Trapped in Afghanistan

When Shah began working as a translator for U.S. forces at an Afghan airbase, in 2007, his parents warned that he was putting the family at risk. “In our culture, most kids listen to what their parents say,” he told me. “And they kept telling me to quit. They’d say, ‘You can have a piece of bread to eat and live a peaceful life. You don’t need chicken and rice.’ ” It had taken Shah two years to learn to speak English well enough to land a job with the Americans. His family was large and poor, and, although he was just nineteen, they depended on his earnings. He’d previously made a modest salary working as a part-time bookkeeper. A few years after he began working as a translator, Shah got married, and, in 2012, he and his wife had their first child. The whole family moved into a two-story house in a gated community. “I was proudly working,” he said. “I had something in my mind.”

The threats had begun almost as soon as he took the position, anonymous callers telling him, “I know where you’re living. I know where you’re going every morning. I know what your job is.” Shah, who asked me to withhold certain identifying details, including his full name, tried to take precautions, changing his routes and scanning the streets before going outside. One night, as he was returning home from work, his father called his cell phone and ordered him to turn back. Shah could hear his mother sobbing in the background. The Taliban were making new incursions into their old strongholds in the southern parts of the country, and some of the group’s fighters had shot a man whom they had apparently mistaken for Shah in front of the family’s house. Afterward, the threats intensified: in addition to the phone calls, menacing notes were left on the front door. By then, it no longer made much difference whether or not Shah quit. He knew people who were assassinated even after they’d resigned their positions with the Americans.

In 2013, Shah applied for a Special Immigrant Visa, or S.I.V. Created by the United States Congress in 2006, the program was designed to help Iraqi and Afghan nationals who faced persecution as a result of working with the U.S. Recipients were relocated to the U.S. and put on a path to eventual citizenship. Applying was notoriously difficult. There were fourteen steps that Shah’s application had to clear, including an extensive review by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. He needed to obtain proof of employment from human-resources departments, as well as separate letters of recommendation written by direct supervisors who were U.S. citizens. Between 2013 and 2016, Shah applied three times for an S.I.V., but each time some bureaucratic problem stood in his way. In one instance, he had a proof of employment from a former supervisor but could not get an attestation from human resources because the contractor had closed its offices in Afghanistan. “He could confirm everything,” Shah told me of his former supervisor. “But they were not accepting the letter.”

Shah is thirty-three now and has five children. He’s held a number of jobs with American contractors, at airbases and in intelligence training. Most recently, he worked from his home office, overseeing cargo deliveries for a U.S. company. In May, as the Taliban advanced on Helmand Province, he started a fourth S.I.V. application, this time with the help of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), an advocacy group based in New York. “Wherever the Taliban took, they were stable there—they were not going backward,” Shah said. “I realized this is something outside the government’s control.”

After filing his application, Shah decided to fly to Kabul, ahead of his family; at the time, the capital was expected to withstand the Taliban’s advances. Before he left, he dismantled his office, threw out any furniture that might suggest he once associated with foreigners, and burned two large garbage bags filled with work documents. On the day of his flight, the airport was mobbed. People were lined up at the ticket counters, pleading with agents to sell them seats on any plane headed for the capital. Prices had surged, and Shah could overhear people offering to pay even more to get their families in the air.

In Kabul, Shah moved between hotel rooms, ordering in food and leaving only to inspect rental properties where he could house the rest of his family. While he was there, the Taliban seized twelve provincial capitals in the span of a single week. Shah’s family had plane tickets for Kabul, but the flights were all delayed, then cancelled. At the time, the White House anticipated that Kabul would come under heavy attack within the month, but Shah faced a more immediate problem. His family couldn’t fly to the capital, and the Taliban now controlled most of the roadways.

One morning in the middle of August, when Shah woke up at four to pray, he noticed his cell phone flashing. His father had been calling. Armed men had shown up at the family’s house around midnight. They claimed to have information about someone inside with ties to the U.S., and threatened to shoot down the door to search the property. Shah’s father, who is in his early seventies and has a heart condition, refused to let them in. He called out to neighbors for help. The noise woke the children, and Shah’s wife and mother were wailing from the stress. “You could have come during the day,” Shah’s father shouted at one point. “How Muslim can you be, to come at this time of night?” Eventually, a crowd of neighbors gathered outside, and the men left.

Shah continued to make arrangements for his family. He found a house that belonged to a man who was taking his own family to Turkey. They met in Shah’s hotel room to sign a rental agreement and exchange the cash. Later that week, Shah visited a government office to get identification documents for his two youngest children, which they would need in order to leave the country. As he stood near the end of a line that snaked around the block, a man emerged from the lobby, yelling that the Taliban had entered the capital. The crowd buckled and eddied—some people ran, others pushed harder to get inside the building. A Toyota Corolla stopped in the middle of the street, and the driver and his passengers darted out, leaving the car abandoned with its doors open. Groups of pedestrians encircled women who weren’t wearing head coverings, to keep them out of public view. “I’m lost,” Shah recalled thinking as he rushed back to his hotel. “I’m in the middle of nowhere now.”

