pakistani342
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Highlights the plight of Afghan Interpreters.
There is a facebook page where Afghan Interpreters discuss visa related issues to the special visa program run by the US government here
I have to say it is a dire shame how we're abandoning people who risked life and limb to help us.
Further, I think Ambassador Karl Eikenberry deliberately stalled the approval of such applications because he wanted the talent to stay in Afghanistan.
...
Original article here
By RUCKER HUNT CULPEPPER
Recently, a photo of a young Afghan man lying in a position that would usually be described as face down in the dirt was posted on the Facebook page for applicants to a special American visa program. In this case, however, the man in the photograph couldnt be described that way because his head had been cut off and placed on the small of his back so that his lifeless eyes stared at the camera. He had been an interpreter for United States Marines advising the Afghan Border Police in 2010, which is presumably why insurgents made an example of him. I dont know his story, but I can tell you Amins.
Amin dropped out of Nangarhar University in Jalalabad when he was 18. He had been studying journalism but gave up that aspiration when a graduate of his program was similarly beheaded by insurgents. Disgusted by what he viewed as a ruthless and ignorant insurgency, he decided to work with Marines surging into Helmand, one of the most dangerous provinces in the country. I met him in April 2012, after he had been in southern Afghanistan for two years. He was a linguist assigned to my infantry platoon.
Amin didnt simply assist my platoon; he was central to our effort. In a complex political environment that Marine battalions rotated through every six months, he was the constant the face that local leaders remembered each time new Marines arrived, and the expert on a complicated web of interpersonal relationships among Afghan soldiers, police, politicians and elders. This community was plagued by the problems typical of many places in southern Afghanistan: land disputes and opportunistic elders who blurred the line between law enforcement and law infringement in ways that would impress Whitey Bulger.
One such elder Ill call him Abdul lived across the canal from my outpost. As a young man, Abdul had fought for the Soviet-backed Communist government against the mujahideen, been imprisoned by the Taliban and fled to the relative comfort of the provincial capital. In early 2010, he returned to his home district when the district governor, whom hed fought against in the 1980s, recruited him to rally elders against the Taliban. With the help of Marines, he did just that, earning the respect of American commanders and an audience with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
But Abdul capitalized on the respect he had won in unsavory ways. He assembled a personal security detail of more than 40 fighters, won a seat on the local district council, got his son appointed as the precincts police commander and began extorting shopkeepers in the bazaar. He brokered a nonaggression agreement with the Taliban that allowed them safe passage from Pakistan to northern Helmand. And when police officers in his sons precinct disagreed, he withheld their supplies.
Amin understood all of this. While each Marine unit that worked with Abdul was aware of occasional but seemingly insignificant abuses of power, it was Amin, the eyes and ears of so many commanders, who put the pieces together and surmised the real extent of the corruption. Thanks to him, we had Abduls son removed from command of the precinct and replaced him with officials who provided a check on his rapacious behavior.
But Amins family in his own village began receiving threats on account of his work. He knew he couldnt return there, and he asked me for help applying to the special visa program for Afghan and Iraqi nationals endangered by their work with United States military forces.
For more than a year now, Amin and I have been stumbling through an opaque bureaucratic labyrinth in pursuit of a visa.
We used the scanner and computer in my remote combat operations center to e-mail documents on his behalf to the United States Embassy in Kabul. After six weeks and five submissions, we received confirmation that all required documentation had been received. But it was another six months before we received Amins approval from the American mission chief and that was just the starting point.
Amin completed a new tranche of paperwork, much of it redundant, for a service center in Nebraska run by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. A month later, we heard that his petition had been conditionally approved and forwarded to the State Departments National Visa Center in New Hampshire for final approval. But two weeks later, we received an e-mail from the center with yet more forms to submit (again, some redundant). By this point, I was back in the United States and Amin was moving from base to base in Afghanistan as the American military shut down operations, making it even harder for him to complete the paperwork.
Today, a year and four months after I sent the first e-mail, Amin is still waiting to schedule medical exams and a final security interview at the United States Embassy in Kabul. He continues to work in the relative safety of an American military base, but as the draw-down continues, he will eventually be left to fend for himself.
For me, as an American accustomed to dealing with federal bureaucracy, this process is frustrating. For a young man who is not a native English speaker and lives in a country with limited internet connections, the challenge is huge.
On Sept. 30, Congress passed legislation extending a special visa program for Iraqis. That a Congress seemingly incapable of accomplishing anything unanimously passed this bill just before the government shutdown is encouraging, but legislation meant to improve the special visa system for Afghans remains up in the air.
When I was preparing to leave Afghanistan, I had my Marines turn in the pop-up flares they had been carrying on patrol. Amin handed me a red-star cluster he had been given by his first American commander. He didnt want to lose me in the cornfields during gunfights, he said.
Amin was probably as indispensable to those other Marines as he was to me. And if our leaders would apply the same sort of focus and industriousness to the special visa program that Amin applies every day to the war effort they oversee, perhaps they could prevent any more of our linguists from being dishonored on Facebook.
