When the US left Kabul, these Americans tried to help Afghans left behind. It still haunts them

The United States' longest war is over. But not for everyone.

Outside of San Francisco, surgeon Doug Chin has helped provide medical assistance to people in Afghanistan via video calls. He has helped Afghan families with their day-to-day living expenses. Yet he remains haunted by the people he could not save.

In Long Beach, California, Special Forces veteran Thomas Kasza has put aside medical school to help Afghans who used to search for land mines escape to America. That can mean testifying to Congress, writing newsletters and asking for donations.

In rural Virginia, Army veteran Mariah Smith housed an Afghan family of four that she'd never met who had fled Kabul and needed a place to stay as they navigated their new life in America.

Smith, Kasza and Chin have counterparts scattered across the country — likeminded people they may never have heard of.

The war in Afghanistan officially ended in August 2021 when the last U.S. plane departed the country’s capital city. What remains is a dedicated array of Americans — often working in isolation, or in small grassroots networks — who became committed to helping the Afghan allies the United States left behind. For them, the war didn't end that day.

In the three years since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, hundreds of people around the country — current and former military members, diplomats, intelligence officers, civilians from all walks of life — have struggled in obscurity to help the Afghans left behind.

They have assisted Afghans struggling through State Department bureaucracy fill out form after form. They have sent food and rent money to families. They have fielded WhatsApp or Signal messages at all hours from Afghans pleading for help. They have welcomed those who have made it out of Afghanistan into their homes as they build new lives.

For Americans involved in this ad hoc effort, the war has reverberated through their lives, weighed on their relationships, caused veterans to question their military service and in many cases left a scar as ragged as any caused by bullet or bomb.

Most are tired. Many are angry. They grapple with what it means for their nation that they, ordinary Americans moved by compassion and gratitude and by shame at what they consider their government's abandonment of countless Afghan allies, were the ones left to get those Afghans to safety.

And they struggle with how much more they have left to give.

How we got here

The American mission in Afghanistan started with the goal of eradicating al-Qaida and avenging the group’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the mission morphed and grew over two decades. Every president inherited an evolving version of a war that no commander-in-chief wanted to lose — but that none could figure out how to win.

By the time President Joe Biden decided to pull the U.S. military from Afghanistan by Aug. 31, 2021, the American mission there was riddled with failures. But by early August the Taliban had toppled key cities and was closing in on the capital. With the Afghan army largely collapsed, the Taliban rolled into Kabul and assumed control on Aug. 15. The Biden administration scrambled to evacuate staff, American citizens and at-risk Afghans.

One Biden administration official recently described the chaos of those three weeks to The Associated Press, saying that it felt like nobody in the U.S. government was able to steer the ship. With the Taliban in control of the capital, tens of thousands of Afghans crowded the airport trying to get on one of the planes out.

That is when this informal network was born.

Past and current members of the U.S. military, the State Department and U.S. intelligence services were all being besieged with messages begging for help from Afghans they’d worked with. Americans horrified by what they were seeing and reading on the news reached out as well, determined to help.

Veterans who’d served multiple tours in Afghanistan and civilians who’d never set foot there all spent sleepless weeks working their telephones, fighting to get out every Afghan they could and to help those still trapped.

‘Only thing I can think of’

One of those civilians was Doug Chin. A plastic surgeon in Oakland California, he was already familiar with Afghanistan, although he'd never been there. A few years before the Taliban takeover, he'd become involved with the then Herat-based Afghan Girls Robotics Team. So impressed was he with their mission that he'd joined their board and sometimes traveled to their international events.

Then, in August 2021, the Taliban entered Herat. Eventually came the scenes out of Kabul airport: mothers hoisting children over barbed wire, men falling to their deaths as they clung to the bottom of departing planes. Chin, working contacts, worked to help the team, their extended families, staff and others get on flight manifests, navigate checkpoints and eventually escape Kabul.

The work was so intense that he shut down his business for three months to focus on helping Afghans. For a time, he was supporting dozens of people in Afghanistan.

