The order “risks abandoning thousands of Afghan wartime allies” who worked with Americans before the Taliban takeover, the head of a resettlement group said.
An executive order signed by President Trump on Monday that suspends refugee admissions to the United States puts at risk thousands of citizens of Afghanistan who helped the American mission during the war there, the president of a California-based resettlement group said.
The order would affect not only scores of Afghans who are now in hiding from the Taliban’s repressive rule, but also family members of active-duty U.S. troops, said Shawn VanDiver, the president of AfghanEvac, a coalition of more than 250 organizations helping to resettle Afghans who worked with the Americans before the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.
The order amounts to “another broken promise” by the United States, Mr. VanDiver said by email. It “risks abandoning thousands of Afghan wartime allies who stood alongside U.S. service members during two decades of conflict,” he added.
Mr. Trump’s order, titled “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program,” is set to take effect next Monday. It does not specify when the suspension will end, saying that it will continue “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.”
Refugee programs have historically been a point of pride in the United States, reflecting its ambition to be seen as a leader on human rights. The president has usually made an annual determination about how many refugees to let into the country in any given year.
After the U.S. military’s chaotic retreat from Afghanistan as the Taliban took power, the Biden administration launched Operation Allies Welcome, allowing 76,000 evacuated Afghans to enter the United States for humanitarian reasons, according to the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.
As of 2023, more than 90,000 Afghans had settled in the United States, according to statistics cited by Mustafa Babak, an Emerson Collective fellow who is an advocacy and resettlement expert. But U.S. refugee agencies had been bracing for the admissions program to be gutted since Mr. Trump won the November election.
During his first term as president, Mr. Trump signed an executive order barring people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the country. He slashed the annual U.S. refugee cap; in 2020, the final full year of his term, the United States admitted a record low number of refugees, about 11,000. The move left thousands of refugees stranded in camps in Kenya, Tanzania and Jordan.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. revived the program after becoming president in 2021. In the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2024, about 100,000 refugees arrived in the United States, the most in nearly three decades, records show.
After Mr. Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 election, a conservative policy blueprint called Project 2025 suggested that he would cite the record number of migrant crossings at the southern border during the Biden administration as a justification for halting refugee resettlement.
The suspension of refugee admissions was one of a blizzard of executive orders signed by Mr. Trump within hours of his swearing-in on Monday. Other orders cracked down on illegal immigration and ended the U.S. program that allowed migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua to enter the United States for up to two years if they had a financial sponsor and passed security checks.
The refugee order states, “Over the last four years, the United States has been inundated with record levels of migration, including through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). Cities and small towns alike, from Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Ohio, to Whitewater, Wisconsin, have seen significant influxes of migrants. Even major urban centers such as New York City, Chicago, and Denver have sought federal aid to manage the burden of new arrivals.”
But Mr. VanDiver said surveys had shown strong support among the American public for the continued relocation and resettlement of Afghan allies.
He noted that people vetted under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program entered the country “only after receiving a government or U.S. run nonprofit referral and after undergoing extensive service verification, background checks, medical screening and rigorous security vetting.”
Now, he said, Mr. Trump’s executive action will plunge thousands of Afghan refugees into limbo by freezing all cases where they stand and preventing Afghans from boarding flights to the United States. He said another executive order by Mr. Trump — about protecting the countryfrom “foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats” — had provisions that could further affect Afghan nationals seeking refuge in the United States.
Mr. VanDiver said his coalition, which works to secure special visas for Afghans who assisted the U.S. mission, had sent a letter signed by more than 700 people, including veterans and civilians who worked in Afghanistan, “urging the administration to exempt Afghan allies from this pause.”
Among those who could be shut out are “family members of active duty DoD service members and partner forces who trained, fought and died alongside U.S. troops,” Mr. VanDiver said, referring to the Department of Defense.
“Failing to protect our Afghan allies sends a dangerous message to the world: that U.S. commitments are conditional and temporary,” he said. “This decision undermines global trust in our leadership and jeopardizes future alliances.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — A prisoner swap between the United States and Afghanistan’s Taliban freed two Americans in exchange for a Taliban figure imprisoned for life in California on drug trafficking and terrorism charges, officials said Tuesday.
The deal to release two Americans, Ryan Corbett and William McKenty, was brokered by Joe Biden ‘s administration before he left office Monday, according to a Trump administration official who was not authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity.
The Taliban’s Foreign Ministry in Kabul said the two U.S. citizens had been exchanged for Khan Mohammed, who was sentenced to two life terms in 2008.
Biden, who oversaw the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, on Monday handed power to President Donald Trump. The Taliban praised the swap as a step toward the “normalization” of ties between the U.S. and Afghanistan.
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That is likely a tall order, as most countries still don’t recognize the Taliban’s rule and two other Americans are believed held. The Trump White House cheered the release and thanked Qatar for its assistance with the deal while pressing the Taliban to free other Americans.
“The Trump Administration will continue to demand the release of all Americans held by the Taliban, especially in light of the billions of dollars in U.S. aid they’ve received in recent years,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement.
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U.S., Taliban and Qatar involved in the swap
Corbett, who had lived in Afghanistan with his family when the U.S.-backed government collapsed in 2021, was detained by the Taliban in August 2022 on a business trip.
“Our hearts are filled with overwhelming gratitude and praise to God for sustaining Ryan’s life and bringing him back home after what has been the most challenging and uncertain 894 days of our lives,” the family’s statement said. They thanked both Trump and Biden.
Corbett’s family also praised Qatari officials “for their vital role in facilitating Ryan’s release, and for their visits to Ryan as the United States’ Protecting Power in Afghanistan.” Qatar has hosted negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban over the years.
A Qatar Foreign Ministry statement said those who were traded passed through Doha and that it hopes the deal “would pave the way for achieving further understandings” to resolve disputes peacefully.
It was unclear what McKenty was doing in Afghanistan.
Biden administration’s effort to get a deal
Before Biden left office, his administration had been trying to work out a deal to free Corbett, McKenty as well as George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi, in exchange for Muhammad Rahim, one of the remaining detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Taliban had rejected multiple proposals that also would have included Glezmann and Habibi before accepting the deal to release Corbett and McKenty late last week following negotiations in Qatar, according to a former senior Biden administration official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The official added that Biden officials found in past negotiations for American detainees in Russia that “one deal can make it easier to get future ones” and that the Trump administration should continue to push the Taliban for Glezmann and Habibi.
