Something happened this weekend that caught me off guard.
We put out our five-year statement Saturday morning. It was deliberately not a policy document. We write about the government fifty weeks a year, and these two weeks do not belong to the government. It belongs to Afghans, to the people who did not survive the last five years, and to the network that has carried this work from the first night.
Then you started writing back. Not a few of you. A lot of you. And what came in was not commentary. It was testimony. About what we’ve done together and what we’ve got left to do.
So this week’s update is going to be different. The policy is still here, the court news is real and it is good, and the asks are all at the bottom where you can find them. But the top of this one belongs to you.
THANK YOU, SPECIFICALLY
Thank you is easy to say and almost impossible to say well, so let me try to say it in the specific, unglamorous way it deserves.
Thank you for the casework you did after your shift ended. For the calls you took at two in the morning because that is when Kabul is awake. For the affidavits, the FOIA requests, the flight manifests you chased, the congressional offices you would not stop emailing, and the families you have carried for five years without ever meeting them in person.
Thank you to the lawyers who filed for free, and kept filing after the fourth denial. To the veterans who went looking for their own interpreters and then stayed to look for everyone else’s. To the teachers, the truck drivers, the grandmothers, and the college students who learned an immigration system from scratch because nobody else was going to do it.
And thank you to the Afghan Americans in this coalition, who spent five years doing casework for strangers while their own cases sat frozen, translating for families they had never met while their own mothers were still in Kabul. There is no version of this work that happens without you, and there is no honest telling of the last five years that puts you anywhere but at the center of it.
A little girl named Ifat spent years in a transit camp in Qatar, her skin blistering from a disease that makes it tear at the lightest touch. Her parents kept her alive in that heat. A handful of stubborn women with no authority and no budget made sure the rest of us learned her name. She is safe today because of them..
That is what this network is. That is what it has been for five years.
YOUR STORIES, FROM THE FRONTLINES
One reply came in from a woman in Portland. In August 2021 an Afghan friend called her, a young man she had tutored in English years earlier in Austria, and asked whether she could find anyone who had stayed at his in-laws’ guesthouses in Kabul, anyone who might sign an affidavit. She thought it would be like tracking down people for a high school reunion. She found exactly one person willing to talk to her. Every other door closed.
The family went into hiding. She and her husband and a friend in California filed anyway, a twenty-two-inch stack of paper for humanitarian parole, because the family’s SIV paperwork had vanished and nobody believed it had ever existed. They were told, in so many words, that everybody claims that.
It took three years. Someone at the State Department eventually found the file. The family had been telling the truth the entire time. They had held an embassy appointment for the day Kabul fell.
The parents came, with their two youngest. The children over twenty-one could not. That family made the decision to split themselves across three countries and an ocean because they believed in what their youngest two might become here. They are her neighbors now.
She did not write to us to complain. She wrote to say thank you, and then a whole life came out of her while she was typing. Her own closing line was this. “I had no idea this would come out when all I wanted to do was say thank you.”
That is what this anniversary did to people. That is what five years of carrying something does.
Others were shorter and landed just as hard.
A woman wrote to say she is one of the many quiet supporters of this work, and that she knows how hard it is to keep going right now. She was not asking for anything. She wanted us to know she was out there.
Another wrote something I have been turning over ever since.
I do not know one Afghan person but I still feel in my heart that we owe them what we promised. They believed us. We have to make it right.
That is the whole argument, from someone with no personal stake in it at all. No Afghan friend, no deployment, no case she is carrying. Just a promise she watched her country make.
A reader in Ohio sent us the reply he got from his senator after asking him to cosponsor. It was a form letter about Haitian TPS. He had written about Afghans. Nobody read it, and he knew nobody read it, and he told us he plans to keep going anyway and that he will always remember this response. That is not a defeat. That is a man who has correctly identified what he is dealing with.
And a veteran wrote four sentences that cut straight through. These are challenging times, he said, and he wants to know how to fight back, because we all served our country but we also signed up to fight.
He deserves a real answer, so here it is. Fighting back does not look like fury on the internet.
It looks like a cosponsor added to a bill, a reporter who finally understands the difference between a refugee and an SIV holder because you spent forty minutes explaining it, a volunteer sitting in a courtroom so an ICE officer knows someone is watching, and a family that does not get separated because somebody read the docket and made a phone call at the right hour.
It is unglamorous, it is slow, and five years of this record says it works. The action list at the bottom is the current version of it.
