Three Years After the Fall of Kabul, These Afghans’ Stories Are Our Stories
From betrayal to sacrifice to gratitude.
I’VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME IN AFGHANISTAN. In 2008, I helped build hospitals and schools on an Afghan Provincial Reconstruction Team. Four years later, in 2012, I spent a year with a special forces team training an anti-Taliban militia in northwest Kandahar. In the summer of 2014, I returned to advise the top intelligence officers in the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs. When I returned to Kabul for the last time in June 2020 to begin a year as a military diplomat at the American embassy, I refused to believe—despite mounting evidence—that we would abandon our allies. And in hundreds of meetings with senior Afghan security officials and politicians, that’s what I told them. That’s what I was supposed to tell them.
Then, during America’s final year in Afghanistan, I watched the country disintegrate. Three years ago today, on August 15, 2021, Kabul fell, and with it, the dream of a free Afghanistan. Everyone watched our allies cling to American cargo planes as we retreated. When their hope outlasted their strength, they fell to their deaths.
For most Americans, that was the end of the story.
But what occurred next was a miracle. A diverse group of Americans joined forces to honor our promise to our Afghan allies. Just because our government had gone back on its word didn’t mean we would. We fought the bureaucracy of the U.S. government from the inside, slowly but surely carving out pathways for our trusted Afghan allies to arrive on our country’s shores. We helped save thousands of Afghans.
Many of them were my close personal friends. We call each other “brother.” They studied at America’s most challenging military academies, graduating from West Point, Ranger School, and pilot training—while competing against America’s best and brightest. They believed in America’s promise. They believed in us.
Those who made it here after August 2021 are grateful to live in the United States despite the agonizing betrayal they endured. They are working diligently to become productive members of society. Even if they no longer trust the U.S. government, they still believe in America.
Over the last six months, as I said my final goodbye to the military, I spent time with our newest arrivals, some landing as recently as April. I want to tell you some of their stories—because their stories are now America’s, too.
Abdul Rahman Rahmani
I first found out about Rahmani when I was in a nearly month-long COVID quarantine after arriving back in Kabul in 2020. I surfed Afghan Twitter to kill time, and that’s how I found Col. Rahmani, a former Afghan Air Force Special Mission Wing helicopter pilot working inside Afghanistan’s intelligence community.
Less than a month later, I met Rahmani, who had become the director of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s presidential intelligence coordination center, at the U.S. embassy. For the next seven months, we met regularly in a quiet room tucked in an out-of-the-way corner of the building. What started as a meeting between allied military-intelligence partners quickly became a friendship.
In late December 2020, Rahmani told me, “Brother, I got into National Defense University.” He should have been happy: NDU is one of the U.S. Department of Defense’s major institutions of higher education, a rite of passage for many American officers proceeding into the general officer corps and for any Afghan officer a major feather in the cap. But he was pensive.
“Congrats, brother,” I said.
“But I cannot leave my family in Afghanistan,” he explained. “I need them to come with me.”
Unfortunately, Rahmani couldn’t bring his family—the Defense Department forbade it because too many Afghans absconded to Canada. Rahmani was asking me to help him get an exception.
“That’s a big ask, brother,” I said matter-of-factly. “That will take some work and influence.”
“I know, brother,” he said. “But, I just cannot leave them behind.”
Like any intelligence professional, I started poking around the bureaucracy. Slowly, I managed to influence enough bureaucrats to find loopholes in the seemingly endless rules and regulations. By late spring 2021, Rahmani, his wife, and their seven kids boarded a plane for Washington, D.C.
But three months after Rahmani’s arrival in the United States, Afghanistan fell. He made the rounds on television while working feverishly to rescue as many of his comrades-in-arms as possible.
Rahmani’s network, combined with my own, was deep and powerful. We had untraceable systems that helped ferry hundreds of trusted Afghan allies into safe houses and eventually to the United States.
While Col. Rahmani worked to get his friends out, the DoD allowed him to graduate from NDU. But because his government had fallen, the DoD made him—like every Afghan officer attending American military universities—take off his uniform. He would no longer be Col. Rahmani, just Mr. Rahmani.