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Russia had rejected proposals to include American Paul Whelan in separate prisoner swaps that freed Americans Trevor Reed and Britney Griner before ultimately including Whelan in a 24-person deal that included Wall Street Journalist Evan Gershkovich and others.
Glezmann, an airline mechanic from Atlanta, was taken by the Taliban’s intelligence services in December 2022 while traveling through the country. Habibi, an Afghan-American businessman who worked as a contractor for a Kabul-based telecommunications company, also went missing in 2022. The Taliban have denied they have Habibi.
Habibi’s family welcomed the exchange and said they were confident the Trump administration would make a “greater effort” to free him, expressing their frustration with the Biden team.
“We know they have evidence my brother is alive and in Taliban hands and it could have been influential in encouraging the Taliban to admit they have him,” Habibi’s brother Ahmed said in a statement shared by the nonprofit Global Reach.
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Biden officials “refused to use” the evidence, he claimed. “We know Trump is about results and we have faith he will use every tool available to get Mahmood home.”
The trade for Corbett and McKenty was originally supposed to take place Sunday night but had to be delayed until Tuesday because of logistical delays, including bad weather, the former Biden administration official said.
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Taliban prisoner first convicted of narco-terrorism
Mohammed, 55, was a prisoner in California after his 2008 conviction. The Bureau of Prisons early Tuesday listed Mohammed as not being in their custody.
Hafiz Zia Ahmad Takal, a Taliban Foreign Ministry deputy spokesperson, said Mohammed had arrived in Afghanistan and was with his family. Photos released by the Taliban showed him being welcomed back in his home province of Nangarhar, in the country’s east, with multicolored garlands.
Mohammed told Taliban-controlled media he had spent time behind bars in Bagram and in Washington.
“It’s a joy seeing your family and coming to your homeland. The greatest joy is to come and join your Muslim brothers,” he said.
He was detained on the battlefield in Nangarhar and later taken to the U.S. A federal jury convicted him on charges of securing heroin and opium that he knew were bound for the United States and, in doing so, assisting terrorism activity.
The Justice Department at the time referred to Mohammed as “a violent jihadist and narcotics trafficker” who “sought to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan using rockets.” He was the first person to be convicted on U.S. narco-terrorism laws.
Ahmed Rashid, the author of several books about Afghanistan and the Taliban, described Mohammed as the “biggest drugs smuggler the U.S. had to deal with and key funder of the Taliban.”
Taliban try to gain international recognition
The Taliban called the exchange the result of “long and fruitful negotiations” with the U.S. and said it was a good example of solving problems through dialogue.
“The Islamic Emirate looks positively at the actions of the United States of America that help the normalization and development of relations between the two countries,” it said.
However, some nations have welcomed Taliban officials, like the United Arab Emirates, home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. On Tuesday, Emirati leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan again welcomed Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, who also heads the Haqqani network, a powerful force within the group blamed for some of the bloodiest attacks against Afghanistan’s former Western-backed government.
Haqqani is still wanted by the U.S. on a bounty of up to $10 million over his involvement in an attack that killed an American citizen and other assaults. The meeting came even as the UAE maintains a close relationship with the U.S.
Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Najib Jobain in Doha, Qatar, and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
White House cheers release of two Americans freed in a swap with Taliban brokered by Biden, Qatar
The Taliban government in Afghanistan says two US nationals have been released in exchange for an Afghan serving a life sentence in California.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan has announced the release of two detained Americans in a prisoner swap deal with the United States.
The Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul did not name the US citizens but said they were exchanged for Khan Mohammad, who was arrested in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar two decades ago and has been serving a life sentence in a California prison.
“Following extensive and productive negotiations between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the United States of America, an agreement was reached facilitating the release of an Afghan Mujahid, Khan Mohammad, from a US prison in exchange for the release of American nationals,” the Afghan Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday in a post on X.
The family of US citizen Ryan Corbett, who was detained by the Taliban in 2022, confirmed he was released and thanked both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as Qatar.
“Today, our hearts are filled with overwhelming gratitude and praise to God for sustaining Ryan’s life and bringing him back home after what has been the most challenging and uncertain 894 days of our lives,” the family said on their website.
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The Afghan Foreign Ministry said the prisoner exchange, brokered by Qatar, was the result of “long and fruitful negotiations” with the US.
Qatar’s lead negotiator, Mohammed bin Abdulaziz bin Saleh Al-Khulaifi, confirmed the Gulf state’s mediation in the exchange, with all the released people going through Doha.
The announcement comes the day after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, who, during his first term in office, presided over a deal with the Taliban that paved the way for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
After Trump’s election win in November, the Taliban government had said it hoped for a “new chapter” in relations with the US.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
Taliban announces release of US citizens in prisoner swap deal
The Islamic Emirate delegation, which traveled to Iran and met with officials from the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Justice of that country.
Iranian media outlets have reported that Iran has requested the establishment of a direct communication channel between the intelligence agencies of Kabul and Tehran.
The Islamic Emirate delegation, which traveled to Iran and met with officials from the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Justice of that country, considered direct communication between the specialized sectors of both countries the most effective way to resolve common issues.
According to these reports, the Iranian Deputy Minister of Interior, in a meeting with the delegation from the Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate, emphasized that the release of criminals, border issues, counterterrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking are key priorities in relations between the two countries.
IRNA reported: “Pourjamshidian considered the establishment of a direct communication channel between the intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies of both sides effective in strengthening bilateral relations.”
“The only communication channel should be mutual respect for the laws and regulations of the concerned countries. I hope the Iranians will accept a politically stable Afghanistan next to them. The delegation from the Supreme Court should ensure that we no longer witness the execution of Afghans,” said Zalmay Afghan Yar, a military affairs expert.
The Supreme Court also stated in a press release that the Islamic Emirate delegation, in a meeting with Iran’s Deputy Minister of Justice, discussed the transfer of Afghan prisoners to their home country and cooperation between the Interpol police of both countries.
“We have problems with Iran regarding Afghan migrants and prisoners, which can only be resolved through dialogue,” said Saleem Paigir, a political affairs expert.
This comes after the Islamic Emirate delegation, in a meeting with the Deputy for International Affairs of the Iranian Judiciary, had requested a list of Afghan citizens sentenced to execution and sought alternative solutions to prevent their execution.
