Afghanistan that he was later forced to abandon when he had to flee the Taliban, who, in the wake of the precipitous 2021 American pullout of his country, have sought to hunt down, torture, and kill anyone who worked with the Americans.
That’s why, for the last four years, I have fought a new war, a hopeless nightmare struggle to help Afghans who served alongside U.S. soldiers reach any place safe from the Taliban. And now there is hope for a simple bureaucratic reform that can help bring to safety the brave men who fought alongside me and so many American soldiers.
To explain, let me tell you about the dilemma faced by two Afghans with whom I am still in contact.
The first was one of our Afghan “terps” (as we called our interpreters). This man, code-named “Tarjoman” (their word for “translator”), was, by far, our best terp. Every squad rolling out on a mission would always, if possible, bring Tarjoman along. My squad conducted dozens of missions with this great man. Again and again, he would venture out with us, unarmed and in plain view of all, including possible enemies, to help us communicate with the Afghan people to get the job done.
Early after the American retreat from Afghanistan, Tarjoman applied for the special immigrant visa program, which was designed to help Afghans who served with our military be admitted to America. After waiting three long, terrifying years, Tarjoman was devastated when the State Department informed him that his application was denied because he had not sufficiently proved that he served with Americans.
I could, today, summon the sworn testimony of dozens of soldiers to confirm Tarjoman had served with us. I have many photos and videos showing Tarjoman serving with us. But Tarjoman and his family remain in terrible danger because of paperwork. The SIV system was broken because the State Department demanded two forms of proof of service. The first was a letter of recommendation from an American soldier, ideally an officer, testifying that the Afghan served with our military. The second was an HR letter.
The HR letter was the problem. The State Department demanded paperwork from some hiring entity. However, that paperwork may never have been generated for that employment in the first place. Our hiring process was often quite informal. When my unit arrived in Farah, Afghanistan, in 2004, our base outside the city was not yet constructed. We rented a mudbrick Afghan house in the middle of the city. From the beginning, we employed Afghans as interpreters, guards, and for trash disposal. We hired Afghans to build the high walls of our big square compound and the buildings within. They dug our wells. We hired these men in part to bolster the local economy and because we needed language translators and extra guards on the outer perimeter. We talked with them, joked with them, prayed with them, and depended upon them. We served in the war with them, trying to help Afghanistan improve education and infrastructure so that Afghans could better resist the Taliban.
It was a good mission, but a long one. It takes time to educate whole generations and raise them to positions of authority so that they can implement lasting, meaningful change. Nevertheless, despite the heat, the cold, the dust, and the fear of deadly Taliban reprisal, our Afghan allies served at our sides.
We often hired Afghans without much official paperwork because we were very busy establishing an American outpost in Farah, and we were naive enough to imagine that America had learned its lesson from the Vietnam War and would not betray and throw away our mission. Had we known then what we know now, we would have produced much more careful paperwork, to prove to the U.S. State Department later, that these men were our trusted allies. We would have demanded more official documentation for all our Afghan hires, and we would have secured copies of these papers in triplicate for later use.
The HR letter that Tarjoman and others like him needed, if it ever existed, may have been filed in some Kabul office for an agency that no longer exists, or it may be inaccessible because it is kept in a building currently controlled by the Taliban. The HR letter may have been destroyed over 24 rough years of war and subsequent Taliban rule. Whatever the reason for the absence of this document, the result for Tarjoman was the same: A good Afghan man who served with the American military in the war in Afghanistan for almost a decade was left in grave danger due to paperwork.
Take another Afghan whom my fellow soldiers and I fought alongside and are indebted to, code-named “Jiraba” (their word for “socks”). He was one of our guards. This man was armed with an AK-47 and, with other Afghans, protected our base’s outer perimeter. Those who approached in a vehicle or on foot first checked in with the outer Afghan guards. Obviously, this placed Jiraba and the others in a great deal of danger from possible Taliban attacks. Yet Jiraba did the job willingly and well until some funding problem required us to reduce the number of hired Afghan guards.
The problem was that the SIV program required Afghans to have served with the American military for longer than one year, and Jiraba was only our guard for a bit under a year. But the Taliban don’t care if an Afghan served with Americans for one year or one day. The result, in the current Taliban-run country Jiraba lives in, is the same, as Jiraba discovered the hard way.
