Why can Ukrainians come to the U.S. while our Afghan allies are stuck?

Two humanitarian parole programs look similar on the surface, but they were not created equally.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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A U.S. soldier points his gun at an Afghan man trying to get on a flight out of Kabul on Aug. 16, 2021. (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)

On a sun-bleached day in mid-August 2021, thousands of Afghan men, women and children swarmed Kabul International Airport in a mass, scaling barbed-wire fences, desperate to board any flight that would take them out of the country — and away from the terror that they were sure would come to their lives under the Taliban. There was even a violent skirmish among Afghan Air Force personnel on the day of the airlift.

The men in that clash, who tried to claw their way onto a bug-like U.S. helicopter, were just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the U.S. military or U.S.-backed media in its 20-year war with the Taliban. Most of these now-vulnerable men and women quickly went into hiding, fearing for their lives. That’s what one man, whom we’ll call Ahmad, did. (He asked not to have his real name used for fear of retribution.)

In the immediate chaos after Aug. 15, on a cooler than normal day, the Taliban came for Ahmad. Frantic, he leaped out a window, landing on pavement and breaking a number of bones.

Aged in his early 40s, Ahmad has three young children and a wife — a former teacher, who, since that summer, cannot leave the house without her husband or another male relative, due to Taliban rules. While Ahmad was dealing with his severe injuries, the Taliban forced him into service. His pilot training by the Americans, which included a year of education in the U.S., is invaluable to the Taliban, who conscripted him to teach its men. With no other choice, that is what Ahmad has been doing for more than a year and a half, all the while working beneath the sword of Damocles. He has not been paid for a few months.

The Taliban assassinated at least seven pilots before the fall of Kabul in August 2021. Now, they regularly threaten Ahmad with death.

“We could cut your head off,” his Taliban masters tell him every day.

“He is a kind of prisoner,” said his sister-in-law, who lives safely in a Western country. She also spoke to New Lines on condition of anonymity, relaying transcribed questions back and forth to her brother in Afghanistan.

This is the beginning of my new story with Sami Vanderlip in New Lines Magazine, which is about the absolute abandonment of Afghans who worked with the U.S., and the impossible requirements of the immigration program that could save their lives.

We took a look at the U.S. humanitarian parole program created for Afghans vs. the one created for Ukrainians.

For one thing, Afghans have to pay bank-breaking fees of $575 each (Afghans have an average annual income of $369, according to the most recent World Bank data), while Ukrainians pay nothing. There are serious hurdles for Afghans to jump through, while Ukrainians have few requirements.

What’s behind the differences? It’s nothing less than racism, experts told us.

One more shocking fact: Afghans paid $19 million in fees to the U.S. program for humanitarian parole between March 2021 and March 2022, yet nearly none of them have made it to the U.S.

As of February, 117,000 Ukrainians have immigrated under the parole program with no problem.

To read the whole story, click here.

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