The White House and the State Department, which oversees US refugee programs, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the US government to resettle in the US, including family members of active-duty US military personnel, are having their flights canceled under President Donald Trump’s order suspending US refugee programs, a US official and a leading refugee resettlement advocate said on Monday.
According to Reuters, this group includes unaccompanied minors awaiting reunification with their families in the US, said Shawn VanDiver, head of the AfghanEvac coalition of US veterans and advocacy groups and the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Afghans and advocates are panicking,” said VanDiver. “I’ve had to recharge my phone four times already today because so many are calling me.”
The US decision also leaves in limbo thousands of other Afghans who have been approved for resettlement as refugees in the US but have not yet been assigned flights from Afghanistan or from neighboring Pakistan.
“We warned them that this was going to happen, but they did it anyway. We hope they will reconsider,” he said of contacts with Trump’s transition team.
The White House and the State Department, which oversees US refugee programs, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nearly 200,000 Afghans have been brought to the US by former President Joe Biden’s administration since the chaotic US troop withdrawal from Kabul.
One of the dozens of executive orders Trump was expected to sign after being sworn in suspended US refugee programs for at least four months.
Trump to Pull Nearly 1,660 Afghan Refugees from Flights: Sources
The spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice, reiterated Sharaee’s statement, saying, “Our duty is not to convince the world, but to enforce Islamic law.”
Abdul Hakim Sharaee, the acting minister of justice, has stated that the Islamic Emirate’s mission is not to convince the world but to enforce Islamic law.
He further emphasized that maintaining the system and managing administrative affairs require laws and other legislative documents, and he urged government institutions to take this matter seriously in accordance with the directives of the Islamic Emirate’s leader.
Barakatullah Rasooli, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice, reiterated Sharaee’s statement, saying, “Our duty is not to convince the world, but to enforce Islamic law.”
International relations expert Wais Naseri said, “Afghanistan is not isolated from the rest of the world; it must be part of the global community. Afghan governments should remain committed and accountable to both the world and the Afghan people.”
Political analyst Jannat Faheem Chakari said, “In administrative affairs, professional individuals and specialists handle technical matters, while in ideological aspects, people are obliged to adhere to Sharia and should not submit to the orders of any individual.”
According to a statement from the Ministry of Justice, the Director-General of Legislative Affairs emphasized that since the return of the Islamic Emirate to power, the legislative process in the country has undergone significant and positive changes. It was further stated that all laws are now drafted by scholars and experts based on Islamic jurisprudential sources.
Acting Justice Minister: Our Mission is Islamic Law, Not Global Approval
Lavrov noted the United States’ continued interest in Afghanistan, adding that the US seeks to reclaim military equipment left behind in the country.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stressed that Afghanistan should not be overlooked.
He further claimed that the US seeks to maintain its influence in Afghanistan by leveraging neighboring countries to achieve its strategic objectives.
“Let us not forget Afghanistan, where the Americans are also trying to restore their presence to some extent, using neighboring countries for this and thinking about returning their military infrastructure there,” Lavrov said.
Obaidullah Bahir, a university professor, emphasized the importance of maintaining balance in two key areas: “One is the balance of power, which is crucial for success in competitions, and the other is balancing domestic and foreign policies, which must be preserved.”
Meanwhile, some political analysts argue that the Islamic Emirate should align its foreign relations with other countries based on national interests.
Political analyst Moeen Gul Samkani said, “Afghanistan is in a position where both the East and the West need it. In such circumstances, we must maintain our balance and avoid leaning too much towards either side.”
Najib Rahman Shamal, another political analyst, said: “Establishing and expanding relations with other countries has been one of the interim government’s priorities over the past three to four years. However, since the government remains unrecognized internationally, these interactions and relationships continue to be unofficial.”
Over the past three years, the Islamic Emirate has expanded its ties with several countries, including Russia, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. However, no country has yet officially recognized the Islamic Emirate.
The story of Samir Ahmadi’s journey to America could have been written by Charles Dickens. But its author is the 14-year-old Afghan boy who, one week after the Taliban walked into Kabul, found himself walking away from it, jammed with his family and tens of thousands of others on the road leading to Hamid Karzai International Airport. The U.S. government, having pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, had announced that it would airlift two groups: Anyone holding a U.S. passport, and anyone who had worked for the Americans during the previous 20 years. But most of the throng was—like Samir, his parents, his older brother, his younger brother, and their 7-year-old sister—simply terrified of staying behind.
Then armed men in black turbans, as if to justify their fear, opened fire into the crowd. Samir was still with his parents when they saw a girl fall into a ditch, then a mass of people fall onto the same spot. When they climbed out, she lay dead. This was when, fearing for their own daughter, Samir’s parents decided to turn back.
Samir did not see them go. Only when he paused in the rush and scanned the faces surrounding him did Samir realize that his family was no longer in sight. He considered going back the way he had come, but someone said the Taliban was beating Afghans who came that way. When he finally reached the long line outside the airport gate, Samir approached an American soldier guarding it. He told the soldier’s interpreter that he could not find his family. They could be inside, he said. The soldier asked his age, and, hearing 14, moved him to another entrance. There, Samir began talking with an Afghan family with U.S. passports. When they went inside, so did he.
“Because Americans were taking their families, I made myself look like I was part of that family and I just kind of tagged along,” Samir says.
He had left home with his family at 10 a.m. Now, at midnight, he unwrapped the clothes he had bundled around his phone, saw that his battery was dead, borrowed a charger, and dialed his family. That’s when they told him
The plane he boarded carried Samir from the place that produced the iconic images of the American withdrawal—desperate young men dropping to their deaths after clinging to departing airplanes; the suicide bombing that Donald Trump invoked in the Presidential campaign, for the death of 13 U.S. service members (179 Afghans also perished). But after the chaos at Kabul, the places Samir went next proved, if anything, too ordered.
Of the 122,000 people evacuated from Kabul over 16 days that August, about 1,400 were children without an adult relative. Most of those, 1,200, either were reunited with family in the U.S., or placed in foster care. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement took the rest—200 children—to live at children’s shelters that had government contracts to house unaccompanied minors. Today, two years later, more than half of those 200 have been reunited with family or fostered. The rest have aged out of the program without family.