FINISH THE MISSION
Wednesday, the 12th of August, was one of the biggest things we did all year. It is a privilege to be able to host a room that told the story of what this coalition really is: people from everywhere, doing their absolute most to finish what we collectively started.
The Global Alliance Update drew nearly 500 registrants from more than sixteen countries. More than half joined from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not advocates talking about allies. The allies themselves, including former military officers, aid workers, and journalists who are still in danger as they listened. Around them sat congressional staff, former senior American officials, resettlement and legal organizations, coalition-country military associations, and press from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Czechia.
Ambassador Tim Davis, former United States Ambassador to Qatar and a Marine, opened it. “Wars do not end because politicians say they are over,” he said. “For those who participate in them, they end when we have taken care of all the work, and all the people, who fought and bled alongside us.” Senator Chris Coons sent video remarks. Ambassador John R. Bass, former United States Ambassador to Afghanistan, closed it, and what he said was about you, not about us. “You ran to the problem. You innovated, you collaborated, and you refused to take no for an answer. Five years later, the results of that determination have been remarkable, well beyond what virtually everyone thought possible.”
The panel was Johnny Mercer, the former British MP and our senior adviser, Major General Denis Thompson of the Canadian Armed Forces, retired, Dr. Beth Oppenheim of HIAS, and Emmanuel Jacob of EUROMIL, moderated by Jon Feltham of Aman Lara. Professor Sara de Jong of the University of York introduced the Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff in International Missions.
And we released The Allied Ledger, written with Professor Sara de Jong, Jon Feltham, and Julia Aitken of Local Staff International. It is the first full accounting of how every nation that fought in Afghanistan kept or broke its promise. The finding is bleak and it is not only about us. By 2026, every coalition nation’s Afghan relocation program had closed, frozen, or been terminated. Only the United States and the United Kingdom rate even a mixed grade. Canada took more than 63,000 and then closed intake entirely. Germany moved 33,000 of 45,000 pledged and froze the rest. The report sets all of it against a century of precedent, from the Assyrian Levies in 1933 to Mali in 2023, and finds the same abandonment recurring by design, with Vietnam and the Kurds as the rare exceptions.
That is why the event was called Finish The Mission. The name was not decoration. The mission was not completed in August 2021, and it does not end because a fifth anniversary came and went. There are people in Kabul, in Islamabad, and at Camp As Sayliyah whose files are open and whose vetting is finished. Finishing the mission means getting them here.
THIS ANNIVERSARY GOT LOUDER
This year feels different and more visible, because you helped make sure that this moment in time did not go unnoticed.
The coverage this week was not a courtesy. NPR’s story on Afghan allies worried about losing their green cards ran on dozens of member stations from Georgia to Utah to New Hampshire, and was picked up in translation in the Netherlands.
CBC and the Globe and Mail ran hard pieces on how the reckoning is going here compared with allied countries. Scripps News carried it on television. Op-eds from our teams ran in Fox News, and a blunter version syndicated out to the Orlando Sentinel, Las Vegas Weekly, the Santa Maria Times, the Lompoc Record, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and the DC Journal under a headline that does not leave much room for interpretation: we made a promise to the Afghans, and we are breaking it on purpose.
Five years in, most anniversaries get quieter. This one got louder. That is not luck, and it is not just us. It is five years of a movement being right, on the record, over and over, until reporters knew who to call.
THREE PIECES, AND WHY EACH ONE EXISTS
I wrote three different things for this anniversary, deliberately, because they are aimed at three different rooms. Here is what each one is for.
We Made a Promise to the Afghans; We’re Breaking It on Purpose, which ran in the Orlando Sentinel and then in the Las Vegas Weekly, the Santa Maria Times, the Lompoc Record, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and the DC Journal. This one is the blunt version, built for regional papers where a member of Congress actually reads the opinion page over coffee. Its whole job is the word “purpose.” Not a backlog, not a bureaucratic snarl. A decision, made by people with names, that can be unmade by those same people.
America’s Promise to Our Afghan Allies Is Still Unfinished Five Years Later in Fox News, written with Myal Greene, the President and CEO of World Relief. This one exists because the audience that most needs to hear this is not the audience that already agrees. It is co-signed by an evangelical humanitarian leader and a Navy veteran, and it makes the case on the ground where it will actually change minds: a promise made, national security, and the character of the country that made it.
The Afghan Betrayal Was a Choice That Happened When You Weren’t Looking, on my own Substack. This is the long one, and it is the fullest accounting I have written of how a working system was taken apart one quiet decision at a time. It is not an op-ed and it is not neutral. It is from my heart, and if you only read one of the three, read this one.
