(Yes, the regularly liberal The Atlantic,
is calling Afghanistain Joe Biden's Siagon & Betrayal,
a typical long Atlantic story.)

from
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/biden-afghanistan-exit-american-allies-abandoned/621307/

THE BETRAYAL

America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan added moral injury to
military failure. But a group of soldiers, veterans, and ordinary
citizens came together to try to save Afghan lives and salvage some
American honor.

By George Packer
JANUARY 31, 2022
SHARE

I.
THE END
it took four presidencies for America to finish abandoning Afghanistan.
George W. Bush’s attention wandered off soon after American Special
Forces rode horseback through the northern mountains and the first
schoolgirls gathered in freezing classrooms. Barack Obama, after
studying the problem for months, poured in troops and pulled them out in
a single ambivalent gesture whose goal was to keep the war on page A13.
Donald Trump cut a deal with the Taliban that left the future of the
Afghan government, Afghan women, and al‑Qaeda to fate. By then most
Americans were barely aware that the war was still going on. It fell to
Joe Biden to complete the task.

On April 13, 2021, the day before Biden was to address the country about
Afghanistan, a 33-year-old Marine Corps veteran named Alex McCoy
received a call from a White House speechwriter named Carlyn Reichel.
McCoy led an organization of progressive veterans called Common Defense,
which had been waging a lobbying campaign with the slogan “End the
forever war.” McCoy and his colleagues believed that more American
bloodshed in a conflict without a definable end could no longer be
justified. “The president has made his decision,” Reichel told McCoy,
“and you’ll be very happy with it.” She explained that it was now too
late to withdraw all troops by May 1, the deadline in the agreement
signed in early 2020 by the Trump administration and the Taliban in
Doha, Qatar. But the withdrawal of the last several thousand American
troops would begin on that date, in the hope that the Taliban would not
resume attacks, and it would end by September 11, the 20th anniversary
of the day the war began.

On April 14, Biden, speaking from the White House, raised his hands and
declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.” The withdrawal, he said,
would not be “a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly,
deliberately, and safely.” The president ended his speech, as he often
does, with the invocation “May God protect our troops.” Then he went to
pay his respects at Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where
many of the dead from the 9/11 wars are buried.

Afterward, Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said, “When someone writes
a book about this war, it’s going to begin on September 11, 2001, and
it’s going to end on the day Joe Biden said, ‘We’re coming home.’ ” With
firm resolve, Biden had done the hard thing. The rest would be
logistics, while the administration turned its attention to domestic
infrastructure. Alex McCoy framed the front page of the next day’s New
York Times and hung it on the wall of his Harlem apartment.

But the war wasn’t over—not for Afghans, not even for some Americans.

A week after Biden’s speech, a group of refugee advocates—many of them
veterans of the 9/11 wars—released a report on the dire situation of the
thousands of Afghans who’d worked at great risk for the United States
during its two decades in their country. In 2009, Congress had created
the Special Immigrant Visa to honor the service of qualified Afghans by
bringing them to safety in the U.S. But the SIV program set up so many
procedural hurdles—Form DS-230, Form I-360, a recommendation from a
supervisor with an unknown email address, a letter of employment
verification from a long-defunct military contractor, a statement
describing threats—that combat interpreters and office assistants in a
poor and chaotic war zone couldn’t possibly hope to clear them all
without the expert help of immigration lawyers, who themselves had
trouble getting answers. The program, chronically understaffed and
clogged with bureaucratic choke points across multiple agencies, seemed
designed to reject people. Year after year, administrations of both
parties failed to grant even half the number of visas allowed by
Congress—and sometimes granted far less—or to meet its requirement that
cases be decided within nine months. By 2019, the average wait time for
an applicant was at least four years.

Toward the end of 2019, Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat,
visited the U.S. embassy in Kabul and found a skeletal staff working on
visas only part-time. “This was no accident, by the way,” Crow told me.
“This was a long-term Stephen Miller project to destroy the SIV program
and basically shut it off.” Miller, the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
Trump adviser, along with allies throughout the executive branch, added
so many new requirements that amid the pandemic the program nearly came
to a halt. By the time Biden gave his speech, at least 18,000 desperate
Afghans and tens of thousands of family members stood in a line that was
barely moving. Many feared that the Americans would now leave without them.