The process was not smooth. Though their physical needs were being met, many endured psychological distress. The trauma of their experience was aggravated, on the one hand, by frequent moves between shelters, and on the other, by the rules of those shelters—especially the severe restrictions limiting phone contact with the families they have left behind, according to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
Samir’s flight out of Kabul landed in Qatar, the Persian Gulf kingdom where all evacuees were taken into U.S. government custody. After two months and 20 days, he was flown with other young people to Chicago. He remembers watching the snow fall from the window of bus that took him to Albion, Mich., and the 350-acres of Starr Commonwealth shelter. The Michigan shelter, Samir was taken to was one of the residential cottages where 13 Afghan children were already staying. As soon as he walked in, the staff took his belongings and gave him new clothes to wear. “The clothes felt like clothes from jail. Like for prisoners,” he says.
Starr Commonwealth was founded as a home for runaway boys in 1913. It later become a residential behavioral and treatment facility for children aged 12 to 18. In the spring of 2021, the federal government began leasing the campus to accommodate Central American children who were then crossing the border in large numbers. Starr shifted to housing Afghan children after the fall of Kabul. “In 2021, our campus served as an emergency intake site,” Starr said in a statement to TIME, “but the Office of Refugee Resettlement ran the programming, including staffing, meals and direct care of the children. Starr only served as the landlord and had no role in or responsibility for the ORR program.”
Samir says that in his first week at Starr, staff prevented him from calling his family at all. After that, they allowed him two 10-minute calls and one 15-minute call a week. He focused on his emptiness without his family, as there was little stimulation. The children’s days consisted of breakfast, a Netflix movie, lunch, playing cards, then another movie. They were offered no schooling and allowed outside for just an hour a day.
Samir was anxious to be with his family again. But his older brother, Najib, was the only one with a passport of any kind. Under U.S. policy, he could enter the U.S. because Samir was already living there, and Najib met the criteria of being 21 or younger and unmarried. The process involved four months of interviews with the Department of State. Najib had to propose a plan to support Samir in the U.S. as his legal guardian.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban was threatening to kill anyone who had worked for organizations linked to the U.S. or to the former government. Before it collapsed, Samir’s father had been employed at the Ministry of Interior Affairs. On one of Samir’s rare calls with his parents, wanting to know that his family was safe, Samir stayed on the call for three extra minutes beyond the allotted 10. For the rest of the week, Samir waited anxiously to speak to his parents again. When his turn finally came, the staff forbade him from calling because he had exceeded his allocation the last time.
To understand the rationale for the phone restrictions, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights interviewed dozens of unaccompanied Afghan minors and shelter staff. What they found, according to Abena Hutchful, the center’s Policy and Litigation Attorney, was that children who had been placed in custody because the U.S. government had failed to ensure that evacuated families remained together, had, upon arrival in America, entered a culture of control and criminalization. “Punishing Trauma” was the title of Young Center report.
Policies for the children were made by former corrections officers or child welfare workers employed by the Office For Refugee Resettlement. “They have worked within cultures of punitive approaches to discipline,” Hutchful said.
Harsh punishment for traumatized children took its toll. Samir and other boys would run away from Starr four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day. When Samir felt most scared about being separated from his family, he would abscond to a lake or hill where he could sit alone and think. His return hours later was usually prompted by a police officer questioning him.
In January 2022, as authorities investigated abuse allegations, the ORR shuttered its program at Starr. One case involved a 16-year-old who said two workers shoved and yelled at him. Another worker was accused of kicking a boy while he was praying. No charges were brought in either case.
Meanwhile, Samir had been moved to another shelter. In October, he arrived at Samaritas, in Grand Rapids, Mich., which had taken in 19 unaccompanied Afghan minors. Sad to leave the 13 boys at Starr who were his first friends after leaving Kabul, Samir felt reassured when the Samaritas staff told him that all the children there could talk to their families for 10 minutes each and every day.
To make the calls, the staff gave the boys two iPhone 7s. It wasn’t enough. Desperate to connect with their families, the boys fought over phones. “There were a lot of broken noses,” Samir says. “Sometimes they would get mad and they would just take the phone, hit it on the floor and break it.”
The dynamic was understandable to Fatima Rahmati, a youth advocate for unaccompanied Afghan children in New York. She is among dozens of Afghan-Americans, most of whom fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, who have helped the Afghan children in the U.S. shelter system to feel more at home in the absence of their families. One teenager had been through seven different shelters in 10 months, Rahmati says.
“How can we ask a 15-year-old boy, who fled everything he knows, to ‘behave’ when he is angry? Control his anger to the point of docility and if he doesn’t comply, the clock resets on when he has the opportunity to be moved to a less restrictive setting?” she asks.
At Samaritas, Grand Rapids police responded nearly every other day to calls for incidents like missing persons, suicide threats, fights and assaults. Samir stayed for less than three months. After he left, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services began an investigation into reports of Afghan minors being mistreated. Samaritas also was cleared of any abuse allegations by the state and reopened the facility. Samaritas did not respond to requests for comment.
Samir’s third and final shelter was different. At David and Margaret Youth and Family Services in La Verne, Calif., he played football and volleyball and swam. He cooked meals and walked outdoors.
He had been there six months when the State Department finally gave Najib a visa and a week’s notice to leave Afghanistan. It was July 2022. But during his own stop in Qatar, he tested positive for tuberculosis. The brothers waited another nine months to be reunited, when Najib finally tested negative and traveled onward to the U.S.
Two shelter staffers took Samir to LAX at 1 a.m. to meet Najib’s plane. Afterward, they returned Samir to David and Margaret, where he had to remain until his brother had a full-time job and had officially become Samir’s guardian. That would take another five months. But the minute Najib touched down, on April 4, 2023, Samir felt part of his emptiness disappear.
“I felt relief because finally there was somebody with me,” Samir said. “All this time I was in the huge United States alone.”
Today their lives look American. Three years after the fall of Kabul, the brothers live in a one-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, home of Disneyland. Samir, now 17, attends Magnolia High School; his hair is cut close on the sides and bushy on the top in the fashion known as alpaca. Najib, 23, works nights filling boxes at Amazon.
But at home they speak Dari and sit on the floor to eat. Every morning before school, Samir calls Afghanistan. Fear of the Taliban is only one of the reasons the first names of his parents and siblings are not in this article. Torpekai Momand, an Afghan immigrant who looks in on the boys, explained that there are thugs in Afghanistan who have kidnapped the relatives of someone who now lives in the U.S., and demanded ransom. His parents, after seeing Najib make his way, acquired passports of their own. But they no longer hear from U.S. officials.