Rucker Hunt Culpepper is a Marine infantry captain.
There is a facebook page where Afghan Interpreters discuss visa related issues to the special visa program run by the US government here
I have to say it is a dire shame how we're abandoning people who risked life and limb to help us.
Further, I think Ambassador Karl Eikenberry deliberately stalled the approval of such applications because he wanted the talent to stay in Afghanistan.
...
Original article here
By RUCKER HUNT CULPEPPER
Recently, a photo of a young Afghan man lying in a position that would usually be described as face down in the dirt was posted on the Facebook page for applicants to a special American visa program. In this case, however, the man in the photograph couldnt be described that way because his head had been cut off and placed on the small of his back so that his lifeless eyes stared at the camera. He had been an interpreter for United States Marines advising the Afghan Border Police in 2010, which is presumably why insurgents made an example of him. I dont know his story, but I can tell you Amins.
Amin dropped out of Nangarhar University in Jalalabad when he was 18. He had been studying journalism but gave up that aspiration when a graduate of his program was similarly beheaded by insurgents. Disgusted by what he viewed as a ruthless and ignorant insurgency, he decided to work with Marines surging into Helmand, one of the most dangerous provinces in the country. I met him in April 2012, after he had been in southern Afghanistan for two years. He was a linguist assigned to my infantry platoon.
Amin didnt simply assist my platoon; he was central to our effort. In a complex political environment that Marine battalions rotated through every six months, he was the constant the face that local leaders remembered each time new Marines arrived, and the expert on a complicated web of interpersonal relationships among Afghan soldiers, police, politicians and elders. This community was plagued by the problems typical of many places in southern Afghanistan: land disputes and opportunistic elders who blurred the line between law enforcement and law infringement in ways that would impress Whitey Bulger.
One such elder Ill call him Abdul lived across the canal from my outpost. As a young man, Abdul had fought for the Soviet-backed Communist government against the mujahideen, been imprisoned by the Taliban and fled to the relative comfort of the provincial capital. In early 2010, he returned to his home district when the district governor, whom hed fought against in the 1980s, recruited him to rally elders against the Taliban. With the help of Marines, he did just that, earning the respect of American commanders and an audience with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
But Abdul capitalized on the respect he had won in unsavory ways. He assembled a personal security detail of more than 40 fighters, won a seat on the local district council, got his son appointed as the precincts police commander and began extorting shopkeepers in the bazaar. He brokered a nonaggression agreement with the Taliban that allowed them safe passage from Pakistan to northern Helmand. And when police officers in his sons precinct disagreed, he withheld their supplies.
Amin understood all of this. While each Marine unit that worked with Abdul was aware of occasional but seemingly insignificant abuses of power, it was Amin, the eyes and ears of so many commanders, who put the pieces together and surmised the real extent of the corruption. Thanks to him, we had Abduls son removed from command of the precinct and replaced him with officials who provided a check on his rapacious behavior.
But Amins family in his own village began receiving threats on account of his work. He knew he couldnt return there, and he asked me for help applying to the special visa program for Afghan and Iraqi nationals endangered by their work with United States military forces.
For more than a year now, Amin and I have been stumbling through an opaque bureaucratic labyrinth in pursuit of a visa.
We used the scanner and computer in my remote combat operations center to e-mail documents on his behalf to the United States Embassy in Kabul. After six weeks and five submissions, we received confirmation that all required documentation had been received. But it was another six months before we received Amins approval from the American mission chief and that was just the starting point.
Amin completed a new tranche of paperwork, much of it redundant, for a service center in Nebraska run by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. A month later, we heard that his petition had been conditionally approved and forwarded to the State Departments National Visa Center in New Hampshire for final approval. But two weeks later, we received an e-mail from the center with yet more forms to submit (again, some redundant). By this point, I was back in the United States and Amin was moving from base to base in Afghanistan as the American military shut down operations, making it even harder for him to complete the paperwork.
Today, a year and four months after I sent the first e-mail, Amin is still waiting to schedule medical exams and a final security interview at the United States Embassy in Kabul. He continues to work in the relative safety of an American military base, but as the draw-down continues, he will eventually be left to fend for himself.
For me, as an American accustomed to dealing with federal bureaucracy, this process is frustrating. For a young man who is not a native English speaker and lives in a country with limited internet connections, the challenge is huge.
On Sept. 30, Congress passed legislation extending a special visa program for Iraqis. That a Congress seemingly incapable of accomplishing anything unanimously passed this bill just before the government shutdown is encouraging, but legislation meant to improve the special visa system for Afghans remains up in the air.
When I was preparing to leave Afghanistan, I had my Marines turn in the pop-up flares they had been carrying on patrol. Amin handed me a red-star cluster he had been given by his first American commander. He didnt want to lose me in the cornfields during gunfights, he said.
Amin was probably as indispensable to those other Marines as he was to me. And if our leaders would apply the same sort of focus and industriousness to the special visa program that Amin applies every day to the war effort they oversee, perhaps they could prevent any more of our linguists from being dishonored on Facebook.
Rucker Hunt Culpepper is a Marine infantry captain.
