When Did the Betrayal Begin?

On Jan. 20, 1,660 Afghans set to come to the United States had their flights canceled by an hours-old Trump administration. It is frustrating, yet unsurprising, that the new administration’s first priority was to continue its betrayal of allies who trusted the U.S.

During the United States’s war in Afghanistan, the U.S. government hired local staff to serve in combat. They worked as interpreters, truck drivers, security contractors, and other positions. Their service proved invaluable, and they saved American soldiers’ lives. As the war progressed, they came under threat. The Taliban hunted them and their families. The United States first attempted to make good on its promises to local staff in Afghanistan through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, created in 2009 (a parallel program for Iraqi staff had been created in 2007). Lawfare has detailed the history of that visa program in a podcast series, Allies. The program was supposed to provide visas for local Afghan staff who had provided “faithful and valuable” service to the United States—but it never worked as intended. Even as advocates, legislators, and veterans supported the program, applicants faced a slew of delays and never-ending background checks. Twelve years later, the withdrawal from Afghanistan ultimately exposed the program’s fatal flaws—never-ending appointments and Kafkaesque requests for documentation that were impossible to complete in the evacuation’s chaos. The new Trump administration’s move is just the latest episode in a long-standing series of disappointments. 

George Packer first dubbed the U.S.’s abandonment of its local staff in Iraq “Betrayed” in a 2007 New Yorker piece, placing blame on the Bush administration’s bureaucratic and strategic incentives. In one exchange, an Iraqi interpreter told Packer that he would not ask for asylum in the United States because, “[f]or the U.S. to give an asylum for an Iraqi, it means they have failed in Iraq.” While bureaucracy was a real and fatal obstacle to the U.S.’s efforts to protect its local staff, Packer’s piece lacks any primary U.S. actor whose betrayal was willful and conscious. 

As demonstrated through the Trump administration’s most recent actions, the U.S. government is committing a vindictive, needlessly cruel, and strategically dangerous betrayal of its Afghan staff. Writing for the Atlantic this month, Packer laid the betrayal “on Republican hands.” As he put it, “Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood.” When did this “cold blood” betrayal start? 

The United States’s conscious betrayal began in the middle of its war in Afghanistan during a routine fight over visas for interpreters and translators. Following its creation in 2009, the SIV program automatically provided visas for local staff through 2013. After 2013, Congress had to renew the program on a yearly basis. Almost every year after that deadline, supporters of the program engaged in an endless tug-of-war with its opponents. And instead of focusing on improving the visa process, the yearly allocation process forced lobbyists to have the same fights. As a report from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s (D-N.H.) office notes, the SIV program has been “undercut by the need for an annual authorization of visas since 2014, which has given opponents of the program a yearly opportunity to add additional constraints to the application process, resulting in superfluous burdens on applicants.” While the report is helpful in outlining the consequences of yearly allocation, it provides little detail about who those “opponents” were and what they demanded.

A closer examination of SIV fights in 2016 and 2017 exposes the “opponents” in question. It also reveals a nascent fault line that emerged in the Republican Party, between national security moderates and rabidly anti-immigrant nationalists. The second election of President Trump has exacerbated that divide. In many ways, the split over SIVs has come to define today’s internal Republican debate about the United States’s obligation to its Afghan allies and its conduct of foreign policy more broadly. 

The 2016-2017 Visa Fight

When the SIV program came up for renewal in 2016, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) obstructed additional SIVs during the National Defense Authorization Act markup in his capacity on the Armed Services Committee. He was not alone in his opposition. Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who at the time served as a national security adviser for the Trump campaign and chaired the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, told reporters, “We just need to be careful about this …. Just because you’ve got applicants doesn’t mean every one of them is deserving of acceptance.” At the same time, the Judiciary Committee spokeswoman said that the committee “didn’t have enough information to determine if an increase was necessary or prudent since there are thousands of unused visas already allotted to the program,” or whether there was any evidence of threats to staff on the ground in Afghanistan. The committee’s justification flew in the face of veterans and fellow senators constantly speaking about the urgent threat to local staff, including the Taliban making propaganda films, executing those who worked with the U.S. “They execute them and basically make snuff films out of their death,” said Army veteran Matt Zeller. “They get them to essentially confess to their crimes and then they cut them apart, piece by piece of their body.”

Grassley and Sessions also had an ally in the House, with then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte arguing for “reasonable limits on these programs.” Grassley, Sessions, and Goodlatte claimed to be concerned about security vetting and right-sizing the program. But their public justifications did not square with their private negotiations.