The uncertainty is a new point of stress. One night, Samir cried out in his sleep. In a dream, his mother had died. Four in the morning in California is 3:30 p.m. in Afghanistan, and he reached for his phone. His mother picked right up.
“I just want to see my mom and dad,” Samir says. “I don’t want anything more.”
‘I Just Want to See My Mom and Dad.’ An Afghan Teen in the U.S. Yearns For Reunion
In February 2020, Rep. Michael Waltz, then a first-term GOP lawmaker, received a coveted invitation to fly to his home state of Florida aboard Air Force One. During the flight, he seized the opportunity to lobby President Donald Trump about an issue to which he had devoted most of his career: the war in Afghanistan.
Trump had just approved a conditional peace agreement with the Taliban that called for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops within 14 months. Waltz, a Green Beret who had served two combat tours in Afghanistan, pleaded with the president to reconsider, arguing that the Taliban couldn’t be trusted and that the U.S. military needed to stay indefinitely. Yet Trump, who had campaigned on a promise to end the war, was unmoved. “We’ve been there so long,” he told Waltz, according to the congressman’s recently published memoirs. “It’s time.”
Despite their fundamental disagreement over the longest war in American history, Trump has tapped Waltz to return with him to the White House as national security adviser.The job does not require Senate confirmation but is one of the most powerful posts in Washington. In an administration that Trump is stacking with figures who share his isolationist leanings, Waltz stands out as the opposite: a post 9/11 veteran who still favors long-term commitments of U.S. troops to fight al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other terrorist groups overseas.
Michael Waltz, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser, during a deployment as a Green Beret to Afghanistan’s Tagab Valley in 2006. He was an officer in the National Guard who served in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group. (Michael Waltz)
Waltz’s views are a reminder that sharp differences exist within Trump’s inner circle about how his “America first” campaign rhetoric should apply to myriad national-security challenges that his administration will inherit when it takes power next week.
In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Waltz, 50, downplayed his differences with Trump over Afghanistan and pledged to faithfully execute the boss’s wishes, pointedly drawing a contrast with aides who tried to obstruct Trump’s foreign policy decisions during his first term. “He welcomes disagreement. He welcomes the vigorous debate. But when he makes the decision, he expects you to implement it, and I will do that,” Waltz said.
At the same time, Waltz has made clear that his National Security Council staff at the White House — including career government employees — must be loyal to Trump. Last week, he told Breitbart News that he would ensure all staffers “are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”
Brian Hughes, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team, described Waltz’s difference of opinion with Trump over the 2020 deal with the Taliban as “not a disagreement but a discussion. Rep. Waltz clearly agreed with President Trump that there had to be a political solution in Afghanistan.”
In an email, Hughes noted that Trump decided at the end of his first term to leave a small military presence at Bagram air base in Afghanistan “to ensure the Taliban would honor their agreement.” Hughes blamed the Biden administration for bungling the final withdrawal.
When he moves into his West Wing office on Monday, Waltz will be responsible for coordinating U.S. policy on the world’s most pressing flash points, including relations with China, Russia, Ukraine and Iran. But he — and Trump — will also have to confront lingering fallout from Afghanistan and who should be held responsible for the war’s many failures.
After Trump’s term ended, President Joe Biden upheld his accord with the Taliban and ordered the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to leave by September 2021. That culminated in the sudden collapse of the Afghan government, the emergency evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the frenzied exodus of thousands of Afghans who helped the United States during the war. Thirteen U.S. troops were killed in an attack during the final week of the withdrawal.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump promised to fire generals and diplomats who oversaw the 2021 pullout, excoriatingthem — and Biden — for the disastrous retreat. “We’ll get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day,” he told a National Guard conference in August.
Waltz also has criticized the Biden administration for botching the U.S. exit from Afghanistan. But unlike Trump, he has said it was a mistake for U.S. troops to leave and that they should have stayed for decades, if necessary, to deter jihadists and to maintain control over Bagram, a strategic air base near China’s western border.
In interviews, televised appearances and his writings, Waltz has repeatedly warned that terrorists are regrouping in Afghanistan and will try to attack America again as they did on 9/11. He has suggested the Pentagon may have to send forces back to Afghanistan eventually, just as it did to Iraq to fight the Islamic State three years after pulling out of that country in 2011.
“If we don’t fight the war on terrorism in places like Kandahar, that war will come to places like Kansas City,” Waltz wrote in “Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret,” a memoir that he published in October. “That’s not hyperbole — it is historical fact.”
In his interview with The Post, Waltz declined to specify how U.S. policy toward Afghanistan might change under Trump or to elaborate on scenarios under which U.S. forces could return there. But he emphasized that the United States needed to improve its ability to collect intelligence from inside the country.
The Trump administration will “be taking a hard look at the intelligence community and the counterterrorism enterprise, and what kind of eyes and ears do we have, to make sure we’re not surprised again — yet again — from that part of the world,” Waltz said. “I wouldn’t interpret that as, ‘We’ve got to go back and fight in Kandahar.’ I would interpret it as, ‘I don’t want to wait until a Kansas City is hit.’”
Ever since Waltz rejoined the U.S. Army in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan has shaped his entire career in the military, politics, media and business. His extensive experience in the field left him more hawkish on Afghanistan than Trump, who soured on the war more than a decade ago and once called the prolonged conflict “a complete waste.”
Colleagues and friends say the lessons Waltz drew from Afghanistan have influenced his worldview and given him credibility with Trump, even if he and the president-elect have disagreed on the war.
“If you look at the breadth and depth of his experience, this guy has done it all, from the street level to the pinnacle of national security and his time in Congress,” said Ryan McCarthy, who served as Secretary of the Army during Trump’s presidency and has known Waltz since the 1990s, when they attended Virginia Military Institute, or VMI. “National security runs through his veins. It’s his passion, his life.”
Michael Vickers, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and Green Beret who worked with Waltz during the Bush and Obama administrations, said his main challenge as national security adviser would be to serve as “an honest broker” in the decision-making process at the White House and as a conduit between Trump and senior members of his Cabinet. He said Waltz was well-qualified for the role.
“The key thing is really the relationship with the president,” said Vickers, who also served as an independent director for a defense-contracting firm that Waltz co-founded. “It’s a pretty high-level political job as well as a national security job.”