RECOMMENDED READING
A woman in a burka puts her hand up to a car window, looking in at a
passenger.
The Taliban’s Return Is Catastrophic for Women
LYNSEY ADDARIO
An illustration of the American flag with a white shroud draped over it
Are We Doomed?
GEORGE PACKER

SPONSOR CONTENT
We Need to Invest in All of America
JP MORGAN CHASE
Tom Nichols: Afghanistan is your fault

Najeeb Monawari had been waiting for his visa for more than a decade. He
was born in 1985, the oldest son among 10 children of a bus-mechanic
father and a mother who devoted herself to keeping them alive amid the
lethal hazards of Kabul. He grew up in a neighborhood turned to
apocalyptic rubble by the civil war of the early 1990s. He and his
friends took turns walking point along mined streets on their way to
swim in the Kabul River. During the Taliban’s rule, his family was under
constant threat because of their origins in the Panjshir Valley, the
last base of the Northern Alliance resistance.

With the arrival of the Americans in 2001, power flipped and Panjshiris
became the top dogs. “We were the winners, and Panjshir Valley people
were misusing their power,” Monawari told me, “driving cars wildly in
the road, beating people. We were the king of the city.” In 2006, barely
20, Monawari lied to his parents about his destination and traveled to
Kandahar, the Pashtun heartland of the Taliban, where he signed on with
a military contractor as an interpreter for Canadian forces. “I spoke
three English words and no Pashto,” he said. But his work ethic made him
so popular that, after a year with the Canadians, Monawari was snatched
away by U.S. Army Green Berets. He spent much of the next four years as
a member of 12-man teams going out on nonstop combat missions in
Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces.

In the Special Forces, Najeeb Monawari found his identity. “I was
dreaming to go to America, to hold the flag in a picture.”
In the Special Forces, Monawari found his identity. The Green Berets
were so demanding that most interpreters soon washed out, but the
Americans loved him and he loved them. On missions he carried a gun and
used it, came under fire—he was wounded twice—and rescued other team
members, just like the Americans. He wore his beard full and his hair
shaved close like them; he tried to walk like them, bulk up like them,
even think like them. In pictures he is indistinguishable from the Green
Berets. The violence of the missions—and the fear and hatred he saw in
the eyes of local elders—sometimes troubled him, and as a Panjshiri and
a combat interpreter, he carried an automatic death sentence if he ever
fell into the hands of the Taliban. But he was proud to help give
Pashtun girls the right to attend school.

In 2009, when a team leader told Monawari about the SIV program, he
applied and collected glowing letters of recommendation from commanding
officers. He wanted to become an American citizen, join the U.S.
military, and come back to Afghanistan as a Green Beret. “This was
totally the plan,” he told me. “I was dreaming to go to America, to hold
the flag in a picture.”

Monawari’s application disappeared into the netherworld of the
Departments of State and Homeland Security, where it languished for the
next decade. He checked the embassy website five times a day. He sent
dozens of documents by military air to the immigration service center in
Nebraska, but never received clear answers. His medical exam kept
expiring as his case stalled, so he had to borrow money to take it again
and again. “We have reviewed the State Department records and confirm
that your SIV case is still pending administrative processing in order
to verify your qualifications for this visa,” he was told in 2016.

In January 2019, Monawari was summoned for an interview—his third—at the
embassy in Kabul. By then he had gone to work for Doctors Without
Borders as a logistician, managing warehouses and supply chains. The
carnage of fighting had traumatized him—he found it impossible to be
alone—and he liked the gentle, unselfish spirit of the humanitarians. He
rose through the organization to overseas positions in Sierra Leone,
Lebanon, and finally a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. He flew back
to Afghanistan for the interview at the embassy and found himself faced
with a consular officer who had been angered by the previous applicant.
When it was Monawari’s turn, she almost shouted her questions, and other
Afghans in the room could hear the details of his case. “Can you calm
down?” he asked her.