“No one left behind” sounds nice, but in America’s wars it usually only refers to Americans. Foreigners who risked their own and their family’s lives to help the United States are optional.
But a small victory. After extraordinary outside pressure from Congress and veterans’ groups, the State Department agreed to undo a change to visa procedure that would have condemned even more Afghan translators to their deaths.
The idea was that Afghans translators who loyally served the United States and who were at risk in their own country could apply for visas for themselves, their spouses and their children, to live in the U.S. These were never called refugee visas or anything that might imply our freedom war was not fully successful, but were pitched as a kind of parting gift for good work.
And so we learn that the latest blunder in the government’s management of a special visa program for Afghan interpreters was fixed this week.
In recent months, Afghan interpreters were told, without warning, that their visa applications were denied as a result of the way officials at the State Department were implementing a change to the eligibility criteria set by Congress. Lawmakers said that as of September 30, in order to qualify for resettlement in the United States, interpreters would need to provide evidence that they had worked for American personnel in Afghanistan for at least two years. In the past, they had to prove only one year of service.
Inexplicably, the government began applying the two-year standard to applicants who had submitted petitions long before the rule changed. Applying laws retroactively is not how things generally work in America. Not that that stopped the State Department from unilaterally just doing that. The State decision slam dunked hundreds of the more than 10,000 applicants with pending cases.
As they learned of State’s action, various Congressional leaders demanded change, and hauled John Kerry up to the Hill to answer for his Department’s decision. Kerry “conferred” with this underlings and this week State reversed itself, and will not apply the new rules retroactively.
New applicants are still screwed, but then again, this is Afghanistan.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.