From Florida to Afghanistan
Waltz as a Green Beret in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006. (Michael Waltz)
A native Floridian, Waltz grew up in Jacksonville, raised by a single mother. In 1992, he moved to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to attend VMI, a state-supported military college known for its exacting academic, physical and disciplinary standards.
Of the 430 “rats” — VMI’s term for new cadets — who enrolled with him, fewer than half made it to graduation four years later, he said in an oral-history interview for the Library of Congress. “You get your head shaved every Monday. You get the crap beat out of you by the upperclassmen. And eventually, at the end, you’re recognized as a human being,” he added.
Waltz received an Army ROTC scholarship and majored in international relations. He studied abroad at the University of Valencia and became fluent in Spanish. He also boxed for the VMI club team.
One of his roommates, Jon Sherrod, said Waltz thrived on the challenges that the school threw at them. “Mike chose VMI because of its rigorous standards. At 18, he was more clear-eyed about that than I ever was,” Sherrod recalled.
Upon graduation, Waltz was commissioned into the Army and assigned to an armored cavalry unit. He graduated from the Army’s Ranger school, a notoriously grueling course, and was selected to join the Special Forces and become a Green Beret.
In October 2000, Waltz left the Army to take a job as a management trainee with a diamond company. But a year later, after the 9/11 attacks, he rejoined the military as a part-time soldier in the Army National Guard, he said in his interview with The Post.
His introduction to Afghanistan came when he deployed with a Special Forces unit to Central Asia in 2003. From a base in neighboring Uzbekistan, he made brief trips into Afghanistan that didn’t involve combat, he told The Post.
When his call-up with the National Guard ended the following year, he landed a civilian staff job at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, focusing on counternarcotics policy. Because Afghanistan produced most of the world’s opium, he wrote in his memoir, the country demanded much of his time.
In September 2005, his National Guard unit returned to Afghanistan for a year-long deployment. As a captain with the 20th Special Forces Group, Waltz led a team of Green Berets that served as a liaison to NATO forces and other allies in southern Afghanistan.
Conditions had deteriorated since his last call-up. In remote areas, U.S. troops began to find themselves outnumbered by the resurgent Taliban.
‘You’re in the buzz saw’
In May 2006, Waltz and five other U.S. Special Forces personnel were guiding about three dozen allied troops from the United Arab Emirates on a mission to Musa Qala, in northern Helmand Province, to scout a location for a new firebase, according to an account provided by Waltz in “Warrior Diplomat,” another book that he published in 2014.
An operations officer at command headquarters had warned Waltz not to go, saying the route was too risky because of an influx of Taliban fighters. But Waltz and the UAE forces, which were part of the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan, resolved to press ahead anyway, he wrote.
After a few hours, their convoy of about eight vehicles ran into an ambush in the town of Sangin, where Taliban armed with mortars and rocket launchers pinned them down in a crossfire. The convoy became separated and struggled to fight its way out, Waltz wrote.
As Waltz’s armored Humvee hurtled along a dirt track, a Taliban sniper took aim at Gordon Cook, a Special Forces medic riding in the exposed rear of the vehicle. Cook was hit in the chest, right arm and left thigh, opening his femoral artery. In an interview with The Post, Cook said he remained conscious, but began to bleed out.
Gordon Cook waits for a medevac flight after he was wounded by a Taliban sniper. Waltz is credited with saving Cook’s life. “His bravery was unquestionable,” Cook said. (Gordon Cook)
Under fire, Waltz crawled into the back of the Humvee and applied a tourniquet to Cook’s leg just below the crotch, tying it so tightly that it tore muscle, ligaments and tendons, according to Cook. The wounded medic said he was drenched in blood and in the “worst pain of my life.” But the tourniquet worked and the bleeding slowed.
Yet they weren’t out of danger. Moments later, Cook recalled, he saw Waltz briefly knocked cold by a Taliban rocket that landed nearby. “I looked over and he had dirt and black s— all over his face and eyelids,” Cook said. “But then he got up, kind of shook it off and started returning fire.”
Miraculously, the convoy escaped without suffering any fatalities. Cook and two UAE soldiers were evacuated by helicopter to a field hospital.
Despite the ambush, Waltz and the UAE commander wanted to continue with their original mission, Waltz wrote in his book. The convoy regrouped and prepared to drive onward to Musa Qala, 30 miles to the north.
When Waltz radioed their plan to headquarters, however, the staff warned him that the firefight in Sangin was just a taste of what lay ahead. Surveillance aircraft showed a larger Taliban force massing nearby, according to Scott Mann, an Army lieutenant colonel who was on the headquarters staff.
“Of course, like a good Special Forces captain, he wanted to push on,” Mann, now retired, recalled in an interview. “I said, ‘Hey man, you’re going into a buzz saw. In fact, you’re in the buzz saw.’”
This time, Waltz listened and the convoy turned around. Over the following 12 hours, his team narrowly eluded Taliban fighters in close pursuit, thanks in part to a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship that arrived in time to wipe out two groups of insurgents. “His guys were really pinched,” Mann said in an interview. “I still get chills thinking about it because it was very, very bad.”
For his actions, Waltz was awarded a Bronze Star with a “V” device, denoting valor in combat. Cook, the medic, saidhethought Waltz deserved additional recognition.
Years later, he offered to help nominate Waltz for a Silver Star, the U.S. military’s third-highest war decoration, for gallantry in action. But Waltz demurred. “He just said something to the effect of, ‘I’m not a medal chaser. Don’t do that,’” Cook recalled.
Cook said he remains a fervent admirer of Waltz — even though he’s not a fan of Trump.
“I’m not at all on the same political wavelength as Mike Waltz, but he saved my life that day and his bravery was unquestionable,” he said.
‘I knew they were full of it’
Waltz returned to his civilian job at the Pentagon in late 2006 and grew frustrated by a disconnect between how senior officials in Washington viewed the war and what he had observed in the field.
In his first book, Waltz wrote that the war had become “rudderless” because the Bush administration was preoccupied with the war in Iraq and had “basically outsourced” Afghanistan to NATO allies. Waltz strongly felt NATO was not up to the task. He had dealt with French, Dutch and other NATO troops in Afghanistan and found them risk-averse, difficult to coordinate and badly equipped.
In his interview with The Post, Waltz said his experiences with NATO forces left a lasting impression — one that echoes Trump’s harsh criticism of the military alliance.
“NATO was a phenomenal alliance in deterring the Cold War,” Waltz said. “But to see what a sad state their equipment has become and how politicized their chain of command was operationally in the field has certainly impacted my views now.”