On the evening of August 25th, Shah received a call from IRAP. Lawyers at the organization were trying to book his family on a charter flight leaving Kabul the next night. Around five the following morning, Shah’s father set out with Shah’s wife and children. It was half a day’s drive on roads filled with Taliban checkpoints. While the family was in transit, a lawyer from IRAP called with another tip: there were reports of an impending attack at the airport. An evacuation was still possible, but it would have to be delayed. Shah still felt hopeful when his family arrived at the hotel that afternoon. His wife and children hurried upstairs to his room. His father stayed in the car, telling him, “There’ll be a time when we’re together again.” He was turning around to drive back home. They had agreed ahead of time that this was the safest course of action. “Now the situation in our province is the same as in Kabul,” Shah told me. “The only difference is that we know no one in Kabul.”

That evening, Shah, his wife, and their five children crammed together inside the small hotel room, waiting for an update about when they could leave. At around 6 p.m., there was a series of explosions at the Kabul airport. Two suicide bombers attacked the crowds, killing at least ninety Afghans and thirteen U.S. service members. Shah’s wife asked him what the plan was. “I cannot think anymore,” he said. “The borders were being locked. The only option was the airport.”

Over the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five thousand Afghans have come to the U.S. as a result of the S.I.V. program, which was designed to protect not just applicants but also their families. Thousands of others, however, never made it through the process. “The way the legislation originally was passed made it very difficult for people to qualify,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, told me. She noted that “both Democratic and Republican administrations” failed to address the program’s systemic problems. The situation, she added, has “also been complicated by the unwillingness of a few people in the Senate to agree to increase the cap to allow the program to move faster.” Jeff Sessions and Chuck Grassley were staunchly opposed to bringing more immigrants to the U.S.; Mike Lee, in 2016, blocked a key measure to expand the S.I.V. program in order to force the chamber’s consideration of an unrelated amendment; and, most recently, Rand Paul said, “I think those who speak English and are our friends should stay and fight.” The cumulative effect of a small minority of obstructionists has been years of underfunding and neglect.

Unsurprisingly, the S.I.V. program has also been beset by logistical holdups. Despite the fact that the government was required to close cases within nine months, average processing times could be nearly three years. In 2019, after a group of Afghan and Iraqi S.I.V. applicants sued the U.S. government over the delays, a federal judge ordered the Trump Administration to submit a plan for resolving such issues. Congress, she said in her ruling, did not intend to give the U.S. government “an unbounded, open-ended timeframe in which to adjudicate SIV applications.” In June of 2020, she approved a plan establishing timelines and performance reports for the government’s handling of each stage of the S.I.V. application.

By then, the Trump Administration had already halted visa interviews at Embassies and consular offices worldwide, owing to the pandemic. They wouldn’t be restarted until February, 2021, a full year after Trump cut a deal with the Taliban to begin withdrawing American forces from the country. In Trump’s final eighteen months as President, as Shaheen told me, the S.I.V. program “pretty much stalled out.” When Biden took office, roughly seventeen thousand applicants remained in Afghanistan, along with approximately fifty-three thousand family members.

“We inherited a deadline,” Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State, said later. “We did not inherit a plan.” In the early spring of 2021, the State Department sent additional staff to Kabul and more than quadrupled the personnel in the U.S. to expedite the processing of S.I.V. applications. Within a few months, according to a senior Administration official, “we saved a ton of time on screening and vetting,” reducing the average processing time for each application by more than a year. Advocates representing S.I.V. applicants were unimpressed. “Many applications saw limited or no movement,” Alexandra Zaretsky, an attorney at IRAP, told me. Her understanding was that some of the additional government staff, in the U.S., wouldn’t be trained until September. “Time was our biggest enemy,” the Administration official told me.

In April, Biden had vowed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of September 11th. Veterans groups and other advocates—including IRAP—urged the Administration to immediately launch massive evacuation efforts. Officials countered that it was impractical to bring large numbers of Afghans with pending applications to U.S. territory, and that a premature exodus could undermine the standing of Afghanistan’s then beleaguered President, Ashraf Ghani. In July, the Biden Administration announced a plan called Operation Allies Refuge to evacuate American allies whose applications had stalled in the federal bureaucracy. According to the Administration official, the idea was to fly out applicants on civilian aircraft and “build a conveyor belt through Fort Lee,” a military base in Virginia, where the new arrivals could finish the visa process. A flight was going out every three days at the end of July; by early August, a plane of evacuees was leaving the Afghan capital every day. “We were getting ready to transition to two flights a day when the Taliban entered Kabul,” another senior official said. Ultimately, out of some seventy thousand Afghans who were waiting on S.I.V. applications, around two thousand of them reached the U.S. through this effort.