Now write yours. Op-eds do not require a title or a platform. They require a specific story and a clear ask, and local editors are hungrier for them than people realize. If you have carried a case, sat in a courtroom, welcomed a family to your town, or served alongside the people we are talking about, you have the credential that matters and I do not have to tell you what to say.
A few things that help. Keep it to 600 or 750 words. Open with your own connection instead of the policy, because a reader in your county will keep going for a neighbor and stop for a statistic. Make one ask, not five, and name the member of Congress you want to hear it. Send it to your paper’s opinion editor with a two-line note about who you are. Regional dailies, weeklies, veteran outlets, and faith publications all publish this kind of piece, and a letter to the editor works too if 700 words is more than you have in you this week.
Once your words are public tell us, both so we can amplify it and because a wall of these, published in different states in the same month, is a thing Washington notices in a way it does not notice any one of us.
THE VOICES OF OUR ALLIES
Every week my inbox fills with letters from Afghans. We are going to start sharing a few, always without names or anything that could identify anyone, because these are the voices this is actually about and they are almost never in the room.
An Afghan mother, stranded in Pakistan with five young children, wrote on Saturday.
I have been waiting for years for my case to be resolved and have completed the required steps, but I am still living in uncertainty.
An Afghan man still inside Afghanistan, who submitted his ties information to IOM in September 2024 and has heard nothing since, wrote to thank us anyway.
The real Afghans will never ignore your struggles. But still I am stuck in Afghanistan.
An Afghan family who were at the Kabul airport on the day of the Abbey Gate bombing, and who are now in Pakistan, sent five sentences. This is the one we cannot put down.
We are living in Pakistan without a destiny, waiting for the unknown.
A former employee of the United States Embassy in Kabul wrote about what the last five years have cost him.
For nearly five years, I and my family have endured extremely difficult and uncertain circumstances, hardships that I never imagined I would have to experience.
And an Afghan man in the P-2 pipeline, still in Afghanistan, who has completed every stage asked of him, wrote a single line that is really addressed to Washington rather than to us.
We have been waiting for protection and hope that the United States will not abandon us.
Then, starting Sunday morning, they wrote together. Message after message from Afghan P1 and P2 families stranded in Pakistan, arriving separately, carrying the same collective request. They are asking for one page. A single document that speaks for all of them rather than any one family, laying out what they are living through: years of waiting, cases that stopped moving, deportation threats, expired visas and documents, economic collapse, children who cannot go to school. They asked that it be carried to Congress and put into someone’s hands rather than left on a desk.
We do not want our voices to stop at an office desk.
Consider it received. We are building that one-pager, and we are going to lift these voices as far as we can carry them.
REST. CLOSE THE LAPTOP. AND THEN COME BACK, READY TO FINISH THE MISSION.
These two weeks are brutal, every single year. August 15 is when Kabul fell. August 26 is Abbey Gate. August 30 is the last flight out. For a lot of people reading this, that is not a timeline. It is an anniversary of the worst days of their lives, arriving on schedule, whether or not they have the capacity for it this year.
If you are Afghan, this fortnight asks you to relive a country’s collapse while your own case sits open. If you spent your youth in that war, it asks you to sit with names and faces and decisions that were never yours to make, while people who were not there explain what it all meant. If you have spent five years doing casework for strangers, it asks you to do it while carrying everyone whose case you could not move.
None of that is weakness. It is the bill that comes due when you care this much, this long, against this much resistance.
You are allowed to close the laptop. You are allowed to skip the five year milestone coverage entirely.
Free legal help, pathway information, safety guidance, and mental health and crisis support are all at afghanevac.org/resources, and they are there for you whether you are in Kabul, Doha, Islamabad, or down the street from us in San Diego. Use them, and send them to someone who will not ask on their own.
The work will still be here in September. So will we.
WHERE THINGS STAND
The First Circuit told the government no on most of it. On August 14, Judges Lara Montecalvo, Seth Aframe, and Joshua Dunlap ruled on the administration’s emergency stay motion in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, No. 26-1703. They granted the stay as to one policy and denied it as to the other two, finding the government “has not met its burden.” Two of the four USCIS policies struck down in June remain vacated, and USCIS is required to adjudicate. The one the administration won back, Comprehensive Re-Review, is the one that reaches backward into cases that were already approved. The government’s opening brief is due September 10.