At the Pentagon, Waltz took a new policy job as a country director for Afghanistan, then was detailed to the White House to work on counterterrorism issues for Vice President Dick Cheney.
As a junior White House staffer, however, he often bit his tongue in briefings when generals gave rosy assessments about how the war was unfolding, he said in his oral history interview. He became especially irked when they exaggerated their progress in training the Afghan security forces, a keystone of the U.S. war strategy.
Waltz said he witnessed “general after general saying, ‘Mr. President, I can turn this military, this Afghan army, around on my watch.’ And I knew they were full of it.”
At the outset of the Obama administration, Waltz briefly returned to his civilian job at the Pentagon. In March 2009, however, his National Guard unit mobilized again and he deployed for a third time to Afghanistan, this time as a major.
Obama had campaigned on a promise to fix the war and eventually boosted the number of U.S. troops to 100,000. In his books, Waltz wrote that the wave of reinforcements created a new set of problems, including a top-heavy and unresponsive chain of command. As a company commander, he sometimes needed to obtain authorizations from 12 different offices before his Special Forces teams could conduct raids against Taliban targets.
He also disagreed with Obama’s strategy for exiting Afghanistan, according to his memoirs. The president said the troop surge would be temporary, to buy time for the Afghan government to build up its forces and pressure the Taliban into peace talks. Waltz felt the United States needed to make an open-ended military commitment and not let up in Afghanistan. Unlike many in Washington, he still believed the Taliban could be defeated outright.
“The underlying theme of everything we were discussing seemed to be how to end the war rather than how to win it,” he wrote in “Warrior Diplomat,” his 2014 book.
Federal contracts and TV interviews
Disenchanted with Obama’s policies, Waltz resigned from his civilian government job in 2011. While he remained a reservist in the Army, he co-founded two private-sector companies in the field of national security.
One was Askari Associates LLC, a small geopolitical consulting firm. The other was Metis Solutions LLC, a Virginia-based defense contractor that ultimately earned him millions of dollars, documents show.
According to federal contracting records, Metis operated primarily at first as a services provider for the U.S. Special Operations Command, which is headquartered in Tampa. In 2016, a Northern Virginia venture capital firm, Blue Delta Capital Partners, invested in Metis, fueling an expansion.
With Waltz as CEO, the company grew from a handful of staff to 400 employees, with operations in 20 states and nine countries, according to a podcast interview that Waltz gave last year.
Kevin Robbins, a general partner at Blue Delta, said the firm invested in Metis because it was impressed with Waltz’s management skills, calling him “a very tough Green Beret.”
“We were writing a check to back Mike and the team and take the company to the next level,” Robbins said. “It was a phenomenal run.”
Metis obtained other federal contracts, including from the Treasury Department. Much of its work focused on analyzing how terrorist networks raise money. The Defense Department also paid Metis to send advisers to Kabul to work alongside Afghan ministries, records show.
Meanwhile, Waltz’s credentials as a Green Beret and Afghanistan veteran opened doors for him in the media world.
The impetus was a 2014 deal negotiated by the Obama administration for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an Army private whom the Taliban had held prisoner for five years. When Bergdahl was freed, Obama met with his parents in the White House Rose Garden and praised the soldier as a hero.
The description angered Waltz, who went public in interviews with his concerns. Waltz had led Special Forces teams that carried out an intensive — and risky — search for Bergdahl in 2009 when he went missing from a tiny outpost in eastern Afghanistan.
Though the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl’s disappearance were murky at the time, Waltz and others viewed him as a deserter who had endangeredhundreds of U.S. personnel by forcing them to conduct a search in hostile territory. Bergdahl later admitted that he abandoned his post because he was unhappy with conditions in the Army. He was captured by the Taliban shortly afterward.
A telegenic Green Beret, Waltz soon found a regular home on Fox News, where he expanded his repertoire beyond the Bergdahl case to become a national security commentator and a critic of Obama’s foreign policy.
In January 2018, he used his perch on Fox to declare his candidacy for Congress. Brian Kilmeade, a host on Fox & Friends, was effusive. “If you want a guy that’s good on business, good on camera, who served in the military with distinction, you’re looking at him,” Kilmeade said.
Waltz defeated Democrat Nancy Soderbergh in November 2018, making him the first Green Beret to win a seat in Congress. Though Waltz did not deploy again to Afghanistan, he remained in the Army National Guard until 2023, when he retired as a colonel. Over his 26-year military career, he received four Bronze Stars, including two with the “V” device for valor, according to his Army service records.
During his first term in Congress, Waltz bonded with Trump on a May 2020 trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to observe the launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon and two astronauts to the International Space Station. Their relationship strengthened during last year’s presidential campaign.
In August, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery to mark the three-year anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans at the Kabul airport.
Federal law prohibits election-related activities at the hallowed site. A Trump campaign staffer got into an altercation with an Army official who tried to block the operative from recording video of Trump amid the gravestones.
The dustup kindled a national debate over whether Trump was politicizing the deaths of U.S. military personnel — or, in his supporters’ view, trying to hold the Biden administration accountable for botching the conclusion of the war.
One of the loudest voices defending Trump belonged to Waltz, who joined him at Arlington for the commemoration. Despite their past differences over Afghanistan, the retired Army colonel had built a rapport with Trump and introduced him to relatives of some of the fallen troops being honored that day. (While several of the Gold Star families supported Trump’s role at the ceremony, others declined to take part).
“Those families wanted him there,” Waltz said in an Aug. 30 interview on Fox News with Pete Hegseth, a talk-show host and fellow Afghanistan war veteran whom Trump has since nominated to serve as defense secretary. “And damn it, they deserve to have whatever they want.”
Alex Horton and Nate Jones contributed to this report.
