Just over a week ago, Javid, an Afghan man working for an international development organisation in Kabul, had a chilling warning: “If Kabul falls, nowhere will be safe. There’s nowhere left to go.”
On Friday, Peter Galbraith, a former United Nations Deputy Envoy to Afghanistan, still held out hope the Afghan National Army could mount a defence of the country’s capital. “It’s a very big city full of people who don’t want the Taliban and have nowhere to go,” he said.
Overnight, Kabul fell with a whimper. As the Taliban reached the capital’s outskirts, after sweeping through a divided, demoralised country with horrifying speed, President Ashraf Ghani surrendered, and escaped to Tajikistan.
It came hours after the Morrison government revealed (by way of the media) it would finally send another evacuation flight to bring Afghans who worked with the Australian Defence Force to safety. By the time the planes arrive, it might be too late.
Too little, too late
Glenn Kolomeitz is angry. The former ADF major, now a military lawyer, has been fighting to bring Afghans who helped Australian troops here. His pleas, which mirror those of many other Afghanistan veterans, fell on deaf ears.
“We could see it coming for months,” Kolomeitz says of the Afghan government’s capitulation. “We’ve been giving the government very viable options for months and months.”
Kolomeitz and his team had offered to help the government process applications. They’ve begged for evacuation flights, and sounded the alarm about the brittleness of Ghani’s government.
Instead, the Morrison government has spent the withdrawal from Afghanistan hiding away from the consequences of Australia’s longest war. In May, Foreign Minister Marise Payne abruptly closed the embassy in Kabul, leaving local Afghan employees, some who’d waited years for a visa, with nowhere to go.
The government also enforced an arbitrary rule which meant contractors who worked with Australian troops building critical infrastructure or ripping landmines out of the ground were denied a fast-track Locally Engaged Employee (LEE) visa.
As late as July, the Immigration Minister was refusing the opportunity for Australia to repatriate Afghans on an American evacuation flight. Days later, Morrison said Australia was “considering” sending flights.
Kolomeitz hopes the relatively peaceful surrender of Kabul, and the Taliban’s promise to allow evacuation flights to leave, could mean Australia’s last-ditch, face-saving mission could bring people to safety.
“Maybe we can take them [the Taliban] at their word. What else can we do?” he said.
But the harsh reality is that many people who supported Australian troops are likely to die.
Bigger than us
Even if Australia rescues some interpreters and guards now, the number of Afghans who in the eyes of the Taliban are tainted by their association with the West is far greater.
Over the 20-year occupation, thousands of Afghans worked with western militaries, NGOs, and development organisations to patch together a state strong enough to withstand the Taliban. That state’s collapse puts a target on their back.
While Western governments like Australia have prioritised people who worked directly under their troops, there are approximately 5000 people who worked with various UN bodies in the country. Galbraith points out that because the UN was in Afghanistan under a Security Council mandate, the organisation’s staff were as much a part of the Coalition mission as those working directly with the military. Those bodies are funded by Australia and, like our troops, were involved in the amorphous nation-building project that the Afghan occupation became.
Instead, such people have been left behind by the west. Most foreign UN staff left the country. Afghan employees were urged to go to Tajikistan (a border now controlled by the Taliban) at a town hall meeting. The UN sent diplomatic notes to neighbouring embassies urging them to grant its employees asylum. Many who arrived at embassies were turned away.
While he noted the UN has an devilishly difficult position, and needs to maintain a local presence in Afghanistan, Galbraith said some of its early statements to local staff were “tone deaf”.
Meanwhile, for people who worked with international organisations, and have been left out of calls for evacuation, the distinctions drawn by western governments feel deeply unjust.
“The Taliban are not distinguishing between who worked for the US or Australia and who worked with the UN,” Javid says.
“For them it’s foreigners. As if they find out they’re working with foreigners, they’ll kill us.”
But Australia has consistently framed its moral responsibility to Afghans in the narrowest possible terms. Contractors are denied visas. UN staff aren’t even in the conversation.
A new generation loses hope
The Western withdrawal leaves Afghanistan back where it was in 2001. But in the last 20 years, younger Afghans have come of age without knowing Taliban rule.
“There’s a whole generation that’s grown up knowing life under a different kind of reality,” said Margie Cook, a former UN Chief Electoral Advisor in Afghanistan.
“There’s an internet generation, well-educated people, women with degrees.”
That world, they fear, will be lost. Javid says his daughter cries over the thought of not being able to go to school.
Samira, an Afghan woman working at an international organisation who’s been unable to leave the country, is terrified at the prospect of the Taliban forcing women to marry.
“I have a masters, I want to work. They want to marry Afghan women by force,” she says.