Camp As Sayliyah is running out of calendar. Around 1,039 Afghans remain in Qatar, more than half women, more than half children, 150 are the immediate family of American service members stranded in what has become a prison camp. The site is slated to close September 30, forty-four days from today (we do not believe this will happen). On August 7, 35 members of Congress led by Rep. Scott Peters and Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to the State Department demanding these vetted allies be processed first. Read the letter. We have raised CAS with senior State officials repeatedly since January 2025. The people there are approved and the vetting is done. What is missing is a decision.
September is the fight. The presidential determination for fiscal year 2027 is due next month, and what we are hearing is that the administration intends to build it around roughly 22,000 Afrikaners from South Africa. For scale, the entire FY26 ceiling was 17,500, the second lowest ever. We are not going to argue about who should be excluded. Afghans belong in that number, and P1 and P2 cases were stopped at the White House, which means the White House can restart them.
ACTION THIS WEEK
Write your representative and ask them to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act, H.R. 9899 / S.5308.
Read and share the Five Years On series at reports.afghanevac.org. Four reports built entirely on primary sources, so nobody has to take anyone’s word for what happened, including ours. You can endorse the recommendations in the Unfinished Mission and arm us to cause the change needed to ensure this never happens again.
Read and share the Afghan-American Foundation’s Five Years On report. It documents what Afghan American communities actually are, told by Afghan Americans, which is exactly as it should be.
Stay ready for September. The fiscal year 2027 refugee determination lands next month and we will need volume, fast, at both the White House and Congress. Make sure you are subscribed so you get the alert the day it drops.
IN THE NEWS
Stories from the past week.
Five years on
While Taliban leaders mark 5 years in power in Afghanistan, a UN official warns of a rights crisis -- PBS NewsHour
Taliban mark five years back in power in Afghanistan as aid groups warn of crisis -- NBC News
Entrenched, Embattled and Defiant, the Taliban Celebrate 5 Years in Power -- The New York Times
The Taliban Kicked the U.S. Out of Afghanistan. Now They Want It Back. -- The New York Times
Five years after Kabul fell, the reckoning over Afghanistan is far from over -- CBC News
The Afghans America made promises to
They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards -- NPR
Rounds’ bill would recognize service of America’s Afghan allies during war -- Ripon Advance
Trump has chance to fix fallout from Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal -- The Washington Times
Inside Afghanistan
What America Owes to Afghan Women -- The New York Times
A total collapse, women’s rights in Afghanistan under the Taliban -- The Christian Science Monitor
Concerns grow over increased global ties with Taliban in Afghanistan -- The Guardian
25 Years in Afghanistan review, the extraordinary life of an optimist -- The Guardian
How our allies are handling it
Taliban Regained Power in Afghanistan, UK Afghan Allies Fear Reprisal Over Resettlement Delays -- NewsCord
Canada, other countries urged to learn from Afghan resettlement experience -- The Globe and Mail
The world set Afghanistan up to fail, and now it has forgotten its people -- The Globe and Mail
From us
We Made a Promise to the Afghans; We’re Breaking It on Purpose -- Orlando Sentinel
America’s promise to our Afghan allies is still unfinished five years later — Fox News
The Afghan Betrayal Was a Choice That Happened When You Weren’t Looking — Substack
Our reports
The Allied Ledger -- #AfghanEvac and Local Staff International
The Unfinished Mission -- #AfghanEvac
Protection Promised -- #AfghanEvac
Five years ago the world watched Afghans run alongside an airplane and decided that image was the story.
It was not.
The story is the twenty-two-inch stack of paper.
It is the woman who found one person willing to talk and filed anyway.
It is the mother who completed every step and is still waiting, and the SIV applicant who wrote to us asking not for his own case but for all of them.
Most of the people who have held this promise together will never be thanked.
In September a president will sign a piece of paper deciding who this country still makes room for, and Afghans have every right to be on it.
We intend to be very loud about that.
Take the rest you need first. Then find us.
Dear Mr. VanDiver,
Thank you sincerely for your continued efforts and advocacy for Afghan SIV applicants and families.
I have one respectful request. Since you and other legal organizations are warning SIV applicants that attending a visa interview under the current circumstances may put their cases at risk, would it be possible for AfghanEvac to ask the courts to prevent SIV interviews from being scheduled until the travel ban is lifted or conditions change enough for SIV applicants to safely proceed with visa issuance and travel?
After years of waiting, it is deeply concerning to face the possibility that attending the very interview we have been waiting for could put our cases at risk.
I raise this only out of a genuine human concern, and I sincerely hope this possibility can be considered in your legal efforts.
With deepest respect and appreciation.