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Emails from Strangers
I get emails from strangers.
No, not the junk mail we all get. I swear I will never contribute to another campaign. Once you’re on one list, something happens, like rabbits multiplying, and suddenly you’re on everyone’s list. Even from members of the California ruling elite, none of whom I would ever vote for, listen to, or consider helping fix their flat tire if I were to recognize one of them standing on the side of the road, their arms folded, a stern face standing as if expecting that one of their imaginary minions would of course immediately stop to assist his or her or they highness out of their predicament.
No, not those kinds of emails. These emails are from Abdul or Zahra or Naseem. They too would like my help, but they’re not asking me to make an online donation, or to vote for them in the upcoming election.
It’s a much bigger ask.
They’re asking me to get them from insanity to sanity, from chaos to order, from daily brutalities and murder … to morning birds and the low buzz of peaceful commerce on the nearby freeway.
They are doctors … a cardiologist who worked with the US and was left behind with his wife and six children.
They are educators … a female university professor who is no longer allowed to fulfill her calling and serves as the family principal, caring for her husband and two children, one newly born.
They are technologists … an IT guy who likes to chat about how to make our evacuation management systems better while doing all he can to protect his young wife, and her mom and aunt.
They are ANA (Afghan National Army) members being hunted … an officer and his six children, a seventh newly born, moving from place to place to avoid detection by the Taliban.
They are single women … one with two young daughters she must hide from the Taliban for fear of them being kidnapped as child brides.
They need help. They deserve help. They were faithful in their endeavors alongside the US forces, fairly expecting that they would be protected and properly repaid for their contributions and loyalty.
I have heard some say it’s best that we withdrew from Afghanistan. Well … I must digress. I once had a friend who sold cars. He used to listen to me, shake his head, and say, “It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.” What he really meant was that I was too direct … too blunt. That I ought to think about how it will come across before I just blurt out whatever pops into my head.
It was a valuable bit of advice. It also applies to doing things. “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.”
I don’t have much of an opinion about whether we should have left Afghanistan. I’m not a foreign policy expert, although I do think that when America forgets its role in the world and starts to pull back from its divinely appointed responsibilities as the country representing freedom and human rights, we are not only leaving other countries vulnerable to the rise of evil, we leave ourselves vulnerable to it as well. So … I guess I do have an opinion about who we are and why this country came to be.
Here is what I would say to the guy in charge: Hey Brandon! You don’t just turn tail and run after twenty years without any real planning or preparation for a proper evacuation, leaving a country inadequate to deal with the evil lying in wait for the first opportunity to retake control, and then callously rationalize your treacherous decision by saying, “Well, the Afghan people need to decide how they want to run their country.”
WTF? We set them up! We were doing the right thing, progressing them into a new age of freedom, providing stability and security not only for their benefit, but for the world’s, and then you come into office and decide to cut the cord because it would look good politically to leave on September 11th? … without one ounce of effort to understand the reality on the ground? Really? Are you that effed up? Are you seriously that self-absorbed and incompetent and corrupt and on every payroll of a bad actor country that you would drive a spear through the heart of every US service member who holds to the “code of honor” and completely disregard the real lives of millions of people in Afghanistan who did nothing but serve in good faith with loyalty, who do not deserve this and have so much to offer the world? Really?
WTF?
Now what? The once high-spirited evacuation groups are fading out. The money is drying up. It seems the DOS continues to run a passive-aggressive strategy of interference, thwarting our remaining efforts to get another flight out through their practiced expertise of malignant neglect.
Heavy sigh.
I do what I can. I write back. I tell Abdul that I’m praying for him and his family, but we cannot take his family’s case. I send him a list of other organizations and tell him maybe they can help. I listen for God’s voice telling me that He’s got this. I know He does.
I stick with the team even though there’s nothing I can do to change the course of things away from the worst humanitarian disaster in recent history, and instead toward redemption of the most terrible mistake this country has made in my lifetime.
So, I write back to Abdul, and I tell the truth.
Abdul responds …
“Thank you so much
Your help in this hopeless and terrible situation your help is everything for us
Thank you so much”
They all respond like this. Love letters.
I have never encountered a people with such heart.
I love the Afghan people. I really do.
I know I’m headed for heartbreak, but what else can I do?
Published in General
You can Pray to God. God loves Justice and Mercy. There are also some private charities helping the Afghan people. The USA and UN will do nothing. Brandon’s purpose was that no one would trust the USA again. The damage was intentional.
If you are sincere, please turn your thoughts to why a twenty year ‘effort’ – with both Republican and Democrat administrations – resulted in a situation where the ANA crumbled like soggy cardboard in the face of the Taliban. If you genuinely feel any responsibility for, and concern about, the Afghans you left behind stop trying to blame this on ‘Brandon’ and take some responsibility for the catastrophe. And reflect on what you did wrong, and what you need to do better (the inevitable) next time. Afghans lives are more important than vapid, self-serving political gotchas in a country where this doesn’t seem to be clear.
