We're pretty sure by now everyone is familiar with the nightmare we are about to describe, but just in case…

 

Throughout the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Afghans risked their lives to serve alongside us, whether it be cooking, driving, providing security, or serving as journalists, interpreters, or cultural advisers.

 

In exchange for their invaluable help, the United States promised these brave men and women that we would not leave them behind to suffer for their loyalty to us. And suffer they would. Terribly. Even as they were negotiating their joke of a “peace” agreement with the Trump administration, the Taliban made it crystal clear that anyone who helped the U.S. during the war would be put to death, and they wasted no time acting on that threat.

 

The Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, an organization supported by the United Nations to supply the organization with rapid response capacity, reported well before America’s final withdrawal deadline that the Taliban had been “intensifying the hunt-down of all individuals and collaborators with the former regime,” going door-to-door to find and kill our faithful partners. If their original target wasn’t around, they just harassed and/or harmed their target’s family members until they arrived to face their fate.

 

When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, we sealed the fates of these loyal allies — and essentially signed many of their death certificates.

 

This happened even though American veterans, refugee advocates, members of Congress, and human rights organizations had been sounding the warning — loudly — for months that these faithful Afghans were in danger of being left for dead.

 

We guess we shouldn’t be surprised, because it’s not like we haven’t done this to our allies before, multiple times. After we left Vietnam, for example, the North Vietnamese communists put 300,000 of our South Vietnamese partners in prison, subjecting them to horrendous treatment, including starvation, torture and, of course, death.

 

After the first Gulf War we abandoned the Kurds, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam Hussein. Likewise, in 2011 when our combat troops exited Iraq, our government failed to issue even a fraction of the U.S. visas authorized for the loyal allies who helped us. After we left, an estimated 1,000 Iraqi interpreters were murdered in retribution.