To a generation who pinned their dreams for the future on a new Afghanistan, the Taliban’s victory has been devastating. There’s a sense of despair and anger at their abandonment by the West.
“Freedom is always worth fighting for,” Morrison said when asked about Afghanistan yesterday.
Thousands of Afghans worked with Australian troops and development bodies not to affirm a geopolitical alliance, but because they actually believed in that freedom. We have left many of them to their fate.
…thought I’d run out of seething anger and frustration with Scotty and his excuse for a Government. I couldn’t raise the energy to care much more at how hopeless they are at doing the most basic things required to govern us well… but this act of wilful neglect to grant refuge to Afghans has roused my ire once more. Can they do nothing right? What are they here for if they can’t implement a basic act of human decency of which many Australians have been calling for since the US withdrawal was announced.
With months of advance notice and the resources to do it and bring to Australia the Afghans who worked for us knowing their lives will be in peril if left behind. Is it Scotty’s focus group research of the Liberal base and their right wing fringe groups who are well known to be Muslim shy that has sandbagged this action? Or just the usual 2nd rate incompetent planning and implementation from these LNP clowns?
According to reports, when Morrison attended the G7 in June, he & his entourage took two aircraft for the return junket. As a taxpayer I would’ve preferred the aircraft diverted to Kabul to be loaded with our Afghani allies (& their families) who supported Australian troops in this farce of a war.
Mathias Cormann’s aircraft which flew him hither & thither around the globe to interviews for the prestigious OECD gig would’ve been better employed securing safety for Afghanis who had risked their lives for the ADF.
We have wasted opportunities to repatriate the Afghanis & shown Australia to be shallow & treacherous.
Once again, for Morrison’s government it’s not a race. There’s nothing that’s a race. Vaccinations,, Afghan refugees, carbon emissions, the list goes on and on. Just leave things alone and after a while all problems go away. Sort of.
We have been so swamped in dumb by this lot that it now is the norm.
How absolutely demoralising.
I feel really despairing this morning.
WTF are we doing in the West?
Corruption as usual. The Taliban walked in they didn’t fight their way in because the Afghan military haven’t been paid for three months or more. President Ashraf Ghani likely took their pay with him.
Reaping what we sowed.
As for collateral damage, that’s just an amerikan euphemizm form the Vietnam era, best exemplified by General Wastemoreland’s comment “In order to save the village it was necessary to destroy it.“
Lazy Scott will fight for his own preservation and nothing else.
Scotty fiddles while Kabul (and Sydney) burns.
Well, I think this is way beyond current parliamentarians because the situation is steeped in history prior. All the blokes East and West have f….. it. And females have enabelled the crush in all cultures.
Global village economics sold to the world while economics and ideology killed diversity. And we in Australia in mental health adhere to inclusion and diversity and cultural appropriateness.
Whatever happens we are all at fault. The fault lines created under the feet of Australians have been stamped by the powers that be. For quite sometime.
Yep it’s complicated but the portrait of powers have steered the country. Well done! (Listen and love me – if not I’ll do away with all of you idiots).
I’m no one. I’m just one. The power of one, the one is no longer. We are now in the time of groups. Not all groups are equal. None of this will turn out equal. Not for a very long time. Foes and friends will be in all camps across the board. Who is who will be any one’s guess.
I so hope I’m wrong…I’d so love that to be true.
What a collection of non sequiturs.
Most impressive.
The coalition in the Federal Parliament have shown their moral cowardice for all to see; there is no escape for those Afghanis who put their lives on the line for Australian interests.
No doubt Scott will do what he does best and abandon all those who once helped Australian troops at the risk of their own and their families’ lives. They are no longer useful to us so they are no longer Australia’s concern, in his view.
They could, of course, try getting to Australia by leaky wooden boat but Scott knows how to deal with that.
That good old “loving kindness”?
It’s the fundamentalist Christian thing to do.
It is a pentecostal thing to do. Not a Christian thing to do.
Smirky does not appear to understand the Second Great Commandment about loving your neighbour – one of the few direct orders given by Jesus Christ to his followers
The only thing Scummo sees in that commandment is “thyself”!
Blood on his hands
Getting on a leaky boat in Kabul won’t help them much – there’s no way you could navigate down the Kabul river to the sea. You might make it in a canoe in spring, when the snow is melting, but you’d have to carry the canoe 1000 meters down the mountains not far from Kabul, and then you’d still be about 1000m above sea level. And Afghanistan doesn’t have a coast.
I acknowledge it will be no easy matter to get from the heights of Afghanistan to sea level and then begin to find a sea going boat of some kind without being picked up by various police forces, immigration officers, hit squads, etc from various different quarters.