By then, there were reports that thousands of other Afghans were eligible for S.I.V. status but didn’t have a pending application. (Many of them had applied before and been rejected, but had yet to restart the process.) Officials were attempting to enact years’ worth of necessary reforms and recalibrations within a period of weeks—in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. To make matters worse, from mid-June to early July, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul temporarily halted S.I.V. interviews, owing to an outbreak of COVID-19. Nevertheless, in the second half of August, following the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, the Biden Administration evacuated more than a hundred and twenty thousand people, most of them Afghans. Thousands more made it out thanks to the coördinated work of private citizens—including veterans, journalists, and advocates—who raised money for private planes that left Afghanistan for third countries in the final weeks before the Americans departed. Many people involved in these efforts pleaded with White House officials to delay the military withdrawal so that the evacuations could continue. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” Biden said, on August 31st, shortly after the final U.S. forces had left the country, “and I was not extending a forever exit.”

The fate of Afghans with pending S.I.V. applications didn’t figure into the President’s remarks. But a day later a State Department official told NBC News, “I don’t have an estimate for you on the numbers of SIVs and family members who are still there, but I would say it’s the majority of them, just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.” The Administration has since estimated that nearly two thousand S.I.V. holders have made it to the U.S. since the fall of Kabul. Advocates at IRAP estimated that at least ten thousand S.I.V. applicants may have been left behind. Zaretsky told me that each applicant has, on average, about four family members who also need to be evacuated. “The S.I.V. process was designed because there was no other clear path for Afghans who helped the U.S. government to reach the United States,” she said. “The U.S. government has a legal and moral duty to protect these individuals and their families.”

Shah is still in Afghanistan, and is now in hiding with his wife and children. The house that he’d initially rented fell through after the Taliban overtook Kabul. But, through a family friend, he and his wife found an apartment that seemed secure. It has three rooms and is fully furnished. They keep the blinds drawn. Each afternoon, Shah puts on a shawl and sits on the front stoop while his children run around with their new neighbors for forty-five minutes. The key, he told me, is to cover his face without looking as if he is trying to hide. It helps that so many people have already fled the country and rented their apartments and houses to other families. The turnover afforded some protection. Since most of the residents in his apartment complex are also newcomers, Shah and his family can blend in.

Shah and his wife spend most of their waking hours worrying about their children—monitoring their movements, keeping them occupied, pleading with them to stay quiet. For the better part of each day, Shah sets them in front of videos on YouTube. His wife stays quiet in the morning so that the children can sleep in. One evening, while Shah and his wife were cooking dinner, they heard a thud, followed by sobs. The kids were jumping on a bed, and one of them fell and banged his head. Shah initially panicked that the boy might be hurt; when it was clear that he was fine, Shah became anxious that the crying would attract attention. He and his wife ordered everyone to bed. The next day, he decided to take his family outside the complex for the first time, a trip to the supermarket, with a stop on the way for ice cream. “We spent one hour outside, and everyone was happy,” Shah told me afterward. When they got back to the apartment, his children asked, “Daddy, are we going to go again tomorrow?”

Later that night, he sent me a series of tweets posted by other Afghans. “An SIV holder was beaten and tortured by the Taliban,” one journalist reported. A former government official announced that the “Taliban have started mass house to house and door to door search operations” across Kabul, “looking for ‘foreigner collaborators.’ ” We’d spoken for several hours by this point, but it was the first time he told me outright that he was scared.

At the moment, there’s nothing he can do but wait. Trying to escape the country is still too dangerous, especially with a large family. Shah has enough money saved to live in Kabul for another five months, he told me. “His application is being processed,” Zaretsky said. But, in the meantime, she noted, the U.S. could help people like Shah evacuate to third countries. “It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Shah to get out on his own.”

According to the Times, sixty-four thousand Afghans have arrived in the U.S. as of September 14th, the majority of whom are currently living on military bases as the government makes plans to resettle them in the States. Another eighteen thousand Afghans are on American military bases abroad. Advocates and private citizens are still working to organize outbound flights for stranded Afghans. Senior Administration officials told me that the U.S. government is also continuing to process S.I.V. applications. When I asked how the Americans are planning to get applicants out of Afghanistan, now that the Taliban are in control, one of the officials told me, “T.B.D.”

When Shah and his family used to live in the south, they weren’t in hiding but their movements were severely circumscribed. His children would come home from school and share reports of classmates whose parents took them all around town, to parks and gardens. “These people are different from us,” he told the kids. “I will take you far away from here, far away from the garden, to a better place.” When he said this, he wasn’t thinking about the U.S. but of Kabul or of foreign cities, like Dubai. “We’ll go on a vacation,” he would say. Shah has finally fulfilled his promise to his children: they are in the nation’s capital. But the other day his oldest daughter had become depressed and refused to eat. She and her siblings miss school, and they beg him each day to go outside. “They’re in a worse situation,” Shah told me, “much worse than it had been back home. I say, ‘This is just temporary.’ This is what I’ve been telling them for years and years. I’ve made a lot of promises to my kids.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of S.I.V. holders who have been brought to the United States since the fall of Kabul.