Full Disclosure. I have a real bug up my ass about the Department of Homeland Security, and it goes back to its name. The only people who have the right to refer to the United States as the homeland are native Americans, and indigenous tribes in Alaska and Hawaii. All the rest of us came from somewhere else. It’s a beautiful land, and we have all made it our home, but it’s not, and never will be our homeland! Biden himself admits it when he keeps talking about the United States being the only country in the world based on an idea. No blood and soil bullshit. Department of Homeland Security sounds like it could have come out of Stalinist Russia.
But on to the main topic. Rachel Maddow has recently been covering the increasingly desperate race to get thousands of Afghan interpreters and translators and their families out of Afghanistan before the Taliban can turn them into a Freddie Krueger retrospective. Most, if not all of these Afghans submitted their emergency visa requests years ago. And military support for them is universal. It is hard to find a soldier or unit commander who worked with one of these unsung heroes who hasn’t written letters supporting their claims.
It isn’t like we have nowhere to put them. The US territory of Guam has been a famous safe haven for people who helped the US military, and then had to skedaddle ipso quick. Thousands of Vietnamese were shuttled there with the collapse of Saigon, to an enthusiastic welcome from the local populace. Then there were thousands of Kurds who fought alongside US troops when Saddam Hussein made a move towards genocide by air war. They were greeted equally warmly while their visas were processed. The Governor of Guam has said that the island is ready to welcome them at any time. But there’s a bottleneck.
And the bottleneck is the fucking DHS! They want to submit the applications from Afghan nationals who stood side by side with American troops, often picking up arms and fighting beside their US partners, as refugees. They want to deep dive into them to see if they are actually what they claim to be. This is insane! If these interpreters or translators wanted to engage in green on green atrocity, they had plenty of time to do that while their trusting partners had their backs turned on them heading into trouble. This kind of institutional paranoia is why the DHS must be decentralized, and the CBP disbanded completely and reconstituted.
Biden has made it clear in his speeches that he is committed to every Afghan and their family who wants to flee will be accommodated. But the clock is ticking. Afghans who assisted the British and the French who submitted their visa applications have already been processed and relocated. The FHSA official reason for blocking the transfer to Guam is that applicants would have additional legal rights on US property than they would in third party countries. President Biden has a phone on his desk. He needs to pick it up, speed dial the Secretary of Homeland Security, and tell him to either get every last one of these people to Guam, or submit his resignation so Biden can appoint someone who will get it done. This is a national disgrace.
I too have been wondering – as in WHAT IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM? It’s not like there weren’t months to prepare for this. I’d have expected this kind of shit if Trump was in office but he’s not in the WH anymore. Yes, he left behind a lot of sleazebags to keep fucking things up for as long as they could and my guess is that that’s what has been happening. Trump holdovers throwing not sand but granite rocks into the gears. However, as I said it’s not like we couldn’t see something like this happening. The village idiot could have told Biden (and Lloyd Austin) that there were Trumpers in place that would look for ways to fuck stuff up and make this administration and the whole United States look bad. THIS issue has been talked about going back to when Trump was still in office and wanting to get us out of Afghanistan – I guess he was made he wasn’t getting a cut of the drug money from the Taliban types using it to fund their efforts. Whatever. Our top military leaders have, even prior to Trump noted the debt we owe to so many Afghans who helped us out and the danger it put not just them but their families in. And that as in prior wars we owed it to them to bring them here someday, or help them get into another country of their choice where they might already have family and friends. We did after all have allies who as you note have done a far better job on this issue than we have with this particular country.
Shame on this administration for not being on top of this. THIS was a great chance to show our allies and the world that America’s word could be trusted again – that we would keep promises we publicly made. We’ve proven in the past we know how to do this, and the same waystation that has stepped up in the past has made it clear they are ready and willing to do so again. The fact this process isn’t damned near completed is a disgrace.
This is one of those times when Biden needs to summon the SecDef, Joint Chiefs, SecSate (and their top deputies) AND DHS to the White House and sit their asses down in one of the big rooms. With a cot for each one and tell them their asses are going to be locked in there and they can by god sleep there, eat their meals there and take their dumps in chemical toilets until they have agreed on the logistics for getting this done. By the end of this month at the very latest.
(It makes me wonder something. Just WHO was the boneheaded asshole that came up with the idea to abandon Bagram out of the blue and WTF possessed Austin to agree and get Biden to sign off on it? WHAT THE FUCK? Where else would they have the airlift capability they are going to need to get this done before countless people we OWE die?)
The answer to WHO was none other than Barack Obama. Recently he and Joe have been speaking on the phone and meeting 1-on-1 for frequent lunches to discuss foreign policy and these meetings appear to have been what influenced the decision to withdraw swiftly from Afghanistan. Wish Biden would prevent Obama from playing VP and involve the rest of his staff and his real VP: Kamala Harris in these discussions. Love what Biden has done, but this foreign policy blunder has been his worst decision so far. Taking a go slow approach to save our allies there from slaughter that we are in process of abandoning would have been a far better approach to maintaining stability and preventing terrorist groups from taking over again there. BTW – some great history on how Afghanistan has changed over the years from before the Taliban and before Russia’s invasion can be found with a deep dive into the people and the culture in Cat Parenti’s intriguing non-fiction Books 1 and 2 under the same title: Afghanistan: A Memoir From Brooklyn to Kabul. Unforgettable reads!
I am old enough to have some memory of Siagon. We have been through this before. I am not military, but recognize we should have some plans in place.
I get what you’re saying in your first paragraph Joseph, but those of us who were born in this country DO have the right to call this our “homeland”. Where else would our homeland be F.F.S.? It’s a shame what the European invasion did to the aboriginals on this continent and in the islands but it was done, we had nothing to do with it, and there is nothing that is going to be done to repair what was broken/destroyed. Furthermore, I am not going to take the blame for what those a-holes did. Will I support Native Americans in their various and sundry political causes and try to assist them in protecting what they have managed to keep? Sure. But I will leave it at that and I will not be overwhelmed with guilt over what was done by people who were not even my ancestors; my family came over from the Old Country in the early 1900’s. I am extraordinarily grateful this nation exists because any of my family that did not come over before WWII are now dead-taken out by Hitler.
Sorry man, but this IS our homeland and I am not going to get bent out of shape over what some federal agency calls itself. I just wish that agency would actually protect my homeland from the terrorists within thereby earning the “security” part of its name.