Now, three years later, the work is shifting. It's a matter of trying to get visas for Afghans so they can escape — an educational visa to study in Europe, for example.

He advocates for human rights activists in Afghanistan and also helps provide medical services remotely to people in there. Once or twice a week he gets requests via the secure messaging app Signal to help someone in Afghanistan. Chin will either give advice directly or help them get in touch with doctors in Afghanistan that can help.

Some memories still move him to tears. In one case, in August 2021, a busload of people he’d helped evacuate was heading to the Kabul airport. One woman wasn’t on the passenger manifest. U.S. officials coordinating the evacuations told him that the Taliban controlling access to the airport might turn the entire bus around because of this one passenger. Chin had to order her off the bus. She later escaped Afghanistan, but it remains painful for him.

“The only thing I can think of," he says, “is the people that I haven’t helped.”

An imperfect pathway

In those initial months, there was a frantic intensity to the efforts to get Afghans into the Kabul airport and onto the American military planes. Volunteers pushed U.S. contacts in Kabul to let Afghans into the airport, coordinated to get them onto the flight lists, lobbied any member of Congress or government official they could find and helped Afghans in Kabul find safe places to go. Even leaders of the U.S. administration and military resorted to the volunteer groups and journalists to get out individual Afghan friends or ex-colleagues.

By the time the last plane lifted off on Aug. 30, 2021, about 76,000 Afghans had been flown out of the country and eventually to the U.S. Another 84,000 have come since the fall of Kabul – each a victory for the Americans helping them over the Taliban and over a tortuous U.S. immigration process.

But more are still waiting. There are about 135,000 applicants to the special immigrant visa program and another 28,000 waiting on other refugee programs for Afghans connected to the U.S. mission. Those numbers don't include family members, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands more Afghans are waiting in limbo and in danger in Afghanistan.

In 2009, Congress passed legislation creating a special immigrant visa program to help Afghans and Iraqis who assisted the U.S. government emigrate to the United States. The idea was that they'd risked their lives to help America's war effort, and in return they deserved a new life and protection in America.

But ever since its inception, the SIV program has been dogged by complaints that it has moved too slowly, burdening applicants with too much paperwork and ultimately putting America's wartime allies in danger as they waited for decisions.

Under the Biden administration, the State Department has taken steps to streamline the process and has boosted the number of special immigrant visas issued each month to Afghans. The department says that in fiscal year 2023, it issued more SIVs for Afghans in a single year than ever before — more than 18,000 — and is on track to surpass that figure this year. State has also used what it's learned to streamline processing of SIV applicants to increase the number of refugees it is admitting to the United States from around the world.

The Biden administration official said most people remember only the chaos of those last two weeks of August and have no idea about the work that has been done in the three years since. But for those still waiting to come, they do so under constant threat and stress.

No One Left Behind, an organization helping Afghans who used to work for the U.S. government get out of Afghanistan, has documented 242 case of reprisal killings with at least 101 who had applied or were clearly SIV-eligible.

An opportunity to pay back

Faraidoon “Fred” Abdullah is one of the volunteers often referred to as caseworkers. He has helped hundreds of Afghans fill out immigration and visa forms or hunt down letters of recommendation from former employers.

“They’re eligible. They have the documentation, but (the) Department of State is too slow,” Abdullah says.

His journey to this work started a little differently. The 37-year-old Afghanistan native began to work with the U.S. military as a translator during the war. He left his home country in 2016 through the same program he’s trying to help people through now. A year later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army.

“I lost many American friends while they served my country, while they were helping Afghan people,” Abdullah says. “So it was always like a dream for me to wear the uniform officially as a part of the United States military to pay them back with my service, with my time.”

He describes the work he has done over the last several years — as one of the few people who speaks the language and understands Afghan culture — as similar to that of a social worker. The calls come at random and varying hours of the night and day, he says.

“It’s like PTSD, and they might just snap at you like for no reason,” Abdullah says about the people he's tried to help. “And not everybody has the patience and tolerance and the ability to deal with that.”