One day, the Taliban arrested him on suspicion of having worked with Americans. By Providence, they did not seize his phone, which had plenty on it to prove he had served with the U.S. Army. The phone would have also compromised others who had served with our unit. Without the phone evidence, the Taliban tortured Jiraba for months, demanding a confession as evidence of his service. They beat him. They sodomized him. They fried him with live electric wires. Somehow, he did not break.
During my time in the war in Afghanistan, Jiraba stood guard while we slept. He was regularly at more risk than we were. And he was repaid by being abandoned. He was tortured because he risked his life to help American soldiers. He remains in danger because of his service. Who knows when the Taliban may arrest him again? It was wrong for Jiraba to be ineligible for SIV just because he did not serve a full year with the U.S. Army.
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Now, under President Donald Trump, the SIV program is, at best, on hold. And worse than pausing the process of rescuing our Afghan allies from the Taliban is that it’s possible some of our hard-won progress in that area is being reversed. Given the fast pace with which the Trump administration conducts business and initiates change, it is difficult to sort fact from rumor from partisan propaganda, and the policy toward our Afghan allies changes so frequently that it’s likely that between researching, writing, and publishing this piece, the policy will have changed again.
My Afghan friend and coauthor Jawad Arash, who finally escaped the Taliban and came to America on a student visa, is at an American university, working on a Ph.D. upon which his life depends. He hates Hamas and all other terrorist organizations. He’d be a great American. Even Trump would like him. But these days, since all Afghan nationals are rumored to be under threat of deportation, he has returned to the sleepless nights he suffered back when he and his family were on the run from the Taliban. If Jawad’s family is forced to return to Afghanistan, he and his wife and tiny children face murder and worse. The Taliban are very creative in their cruelty.
Because former President Joe Biden made the situation in Afghanistan so much worse, even arming the Taliban with tens of billions of dollars of American weapons, America owes a special debt to Afghans who are particularly persecuted by the Taliban. Afghans who have legally reached safety in America, who do not support terrorist organizations, and who have followed our laws should remain in America. Outside of some expensive American-funded prison/refugee camp we might establish in some other place, no country will take them. Believe me. In the two years I fought to save Jawad, I studied the immigration policies of every country, many of which I’d previously never even heard of.
But it is useless to criticize the policies of an administration that is trying to clean up an immigration disaster, or to look backward at the Biden administration, which is over. What I have some insight into, because of my personal connection and work with Afghans to whom America owes safety, is what things could look like going forward to keep America safe and its borders under control and to make sure it honors its promises and debts to the Afghans who fought alongside U.S. soldiers.
Tens of millions of good Afghan people trusted America and believed in our promise of hope for a better, safer, more stable Afghanistan. Biden’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan condemned those people to an oppressive Taliban hell. Still, America cannot possibly grant asylum to tens of millions of Afghans. But the Taliban aren’t simply an ideologically or economically opposed enemy. They are evil and sadistic. The Afghans who served with the American military face a special, deadly danger because of that service. We cannot continue to abandon them.
The past program requiring a letter of recommendation from an American soldier and an HR letter should be resumed. However, if for any reason an Afghan ally does not have and cannot obtain an HR letter, said Afghan should be eligible for SIV upon furnishing three letters from verified American Afghanistan War veterans who served with said Afghan and can swear for the Afghan’s service and character. After the last several years of troubled immigration policy, many Americans demand a more thorough vetting process for those seeking asylum. My three-soldier approach would provide just that. The State Department could easily verify the Afghanistan service of all three service members from Defense Department records, and surely, three service members swearing trust in a known Afghan ally is better proof of the Afghan’s trustworthiness than a single recommendation and HR letter. And, since the Taliban do not grant exemptions for those Afghans who served with Americans for less than a year, we Americans should not exclude from the SIV program those Afghans who served with us for less than a year. An Afghan who served with the U.S. military in the war in Afghanistan should be eligible for SIV if he served 30 days or more.
The Army drilled into us soldiers the idea that we leave no one behind. It was part of our creed in which we also swore to live the Army Values, one of which is the value of honor. The implementation of my suggestions would ensure America crafts an honorable policy that rectifies our mistakes without abandoning good Afghans who stood alongside American soldiers. There is still time to remedy the chaos and injustice of Biden’s random and ineffective effort to aid our Afghan allies.
Trump can still prove he is better than Biden regarding Afghanistan by fulfilling America’s moral obligation toward the Afghans who served with our military.
Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.