Instead of privately negotiating more resources to vet applicants or seeking better reporting on the number of visas, the program’s opponents bargained using other visa programs. For example, in negotiations with Sens. Shaheen and John McCain (R-Ariz.), staffers from Grassley’s and Sessions’s offices offered a “one-for-one” trade with the diversity visa program. The diversity visa program offers a lottery system for immigrants from countries with low immigration to the United States. Grassley and Sessions’s offer revealed how they saw those Afghans who had served the United States. In their view, SIV recipients were the same as any other immigrant. “If you’re going to give more visas, you should take away unused visas someplace else,” Grassley said later.

At the time, a Grassley spokeswoman “confirmed the existence of the offer, but disputes that it came from her boss.” Some advocates later speculated that Sessions was the sole force behind the push. Zeller, an SIV advocate, recalled that, during one previous SIV fight, Sessions’s staffer, Stephen Miller, told him that SIV advocates were “doing nothing but letting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into our country and it’s our job to stop you.” Subsequent reporting detailed Miller’s opposition to the SIV program during the first Trump administration, including a cabinet meeting in which he reportedly said, “What do you guys want … a bunch of Iraqs and ’Stans across the country?”

In 2016, McCain and Shaheen compromised with Grassley and Sessions, cutting the number of requested visas for authorization from 4,000 to 2,500. But the debate over renewal reached a fever pitch that June, when Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) demanded a vote on “an unrelated amendment,” blocking Shaheen and McCain from adding the 2,500 visas. In a June 9 speech on the Senate floor, McCain said, “I can’t imagine how it must bother someone who is literally signing the death warrants of some people who in their innocence decided they would help the United States of America.”

Despite the fact that their early summer effort to add SIVs failed, the senators and advocates persisted. Later that year in July, McCain took to the Senate floor again to highlight the absurdity of his fellow Republicans blocking the program on unrelated domestic policy grounds, while top U.S. military officials supported the program:

It is heartbreaking that Members of the Senate, for their own parochial interests—just a couple, actually—would block this legislation, which calls for us to be able to bring to the United States these people who literally risked their lives on our behalf and whose lives are in danger as we speak. ... General Petraeus has stated eloquently that these individuals put their lives on the line to save the lives of American service men and women, and yet we have Members of this body who block a proposal to allow them to come to the United States of America .... General Nicholson, our commander in Afghanistan, said: “It is my firm belief that abandoning this program would significantly undermine our credibility and the 15 years of tremendous sacrifice by thousands of Afghans on behalf of Americans and Coalition partners.”
I say to my colleagues, this is pretty straightforward .... That we even have to do this is testimony to the nature of the way we seem to be doing business around here, and that is that people would literally put the lives of our allies in danger for their own parochial interests, for their own amendment, which they are demanding not only be taken up but passed, which has nothing to do with the lives of these great individuals who saved the lives of Americans and whose lives are in danger[.]

McCain’s outrage was understandable. In 2016, he fought for control over conservative foreign policy and politics. While battling a primary challenger in Arizona, the emerging wing of his party forced McCain to walk a “high wire” between supporting his party’s new nominee, Donald Trump, and defeating a Democratic challenger in the general election. And as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain was supposed to be the party’s standard-bearer for national security issues. But now his party appeared to be willfully ignoring generals, veterans, and McCain himself. 

Congress eventually extended the program in December 2016, authorizing only an additional 1,500 visas, but placed further restrictions on those who qualified for it. Proponents like Sen. Shaheen remained wary. “The number of visas needed for those in danger far surpasses what’s provided in this bill,” she said in a statement at the time.

Shaheen’s prediction was correct. By March 2017, just three months later, Voice of America reported, “Faced with a shrinking pool of visas, the U.S. embassy in Kabul has started turning away Afghan military translators and other Afghan Nationals seeking to immigrate to the United States[.]” The State Department’s unclassified quarterly report on SIV applications for 2017 noted that 600 applicants applied for a visa in January, but “due to limited numbers” of remaining visas, no interviews “were possible during the months of February or March.” One anonymous official reportedly said, “We do not expect to resume scheduling appointments unless new SIV numbers are allocated by Congress.”

Once again, during negotiations in April and May, Sen. Grassley maintained his reservations. He told reporters that “there’s several visas that are unused right now,” but when reporters responded that the State Department stopped scheduling interviews for potential visa recipients, he said “he was basing his concerns on figures from three to four months prior.” That April, one veteran from Iowa wrote an op-ed supporting the SIV program, “Astonishingly, our own Senator Chuck Grassley bears responsibility …. [H]e is in a position to green-light or to oppose additional visas, and so far, despite broad bipartisan support and loud advocacy from military and diplomatic leaders, he has chosen the latter path.” Although proponents ultimately secured an increase of 2,500 visas in 2017, opponents still restricted eligibility for SIVs, which significantly limited the number of Afghan allies able to secure a visa.