He was on active duty when the United States decided to withdraw. He had left his mom, siblings and other relatives in Afghanistan, thinking that the democracy that had been slowly built over the years would endure. It didn't.

Over the last few years, Abdullah has been able to relocate a few family members out of Afghanistan. But more than a dozen still remain stuck in a process run by the departments of State and Defense. Now he worries that attention has faded from Afghanistan as other conflicts take precedence. The same urgency to donate, volunteer or sustain Afghans as their status remains in limbo is no longer there.

“Afghanistan is, right now, not an important issue — not a hot potato anymore,” Abdullah says. “That focus has shifted to Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Haiti. And then we are kind of like, you know, nowhere.”

‘By, with and through’

To understand what has taken place since the last U.S. flight left Afghanistan, former military members will point you to the Special Forces operational approach titled, “by, with and through.”

The term effectively means that nothing the United States does on the ground in a partner state is done without allies. In the case of Afghanistan, that's the Afghans who — at great risk to themselves — turned against the Taliban to work with the Americans.

So when Kabul fell, the obligation to their Afghan allies left behind was equal to the responsibility to their own fellow service members. Just as they would never leave another service member behind, so too with the Afghans they worked with.

It is a commitment Thomas Kasza knows all too well.

He spent 13 years active duty in the U.S. military, 10 as part of U.S. Army Special Forces, with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he prepared to leave active duty in August 2021, Kasza was planning to go to medical school. Then came the evacuation.

Like many U.S. military veterans, Kasza started helping Afghans he knew who were still in Afghanistan. At first, he was determined to limit his involvement.

Today, the notion of medical school has been abandoned. He's the executive director of an organization called the 1208 Foundation. The group helps Afghans who worked with the Special Forces to detect explosives to come to America. Kasza and another Special Forces member and six Afghans do the work.

The foundation does things like pay for housing for the Afghans when they travel to another country for their visa interviews or paying for the required medical exams. They also help Afghans still in Afghanistan where they’re hunted by the Taliban. In 2023 they helped 25 Afghan families get out of Afghanistan. Each is a hard-fought victory and a new life. But they still have about another 170 cases in their roster, representing more than 900 people when family members are included.

To focus on the mission — getting those Afghan team members to safety — he limits the conversations he has with them. “You have to maintain a separation for your own sanity,” he says.

As the third anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan arrives, Kasza is preparing to step back from the executive director role at the organization he helped found although he'll still be involved in the organization. Everything that's happened over the last three years still weighs on him.

“I can’t do what our government did and look the other way,” he says.

Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret who spent several deployments training Afghan special forces, describes the work of the past few years as “being on the world’s longest 911 call” and unable to hang up. “It is like one of the most taboo things in the world to leave a partner on the battlefield in any way,” he says.

Scott adds that many veterans, like himself, are only alive now “because on at least two occasions Afghan partners prevented" them from getting killed.

“And now those very people are asking me to help their father or their mother who were on the run,” he says. "How do you hang up the phone on something like that?”

The notion of ‘moral injury’

Some of the volunteers spoke of tapping their own retirement accounts, or their children’s college funds, to keep stranded Afghan allies housed and fed, sometimes for years. Marriages reached breaking points over the time that volunteers were putting into the effort. Spouses and children warned their loved ones that they had to cut back.

One veteran who worked at the heart of the logistics network by which volunteers got grocery and rent money to Afghan allies talked of the loneliness of the work, where once he’d had fellow troops with him in tough times. As the effort went on, he upped his antidepressants. Then did it again. And again.

“Moral injury” is a relatively new term that is often referred to in the discussion about how many volunteers, especially military veterans, feel about the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan and the treatment of allies. It refers to the damage done to one's conscience by the things they've had to do or witnessed or failed to prevent — things that violate their own values. In this case, they feel betrayed by their country because they feel it has failed to protect Afghan allies.

It is a concept that Kate Kovarovic feels passionate about.

