Opinion: We made a promise to Afghan allies. Here’s how we keep it.

Ten years ago, I went to war on a mission to help Afghan people escape tyranny and start a new life. Well, here’s our chance.

Bernie Stone
Guest columnist

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, the people facing the most danger weren’t those of us in uniform. They were the Afghan interpreters, journalists, and NGO workers who’d risked everything — their lives, their livelihoods, and their families’ safety — to help us. For 20 years, they championed women’s rights, stood up to corruption, and committed to defending democracy. What’s more, they did it as civilians in the middle of a war zone.

Under Taliban rule, any evidence of these heroic deeds is tantamount to a death warrant.

Anticipating as much, the departing U.S. mission advised our friends and allies to hide — or even burn — any documentation of their work with us. Most of them did exactly that, and for good reason. During my tour in Afghanistan, I’d seen what the Taliban does to people they consider traitors.

Last August, the American military managed to evacuate more than 70,000 of our Afghan allies to the U.S. Ever since, they’ve been living on U.S. military bases before being resettled to communities, trapped in a bizarre legal limbo called “humanitarian parole.”

Why haven’t they been granted asylum?

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Well, for starters, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is short-staffed and tied down by red tape. The immigration agency is running a backlog of more than 600,000 asylum cases. The average wait time for an interview clocks in at four and a half years

That’s time that Afghan evacuees simply don’t have. According to the conditions of their “parole,” if their legal status isn’t resolved within two years, they will be subject to deportation. I find this Catch-22 that we put them in reprehensible.

But it gets worse. Even if their cases were pushed to the front of the line, their chances of being approved for asylum are, under the current regulations, alarmingly low.

The most important part of an asylum application is hard evidence that a person or their family would be persecuted if they returned to their home country. In this case, that means documentation of previous activity that is now prohibited by the Taliban. For instance, working as an interpreter for U.S. troops, or advocating for women's rights groups or democracy reforms — that is, exactly the sort of documentation they were previously advised to hide or destroy.

According to the fine print of our immigration code, the common-sense steps that our allies took to protect their families now put them at high risk of being denied legal permanent residency. This has brought thousands of evacuees to an unacceptable impasse. Their lives have been saved, but they aren’t allowed to settle quietly and live them.

The situation isn’t just heartbreaking, it’s unprecedented. No other group of U.S. wartime evacuees has ever been held to the immigration standards that Afghans are up against. Not the Cubans who arrived on our shores when Fidel Castro took over. Not the Vietnamese who evacuated after the fall of Saigon. Not the Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein.

In all three of those cases, Congress passed powerful pieces of legislation called “adjustment acts.” Senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle recognized our nation’s part in the humanitarian crises that people were fleeing, and they joined forces to grant evacuees a pathway to permanent legal residence in the United States.

Now, the 117th Congress has an opportunity to live up to the example set by their predecessors and do right by our Afghan allies.

On behalf of hundreds of veterans and dozens of veteran service organizations, I am urging Iowa’s senators, Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Joni Ernst, to support an Afghan Adjustment Act.

Such legislation would swiftly cut some of the red tape clotting our asylum system and put Afghan evacuees on the fast track to rebuilding their lives here in America, and indeed here in Iowa.

Some legislators have worried that these measures would undermine our national security or “open the floodgates.” The legislation should stipulate additional screenings and enhanced security vetting.

The same legislators who are quick to mistrust outsiders are often the most outspoken in their support for our troops. If Grassley and Ernst want to honor those of us who served in Afghanistan, they don’t need to thank us for our service. Instead, show us that the ideals we fought for are alive and well here in Iowa.

Ten years ago, I went to war on a mission to help Afghan people escape tyranny and start a new life.

Well, here’s our chance. 

Bernie Stone

Bernie Stone is a retired Army veteran, local business owner, and frequent volunteer for entrepreneur, mental health, and veteran causes in central Iowa.