Nowhere Left to Go: Afghan Refugees Between an American Retreat and an Iranian War 

Four years ago, the United States was airlifting allies out of Kabul under a program it called Operation Allies Welcome. Now it is offering some of those same allies $4,500 to go back. More than 1,000 Afghans who worked alongside American forces, interpreters, and the relatives of U.S. service members, remain stranded at a shuttering camp in the Qatari desert, caught in a reversal so complete that the government that once called them partners now treats them as a liability to be moved, paid off, or sent home to the Taliban. On September 29, the Trump administration moved to extend the camp’s life by nine months,  a last-minute reprieve with no destination attached, the State Department offering no account of where the Afghans would go once the time ran out. This article traces how that reversal unfolded and what it has set in motion across the region.

A Crisis Decades in the Making

Afghanistan has generated one of the world’s most protracted refugee crises, with successive waves of mass displacement stretching back to the Soviet invasion of 1979 — through the civil war that followed, the first Taliban emirate, and two decades of U.S.-led war. By the time the United States withdrew its forces in August 2021 and the Taliban returned to power, Iran and Pakistan had spent four decades absorbing the majority of those who fled, hosting a combined population of more than four million Afghans at any given time. The 2021 collapse triggered a fifth major exodus, and most of those who fled went where Afghans had always gone: across the border into Iran, drawn by proximity and shared cultural ties, and into Pakistan. Neither was a welcoming host by that point. Iran tightly restricted refugees’ work and legal status, and Pakistan had forced nearly 600,000 Afghans out in 2016 alone. What the 2021 withdrawal produced, in other words, was not a new refugee crisis but the latest surge in one the international community had left underfunded — and one in which Western resettlement had only ever been a thin layer on top of a burden carried, grudgingly, by Afghanistan’s two neighbors.

The Post-2021 Welcome

In the years immediately following the withdrawal, U.S. policy ran in the opposite direction from where it sits today. The Biden administration stood up Operation Allies Welcome within two weeks of the fall of Kabul, a program led by the Department of Homeland Security to bring Afghans who had worked with U.S. forces into the country. Within a year it became a longer-term program called Enduring Welcome. Together, the two programs resettled nearly 200,000 Afghans, about 40 percent of whom were eligible for Special Immigrant Visas, a program Congress created in 2009 for Afghans who had helped the United States. For four years, the United States treated the people who had worked for it as a debt to be honored.