I am grateful beyond words for the work you are doing to help people living under the Taliban and trying to get away. It has to be a surreal existence for anyone caught there.
You are in my prayers. As are they.
The point here isn’t to review the entire US involvement in Afghanistan and what could or couldn’t have been done better. The point is the incompetence and betrayal of the way the withdrawal was conducted.
Regarding the first point: the US President is supposed to be the chief executive. Biden has never had an executive position of any kind, never ran a state, a city, or even a small business. Why would anyone have possibly thought he could handle the complexities of the presidency?
Regarding the second point, see the quote from Biden at this link. The man just doesn’t care: doesn’t care about Afghan allies, doesn’t care about American soldiers, doesn’t care about anything but his money, his ego, and his ‘legacy’.
Over the past two days, I’ve read a number of meditative writings, all inline with dealing with the impossible. Here is one …
Got any rivers they say are uncrossable,
Got any mountains they say “can’t tunnel through?”
We specialize in the wholly impossible,
Doing the things they say you can’t do.
Song of the Panama Canal Builders
I often “receive” encouragement through multiple avenues that center upon the same theme. I’m watching my faith become increasingly based upon actively believing that God is capable, a willingness to follow Him in trust, and doing what He puts in front of me without allowing doubt to shut it down. It is difficult, especially when others bring pure intellectual rationality and unbelief into the discussion. Maybe this is why I prefer to spend time alone, thinking, praying, listening. I have lived from one miracle to another my entire life. Not always aware of it at the time, but looking back, seeing that He was there the entire time, loving me and protecting me and leading me down a path.
I am grateful for your prayers. It is the most powerful thing we can do – turn to Him Who is all knowing and all powerful, He who loves us beyond what we can imagine.
Thank you for this. It is always encouraging to be correctly understood.
Why are you concerned with that but not with the incompetence and betrayal of how the twenty years occupation of Afghanistan was conducted? Why is that incompetence and betrayal off topic?
Not every angle of every topic needs to be discussed in every post. If you want to put up a post to discuss the history of the US Afghanistan effort and what *should* or should not have been done, you can certainly do so.
David, it’s the same incompetence and the same betrayal.
I don’t see the evidence of incompetence or betrayal. It was a failed mission, probably because it was an impossible mission.
The withdrawal, in my view, was quite a success. We got our forces out with minimal losses. Thank God that we are finally out.
It was difficult for me to come to view the Afghanistan mission in this way. It was actually President Trump who convinced me.
The Pentagon report on the way the exit was conducted looks pretty damning. And even Jake Tapper of CNN is disturbed by Biden’s failure to take the report seriously.
I find it preposterous to blame 20 years of American support for the Afghans incompetence against Taliban forces. Don’t the Afghans themselves have any responsibility for their own collapse?
Sure, but doesn’t the West (mostly America, but the rest of us as well) have any responsibility for propping up and enabling a corrupt and dysfunctional regime for two decades? A regime that was unable to build, or perhaps uninterested in building, widespread support for itself despite so much aid from the US over twenty years?
And when I’m talking about betrayal and incompetence, it isn’t just the Afghans, it’s your Government betraying you the tax payer.
From a 2021 article in Aljazeera:
Or if you prefer, from SIGAR’s report:
They’ve been producing these reports for Congress since 2008.
The seeds for the country’s fall, and for all those abandoned people being hunted by the Taliban, were sowed over many years, and under many Administrations.
It is noble, God-Loving Woman, to be concerned for the people – that speaks well of you – but it is imho irresponsible to ignore the reasons they are in their current situation and our (the West’s) role in that.
I take no issue with your points. My focus is not on what led up to it, but on what has been left in its wake. Under the circumstances you point out, no real progress could have been made. It began with enabling a corrupt and dysfunctional regime – which tend to muck up everything else. My focus is on the people. We left like a father suddenly abandoning his family after a bad twenty-year marriage … no concern for the kids. It wasn’t their fault.
I agree with you that America has a responsibility to the Afghan people. That’s why I totally opposed the withdrawal of American troops. I think it was one of the worst foreign policy disasters in our history.
Thank you both for your very gracious responses. It’s immensely frustrating – this the second time the Taliban have come to power because of corruption, which entrenches a bad dynamic.
I know you’re not in this country, but can you imagine twenty years ago when we chased the Taliban out of Afghanistan, someone saying “In twenty years we will voluntarily give the country back to the Taliban and give them billions of dollars worth of airplanes, helicopters, guns, and rockets., and not only that but we will leave Americans and Afghan allies behind to fend for themselves.” That person would have been denounced as insane.
Exactly. It would have been inconceivable. It still is to me.