She is not a veteran, nor does she come from a military family. But she became involved in the effort after a friend reached out to her in 2021 to ask for her social media expertise. From there Kate got more and more involved until she became the director of resilience programming for #AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations dedicated to helping Afghans trying to leave Afghanistan. She held that position for over a year. She describes it as the hardest job of her life.

During the evacuation and its aftermath, volunteers were focused on helping Afghans flee or find safe houses. But a few months later volunteers started realizing that they needed support as well, she says.

The ease of communication meant volunteers were always getting bombarded with pleas for help.

Kovarovic says they tried a little bit of everything to help the volunteers. She held a series of fireside chats where she'd talk to mental health professionals. They created a resource page on #AfghanEvac's website with mental health resources. And she helped create a Resilience Duty Officer support program where volunteers needing someone to talk to could call or text a 24-hour hotline. She describes that program as “catastrophically successful.”

The volunteers weren't just calling to vent a little. Kovarovic says the calls were graphic. Desperate.

“I personally fielded over 50 suicide calls from people,” she recalls. “You were hearing a lot of the trauma.”

She lost weight, wasn't sleeping and developed an eye twitch that made it difficult to see. Loved ones asked her to stop. In 2023, she took a break. Home from a two-week vacation, she landed at the airport and her eye twitch immediately returned. She sat down and texted colleagues that it was time for her to stop.

“I wept. I have never felt such a heavy sense of guilt. I felt like I hadn’t done enough and that I had failed people by abandoning them,” she says.

She now hosts a podcast called “Shoulder to Shoulder: Untold Stories From a Forgotten War” with a retired Air Force veteran that she met during the evacuation. They talk to guests like a Gold Star mother and an Afghan interpreter who lost his legs in a bomb blast.

She wants people outside the community to know that the work of helping Afghans during the withdrawal and all that has happened since has been its own front line in the war on terror.

“What I hope that people will understand one day is that these are lifelong conditions," she says. “So even people who leave the volunteer work, even if you never speak to another Afghan again, this is going to sit with you for the rest of your life.”

What comes next?

Everyone in the movement, spread out across time zones, has varying views of where this effort goes from here. Many want Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would provide a permanent emigration pathway for Afghans. Others would like support for volunteers' mental health concerns. Many just want accountability.

None of the four presidents who oversaw the war in Afghanistan has taken public responsibility for the chaos and destruction that followed America's withdrawal. Biden, in charge when U.S. troops left, has come under the most criticism.

The Biden administration official, who spoke to AP on the condition of anonymity, said that the unwillingness by the U.S. government to admit its mistakes in regards to Afghanistan is perpetuating the moral injury felt by those who stepped up.

In the meantime, the work goes on — getting Afghans to safety and helping them once they're here.

In 2022, at Dulles International Airport, Army veteran Mariah Smith got to experience that moment. Smith spent three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. With retirement from the military nearing in 2020, she joined the board of No One Left Behind. Then came the U.S. withdrawal.

One of the Afghans the group was helping was a woman named Latifa who had worked for the U.S. government. With the Taliban encircling and constant concerns over bombings, Latifa and her family didn’t want to risk taking the young children to the airport.

She was eventually able to get a visa to what is likely one of the least used Afghan immigration routes: Iceland. From there, No One Left Behind helped her process her special immigrant visa. That's how Smith and the woman started talking.

They discussed where the woman and her family were going to live. Mariah lives in Stephens City on a farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley countryside. She also owns a home in town that she usually rents out but was empty at the time. She offered it to Latifa and her family.

Mariah was amazed at the response by the town of roughly 2,000 people where the Afghan family lived. Latifa, her husband and two kids came with the luggage they could carry, but Mariah said the mayor, police chief, town clerk, town manager and others all pitched in with furniture, toys and household items: "People really, really tried hard. And that was wonderful to see too." The Afghan family stayed for over a year before moving to Dallas.

Why did she make that offer of a place to stay? Smith says it was a way to help a woman, her family, her children who'd had everything taken from them in their home country — helping them find a safe place, showing them that it was possible to start over here. Filling a gap. Helping.

“It felt like being a part of, I guess, the fabric of America."

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Associated Press journalist Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.