After Rahmani graduated, he initially struggled to support his family of nine. But, like generations of immigrants, he is a relentless worker. Not only has he climbed the ranks inside a catering company, but he was also recently picked for the McCain Institute’s Global Leaders Program. Senator John McCain will always be one of my heroes, so having a brother involved in such a prestigious program makes me beam with pride. And Rahmani’s eldest daughter, Aqsa, writes a weekly online column about her life as an Afghan refugee.
During our weekly phone calls, Col. Rahmani always tells me the same thing: “I’m grateful to be here, brother,” he says. “But this isn’t my home.”
Shir Zad
“Lieutenant Colonel William Selber, this is First Lieutenant Shir Zad from the Ministry of Defense’s Office of International Military Affairs,” Shir Zad introduced himself in perfect, crisp English—for the first of what would be many times that year. “I’m calling to confirm your appointment this week with Colonel Nasery to discuss pressing security matters.”
That’s how I met Shir Zad in October 2020. He was a motivated young officer in the Afghan National Army (ANA). He was a distinguished graduate of the Indian Military Academy (similar to our West Point), so his English was more British than American. He was proper, meticulous, and impressive, fluent in English, Dari/Farsi, Pashto, and Hindi.
Shir Zad’s father had retired as a colonel in the ANA after serving for nearly three decades. Like many Afghan officers, his father was trained by the Soviet Union during the 1980s. A combat-wounded veteran, Shir Zad’s father knew very well the problems inside the Afghan government. I learned a lot from him. He had seen the Soviets make many of the same mistakes that we did—including the mistake of supporting regional warlords. Before the fall, President Ghani tried to enlist the usual warlords to protect the state, but they failed to mobilize enough supporters. Of America’s many sins in Afghanistan, empowering warlords to provide short-term stability was the most shortsighted. The “security” backed up by warlords like Atta Mohammad Noor, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and Gul Agha Sherza, affectionately known as “The Bulldozer,” was a castle built on sand.
I became friends with many of these warlords. That was my job. While they professed to care about Afghans, too often they cared only about themselves. Cannily reading the international scene, and knowing the day was coming when the United States would depart, they stuffed their pockets with the fruits of American generosity while doing little to differentiate themselves from the Taliban.
Shir Zad, however, was part of the newest generation of Afghan military officers. He’d trained hard to serve his country. He dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps and fighting for Afghanistan. He believed.
Then, the Taliban shattered his dreams.
During the fall of Afghanistan, Shir Zad courageously escorted his wife to Hamid Karzai International Airport. By the time I found him, he was already safe. However, his other family members did not make it inside. There just wasn’t enough time. And, as much as I hate to write it, I had other priorities during those dreadful two weeks.
“Hey bro, you good?” I texted him.
“Yes, sir,” he texted back. “But what about my family?”
A few days later, I finally responded.
“Bro, I can’t get them out,” I texted. “But I promise we will work to get them out. They all deserve it.”
Shir Zad landed in the United States with little money and just one backpack. He knew almost no one. He started working for the International Rescue Committee and quickly rose through the ranks. He made a life for himself but never forgot about his family.
Shir Zad worked on his contacts to meet more influential Americans, especially people inside the national security apparatus. Over time, this man who came to America with almost nothing managed to stitch together a collection of people with different skills and in different positions of power who knew his story and cared about his family. This motley crew of American heroes helped get Shir Zad’s family—more than ten people in total—to the United States.
Last month, I met many of them when they landed at long last in the United States. His father, the old battle-wounded infantry officer, greeted me with zest.
“Will, Sahib,” he greeted me at the airport.
“Colonel, sir, it’s a pleasure to see you again,” I told him as we shook hands.
“Thank you, brother,” he said emotionally. “Your team helped get us out.”
“Well, sir, I’ll make sure to tell everyone involved you’re grateful,” I told him. “However, you should be proud of your son, Shir Zad; he’s the one who made it happen.”
Shir Zad, a young man whose dreams were shattered three years ago, singlehandedly created a network to rescue his family. It is one of the most astonishing achievements I’ve ever witnessed in my twenty years inside America’s intelligence community.
Lt. Gen. Haibatullah Alizai
In 2014, I advised Haibatullah Alizai’s father, who was then the head of one of Afghanistan’s intelligence services. Haibitullah, then a colonel, was his father’s aide-de-camp after having risen through the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s premier intelligence service.