Those yearly negotiations continued until the end of the war. Year after year, the pattern in the 2016-2017 negotiations repeated itself: Proponents of the program brought in advocates, ran stories on media outlets, portrayed the danger posed to Afghan allies, and attempted to shame opponents into voting for the program. Meanwhile, opponents extracted concessions including increased vetting (meaning longer wait times) and fewer visas. This constant whiplash and delay ultimately hurt those who trusted the U.S. the most. While waiting for the U.S. to even decide if the program was still up and running, local staff could not even schedule an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, an essential part of the application process.

Legislative horse trading is not new, but one aspect of the 2016 negotiations appeared novel to Sen. McCain. In his remarks above, McCain’s outrage stemmed from fellow Republicans tying “the lives of these great individuals who saved the lives of Americans and whose lives are in danger” to “their own parochial interests.” Those same opponents also now willfully ignored a mountain of evidence from national security officials about the SIV program’s value. For example, in the fall of 2016, a letter signed by 36 national security officials noted the consequences of a dysfunctional SIV program: “America has abandoned them, and in kind, they are now free to abandon our forward deployed troops.” To McCain, both playing with the lives of U.S. allies and the willful ignorance of national security consequences underscored a shift in the nature of legislative bargains, “that we even have to do this is testimony to the nature of the way we seem to be doing business around here.” Unfortunately, that way of “doing business” on Capitol Hill continues.

Strategic Narcissism

The United States’s vacillating commitment to the SIV program is reflective of a broader ambivalence to the war in Afghanistan and, at present, the U.S.’s attitude toward its allies. As Lt. Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser to President Trump and veteran of the war, put it, “Afghanistan was not a twenty-year war; it was a one-year war fought twenty times over.” It could also be said that lobbying battles for the SIV program were quite literally one-year battles fought 10 times over. Every year, proponents of the program dealt with the same opposition and attracted the same media attention, only to have Congress pass a slither of improvements that were needed. As Sen. Shaheen said in 2021, “[T]here were a few Republicans in the Senate who blocked us year after year from getting more SIV applicants to the United States.”

McMaster also blamed U.S. military failures on “strategic narcissism,” what he defines as “the tendency for American leaders to define the world only in relation to the United States.” The problem with defining the world in that way “is that it does not acknowledge the authorship over the future that others enjoy, from allies to adversaries to enemies.” By failing to acknowledge that reality, strategic narcissism leads to “self-delusion[,]” which “provide[s] a rationale for self-defeat.”

Those who opposed the SIV program were the embodiment of strategic narcissism. Forget the fact that those interpreters are hunted by the Taliban and that U.S. allies can lose their trust in the United States. For the opponents, domestic politics had priority over U.S. strategic interests. Those on Capitol Hill could have improved the program and recognized the lived reality of those executed by the Taliban. Instead, they chose to tie the U.S.’s commitment to its allies to diversity visas and unrelated amendments. And they bargained as if trust in the United States is an infinite operating assumption for any ally. They either refused to see or ignored the fact that the failure to protect local allies who trusted the U.S. leads to broader “[p]erceptions that the United States cannot or will not honor its promises.” Put simply, the SIV program was a promise. Their yearly bargaining broke it.

The malignancy of strategic narcissism is hard to ignore. Take last year’s fight over Ukraine aid, for instance. Republican opponents to Ukraine aid constantly brought up “border security” as the primary reason for their opposition to the bill. As Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wrote amid negotiations, “$60 billion to the corrupt regime in Ukraine and no real border security for our own country …. This has to stop.” And, just like the SIV program, the delay in aid to Ukraine had real consequences for U.S. allies—including a shortage in ammunition, which the former president of Ukraine reportedly told the Associated Press, “forced outgunned Ukrainian forces to surrender village after village on the front lines.” That episode provides clear evidence that Russia will continue its onslaught regardless of what the U.S. decides with its immigration policy. And “the tendency to define the world only in relation to the United States persists.” As President Trump said to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.”

What Now?

The SIV program’s fate remains uncertain. As noted above, the Trump administration halted flights to the United States for new visa recipients and suspended aid to resettlement organizations. According to Reuters, the White House is currently considering a new travel ban that could bar people from Afghanistan from entering the United States. When asked about Afghan SIV recipients on March 17, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said that the SIV program is undergoing a “review.”

The recently passed Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act extended the SIV program for one more year as it undergoes that review. Supporters of the SIV program were hoping to extend the application deadline for two years and increase the visa cap by 20,000. But, in a familiar refrain, Republican “holdouts” to the bill wanted even more vetting for SIV applicants and successfully defeated the increased visa cap. It doesn’t appear that the extension will matter given the freeze in refugee processing and funding for resettlement. According to CBS News, over 40,000 Afghans have been vetted and approved to leave Afghanistan. They remain the primary victims of strategic narcissism. In the words of one former lieutenant colonel for the Afghan army who had his visa blocked via executive order, the United States “not only disregarded the interests of Afghans in this decision, but also failed to consider the interests of the United States. How can the world and America’s allies rely on the U.S. government?”