Biden must prioritize Afghan allies’ evacuation rather than opening border

After May 23, a surge of migrants is likely to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border when the Biden administration stops Title 42, which blocked migrant entry during the coronavirus pandemic.

Rather than stopping Title 42, Biden’s “fair, orderly, and humane immigration system” should address the tens of thousands of Afghan allies and democracy advocates who qualify for referrals to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, for the special immigrant visa program, or for humanitarian parole visas, but whom Biden has left for eight months to be plagued by hunger, joblessness, and the looming fear of the gruesome fate that may befall them if their hiding locations are uncovered by the Taliban.

Biden is unlikely to prioritize Afghan allies, having apparently moved on from the humanitarian disaster spawned in the wake of his mismanagement of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden’s stolid supporters agree, with a slew of rationales for defending his decisions. Some attempt to renovate the disastrous withdrawal as a success story. Still more obfuscate reality by blaming the withdrawal’s failure on former president Donald Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban — ignorant, perhaps, that deal-making with the Taliban began under former president Barack Obama.

Still others blame Afghan forces for failing to repel the ascendant Taliban. They fail to consider the vital role U.S. airpower played to the Afghan military, or the sense of abandonment felt, for instance, when Afghan workers arrived at Bagram Airfield in July 2021 to find the Americans had “slipp[ed] away in the night” without warning. One Afghan A/C-208 pilot, who now lives in hiding, told me that the U.S. never supplied the rockets they promised to deliver in August to help Afghan pilots defending their country. He said he cried when flying over beleaguered ground personnel who called for air support, because he had no air assets to deploy.

Many of the tragedies analysts warned might occur under Taliban rule have come to pass. The Taliban have created a living hell for women and girls. Just a week after banning girls’ secondary schools, the Taliban tightened their constraints further, stating women may not leave their homes or go to work. On Friday, when a midwife in Balkh got into a car with a male colleague who was not her relative, the Taliban murdered her by way of torturing and stabbing her, and shooting her 12 times.

The Taliban are steadily encroaching on the rights of members of ethnic minorities, particularly those from regions of Afghanistan where active resistance is ongoing. Just last week, the Taliban also reportedly closed the doors of a Shia mosque used by Hazara Afghans, and banned a Hazara television station.

The West has known for months about Taliban reprisal killings of members of the prior Afghan government and Afghan military personnel. Now these reprisals are conducted more secretly, and may include the killing of a “former government soldier,” alleged to be Hazara, found burned to death in Herat province last week.

With the Taliban not only overseeing aid distribution, but attempting to involve themselves in determining aid recipients, the starvation crisis stands to worsen. Already, 95 percent of Afghans struggle to get enough food, and more than 13,000 Afghan newborns have perished due to malnutrition issues since January 2022.

At the same time, donor finances are so tight that some volunteer evacuation organizations struggle to provide food to Afghans desperately awaiting evacuation. If those groups run out of funds to finance safe houses, Afghans hunted by the Taliban will be turned out onto streets lined with Taliban checkpoints. Due to the nature of their employment, many of our allies’ fingerprints are in U.S. biometric databases. Talibs now wield the biometric devices the U.S. left behind.

In nearly eight months, there has been no attempt to rectify the manifold disasters that have unfolded since Biden’s mismanagement caused the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and around 170 Afghan civilians, and allowed the Taliban to overtake Afghanistan. U.S. refugee resettlement agencies are already overloaded with Afghan refugees. An additional 100,000 Ukrainian refugees will soon be admitted to the U.S. Rather than opening our border to a new flood of migrants, Biden must prioritize swiftly bringing abandoned allies to safety.