We spoke occasionally, but not often. I focused on advising his father’s general officers and the director of operations, who ran human intelligence sources throughout the country. This war in the shadows was bloody and relentless. We deployed mobile training teams throughout the provinces to equip Afghans to better fight the Taliban and al Qaeda—teaching rural Afghans to be spies. It was difficult. It was dangerous. But we were trying.
In 2015, I left Afghanistan and wouldn’t return for another five years. By the time I returned in 2020, Haibatullah Alizai had been promoted to major general. I watched as he took over the 209th Corps in northern Afghanistan. He fought the Taliban with one hand while dealing deftly with warlords with the other. In an unenviable position, he distinguished himself.
President Ghani then tapped him to lead the Afghan National Army Special Operations Corps, comprising Afghanistan’s most elite units. For the remainder of America’s war in Afghanistan, Haibatullah’s men fought with distinction. There were no days off for Afghanistan’s commandos. Despite his best efforts, however, the rest of the Afghan National Army buckled because of Donald Trump’s Doha agreement.
A few days before the fall of Kabul, President Ghani tapped Haibatullah, by now a lieutenant general, to be the new chief of general staff of the Afghan National Army—that is, the top soldier in the country. But by then it was too late.
There are so many tragedies in lost wars. But for my friends like Haibatullah, Gen. Sami Sadat, and many others, woven into the horrible stories of the loss of their country and the deaths of so many brave fighters is a subtle personal sting: that when they finally reached the highest echelons of power—when at last they had the chance to change things—the carpet was pulled out from under them.
Haibatullah himself made it to the United States. Tragically, though, many of his friends and family members did not. While he waits to reunite with his family, he works security and is an Uber driver. That provides the money he uses to support not only himself but many others back home who were not so lucky. I’m not sure many of our own three-star generals would react with his aplomb to such a predicament. Can you imagine an American general officer becoming an Uber driver?
But Haibatullah doesn’t mind.
“Brother, I do not care about that,” he said quietly. “I’m the lucky one to be living here in the United States. I never forget that.”
Ahmadullah
There are miracles, and then there is Ahmadullah’s story. Some of you may remember Ahamdullah, my former combat interpreter.
While the story had a happy ending, that wasn’t a guarantee.
“I give him a 50 percent chance to survive,” I wrote about Ahmadullah as Afghanistan was falling. By the time we reconnected via email in 2022, I hadn’t seen him in person for over a decade. His special immigrant visa had languished over an administrative dispute with his previous employer. Luckily, I had the assistance of volunteers in the United States who fought his legal battles and prepared for his eventual arrival.
While they prepared, my network played a lethal game of hide-and-seek with various adversarial intelligence services. Ahmadullah, like many of America’s combat interpreters, was not only hunted relentlessly by the Taliban but also by Iranian, Chinese, Russian, and Pakistani intelligence services.
We kept him off the grid. Crowdsourced money allowed him to live in the shadows but in relative comfort. Without that money, he and his family would have been killed and dumped in a shallow, unmarked grave.
Now he’s building his life in America. He’s secured employment. He’s made friends with other Afghans in his neighborhood. He’s starting to excel. He will eventually become an American citizen—an excellent one.
More importantly, Ahmadullah’s wife and daughter will not live in a gender apartheid. They will have every opportunity afforded all Americans. They will thrive.
That isn’t just an accomplishment. It’s a miracle.
THE TALIBAN AND AL QAEDA’S VICTORY in Afghanistan wrecked my soul. It has caused immense damage to Afghan combat veterans. Men and women who fought America’s enemies for two decades ended their lives because of the tremendous pain caused by our ignominious retreat and betrayal.
The only silver lining to this tragedy is that many of my Afghan brothers and sisters now live in the United States. They are scattered throughout the country, with clusters in Northern Virginia, California, and Texas. As always, they welcomed me into their homes with open hearts—and tons of food.
Over the last six months, I healed alongside the Afghans in America. I’ve wept in front of Afghan women, trying to convey the deep shame I feel for my country’s dishonor. They always embraced me with love and respect, something I rarely feel from my fellow Americans when war talk comes up. Often, I feel more at home with the Afghans in America than with my fellow Americans.
The Afghans in America are not just my brothers and sisters in arms. They are part of my family.
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