Is the US Abandoning Afghan Interpreters to Certain Death?

First published on July 22, 2014. Original text
below:

“I was getting letters from Taliban, they were showing up at my
house and everywhere. They were telling me that they were going to
kill me or a member of my family, or kidnap my son,”
says Janis
Shinwari, a former Afghan interpreter for the American
military.

The U.S. military relies heavily on locals in Afghanistan and
Iraq to serve as interpreters. The Iraqi Refugee Assistance
Project estimates that 50,000
Iraqi and Afghan nationals served as U.S. military
interpreters over the past decade-plus.

Interpreters provide one of the most crucial roles in a military
unit—without them, service members would not be able to communicate
with local populations. It’s also one of the most dangerous roles.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban labels interpreters traitors and has no
compunction about killing them and their loved ones.

“Interpreters have become a very big target of the Taliban and
Al Queda,” says Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). “There’s been a lot
of beheadings of people that have worked with the West.” 

The U.S. was able to recruit interpreters by promising them
American visas when the war ended. “If we completely pull out of
Afghanistan and we don’t bring these interpreters back,” says
Kinzinger, “they’re going to be killed. Their families are being
killed too. Their houses are being burned down. It is very messy
over there.” 

An officer in the Air National Guard and a veteran of Iraq and
Afghanistan, Kinzinger is pushing Congress to extend
and amend the Afghan
Special Immigrant Visa Program. The program was established in
2009 to give visas to Afghan nationals who helped the U.S.
military. The program has been extremely inefficient and it
can take years for an application to be processed. From 2009
to 2013, Congress said 7,500 visas could be issued but the State
Department approved only 2,000. 

“A lot of it is because of bureaucratic wrangling,” says
Kinzinger. “While we do need to have good background checks and we
do need to be cautious about this, its been way too slow at this
point and a lot of translators have given their lives in the wait.”
 

The State Department has responded to the criticism by improving
the processing time. So far in 2014, approximately 2,300
Afghans received visas out of an allocation limit of
3,000. But State expects to run out of allocated visas within a few
weeks and the whole program expires in September, leaving
6,000 applicants in limbo. 

Secretary of State John Kerry has appealed
to Congress to extend the program and to grant more visas
for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends on September
30.

If left behind, many interpreters will die at the hands of the
Taliban. Janis Shinwari was able to escape that fate and moved to
Virginia in October with his wife and two children. His visa came
largely due to the efforts of Army Capt. Matt Zeller, whose life he
saved (Shinwari is credited with saving the lives of at least four
other American soldiers). In 2008, Zeller returned to the U.S.
while Shinwari stayed in Afghanistan to continue his work as an
interpreter.

“It was the hardest goodbye I’ve ever had in my life,” says
Zeller. “If he had been an American he would have been getting on
that plane with us. It didn’t feel right.”

Zeller relentlessly pressured the State Department to issue
Shinwari his visa. He eventually succeeded and now the two friends
are focused on not only bringing more interpreters to America but
also providing food, shelter, and job opportunities to them once
they arrive through Zeller’s nonprofit, No One Left Behind.

Increasing and extending the visa program is “the right thing to
do,” says Rep. Kinzinger, who stresses not just the promises the
U.S. made in the past but how abandoning local partners will affect
operations in future wars. ”America is going to find itself in
another war one day—it’s a reality. And then if we go in and we try
to bring the local population on our side, and they look at history
and look at all the promises we made in the past that we didn’t
follow through [on], that harms our national security because we
can’t convince them that America stands by its word.”

About 6 minutes.

Produced by Amanda Winkler. Camera by Joshua Swain, Tracy
Oppenheimer, and Winkler. Narrated by Todd Krainin.

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Music by The Abbasi Brothers.

Photos courtesy of Matt Zeller, Janis Shinwari, U.S. Army Staff
Sgt. Jason Epperson,  Staff Sgt. Christopher Allison, Staff
Sgt. Ezekiel R. Kitandwe, Cpl. Adam Leyendecker, Staff Sgt. Eric
James Estrada, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Cpl. John McCall,
 Lance Cpl. Bobby J. Gonzalez, Tech. Sgt. Kevin Wallace, Tech.
Sgt. Efren Lopez, and Niklas Bildhauer.

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