Stranded people arrive to try to cross the border into Afghanistan, at a border crossing in Chaman, Pakistan, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021.

Photo: Jafar Khan/Associated Press

President Ashraf Ghani was able to flee Afghanistan on Sunday, preventing the spectacle of a public execution by the Taliban. But tens of thousands of other Afghans who assisted the U.S. over 20 years aren’t so fortunate and now face a potentially gruesome fate.

The speed of the Taliban offensive caught the Biden Administration by surprise, but it can’t say it wasn’t warned to move faster on visas and exit plans for Afghan translators, journalists and their families. Former U.S. military officers sounded the alarm, as did Members of Congress. There’s no excuse for the scenes of fear and chaos on Sunday at the civilian wing of Kabul’s airport that had Afghans trying to flee without military protection as the Taliban closed in.

One of those sounding the alarm has been James Miervaldis, a U.S. Army vet who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and is now chairman of No One Left Behind. The nonprofit has been trying to fill the vacuum left by the U.S. State Department by negotiating and financing the exit of families who have been lucky enough to obtain U.S. visas.

On Sunday morning New York time, Mr. Miervaldis told us that his group had 50 families with some 250 people scheduled to leave Kabul on commercial flights. But they were stuck when commercial flights were halted. He said U.S. military flights appeared to be taking only big shots or U.S. Embassy personnel, and no one knows if or when the Taliban will allow commercial flights to leave.

He said U.S. military units contacted his group to obtain information on what is going on at the airport because they had been provided no on-the-ground intelligence. This is unforgivable, and the incompetence of the U.S. is stunning. “It is mind-blowing, the lack of preparation,” Mr. Miervaldis said.

He added that only about 350 Afghan families, or about 1,200 people, with U.S. visas had been able to leave before the Taliban victory. That leaves hundreds of translators and their families who had already obtained visas stranded in Kabul. There are perhaps 50,000 or more who would qualify for visas but didn’t yet have them because of the slow U.S. bureaucracy.

This could turn into a human tragedy. No One Left Behind has tried to track Taliban killings of translators and counted some 300 from 2014 to April 2020. It has since had a harder time getting accurate information, but Mr. Miervaldis says the killings spiked again this spring and have escalated in the summer. Afghan girls and women will suffer even if they aren’t killed, as they are forced to marry Taliban fighters and can no longer attend school.

The tragedy is compounded because there is no easy refugee exit. When the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan, Pakistan was a refuge. No longer. The county’s border crossings with other countries are closed amid Covid.

Mr. Miervaldis says Afghanistan for him is “watching this movie on repeat” from his experience in Iraq. When the U.S. withdrew there in 2011, jihadists emptied the prisons and the insurgency reformed into ISIS. He fears the same will happen as the Taliban empties prisons, and al Qaeda and ISIS establish havens.

The Biden Administration’s withdrawal is already a catastrophe, but it has a moral obligation to keep U.S. forces in Kabul for as long as it takes to evacuate all of the Afghans and their families who assisted us.

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