For Trump’s national security adviser, Afghanistan still looms large
On Monday, 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will again assume the presidency of the United States. In his first term (2016-20), his administration negotiated the Doha Agreement and the near-unconditional withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan; his successor, Joe Biden, completed the pull-out seven months later, after the Taleban had already taken control of Kabul. Since then, US-Afghan relations have been at arms’ length. The Islamic Emirate has not been recognised by the US and American sanctions remain in place, albeit with waivers. The US remains Afghanistan’s largest donor, channelling largely humanitarian aid through the United Nations and NGOs. Kate Clark looks at whether there could now be change and explores the conundrum of why so many Afghans, both pro and anti-Emirate, are welcoming the return of Trump to the White House. She also looks at what the change in presidency means for the last Afghan held in Guantanamo.Just ahead of the 5 November 2024 presidential election, we looked at what the two presidential hopefuls, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, had said in their one debate: “As to any thoughts on forward-looking policy on Afghanistan … there were none, from either candidate.”[1]
There were, however, mutual recriminations over the Doha Agreement, signed by the Trump administration in February 2020. Harris accused Trump of having negotiated “one of the weakest deals you can imagine,” one that even his national security adviser had said was “a weak, terrible deal,” that “bypassed the Afghan government” and which “involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.” She recalled Trump’s invitation in September 2019 to “the Taliban to Camp David” as an example of how he had “consistently disparaged and demeaned members of our military, fallen soldiers.”
Trump hit back, saying it had been a “very good agreement,” before embarking on a number of untruths: it had stopped the Taleban killing lots of US soldiers with snipers, he claimed, and that he had negotiated directly with “Abdul … the head of the Taliban” (assumed to be head of the Taleban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar) and, most egregiously, that he had broken off the deal because the Taleban had not met various conditions: “The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.” In reality, Biden came into office with the agreement still in place and with just 2,500 US troops left on the ground: he extended the deadline for withdrawal from May to September, but kept his campaign promise to complete the pull-out.
It is an irony that as Trump returns to the White House, the general public views his record on the withdrawal as clean, even though his administration was its architect. Indeed, Trump had even promised ahead of the 2020 election to bring the final troops home by Christmas. Biden ultimately completed the withdrawal, with all that ensued: the shambles, mayhem and violence and, for the US, the humiliation of the Taleban driving into Kabul to retake power, all played out live on television. The withdrawal caused a fall in Biden’s public approval ratings from which he never recovered: “For the Bidens, Afghanistan was their [Iran] hostage crisis, which really hurt [Jimmy] Carter and his legacy. Afghanistan was the real hinge point for Biden’s approval ratings,” Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told the Washington-based news website Roll Call. In the public imagination, Biden is remembered as the sole author of the catastrophe.[2] Subsequently, he acted as if he would rather Afghanistan had just disappeared completely, although officials, including (now former) Special Representative on Afghanistan Tom West, have striven to engage with the Islamic Emirate.[3] By contrast, for Trump, Afghanistan is not linked to his failure, which means that, if he wanted to, he does have the political space to do something different. The question is: Will he?
Afghan responses to Trump’s Election and his coming inauguration
The Emirate responded positively to Trump’s election victory. On 6 November 2024, the day after the announcement of his win, foreign affairs ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi tweeted that his ministry:
In line with its balanced foreign policy, expresses hope that following the announcement of the U.S. election results, the incoming U.S. administration will adopt a pragmatic approach to ensure tangible advancement in bilateral relations, allowing both nations to open a new chapter of relations grounded in mutual engagement. The Doha Agreement signed between the Islamic Emirate and America under President Trump’s administration lead to the end of the twenty-year occupation.
More recently, reported ToloNews on 4 January 2025, acting Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Shir Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai said the Emirate had closed the door on enmity with the United States and was ready to engage with all countries, including the US. Hoping Washington would refrain from interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs and honour the Doha Agreement, Stanekzai said:
One or two weeks from now, he [Trump] will come to power. He should change his policy, abandon Biden’s policy, and create a new approach. From Afghanistan and the Islamic Emirate’s side, the path is open for them. If they intend friendship, we will extend a hand of friendship as well. An enemy does not remain an enemy forever, and a friend does not remain a friend forever.
The fact that the Doha Agreement was signed during Trump’s first term in office has encouraged some Emirate officials to believe he might change US policy to their advantage.
Meanwhile, the opposition was also delighted by Trump’s victory and Biden’s demise. Ali Maisam Nazary, head of foreign relations at the National Resistance Front (NRF),[4]tweeted his congratulations to Trump on 6 November, with hopes he would end Biden’s policy of ‘appeasing’ the Taleban. Nazary was confident, he wrote, that Trump would take “meaningful actions” to support and recognise the “people of Afghanistan’s resistance against global terrorism and their legitimate aspirations for a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic Afghanistan.” They were, he said, looking forward to “collaborating with you and your esteemed team in the months and years to come.”
Former head of the NDS and former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, also part of the NRF, tweeting on 7 November, was more circumspect, warning compatriots not to get too emotional or place too much faith in the new American president, counselling that “change begins in our own villages.” More recently, though, he has appeared optimistic. On 15 January, he tweeted a question: “Is the era of hallucination ending in the White House?” Biden’s pursuit of a “pro-Taliban narrative,” he asserted, “played a significant role” in his defeat. In contrast, he claimed that “Trump’s unambiguous anti-Taliban stance” had been “crucial to his electoral success.” Saleh also said the “veteran community, highly influential and revered in America, appeared to significantly sway this narrative.”
The NRF has been buoyed up by two key Trump nominations: Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The two men, who are among the most hawkish and most actively anti-Taleban American politicians, have also picked up some of the NRF’s talking points.
Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, visiting Guantanamo Naval Base in May 2012. Rubio has been a strong supporter of the ‘War on Terror’ detention facility there. Photo: US government
Two key Trump nominees
Marco Rubio, a Florida senator since 2011, has long pushed for the US to take a far harder stance against the Islamic Emirate. In November 2023, he reintroduced a Senate bill (first proposed in September 2021) to designate what he called “the illegitimate Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as a state sponsor of terrorism and the Taliban as a FTO [Foreign Terrorist Organisation],” saying:
A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan poses a direct threat to our national security interests as well as our allies and partners both in the Middle East and in Central Asia. The Biden Administration’s botched military withdrawal from Afghanistan has left the nation as a safe haven for anti-American terrorists. Designating the Taliban as an FTO is the next logical step.
Such designations would establish extra constraints on the US government, NGOs and American citizens, further to the sanctions already in place, as well as on other countries dealing with Afghanistan.[5] Currently, four countries are designated State Sponsors of Terrorism – Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria – while FTOs number in the dozens.
Trump’s nomination for National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, is a congressman from Florida, a decorated former colonel in the National Guard Special Forces, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan, worked as defence policy director at the Pentagon during the George Bush presidency and counterterrorism advisor to then Vice President Dick Cheney. “Following his time in the White House,” his biography reads, “Mike built a small business to over 400 employees, which was repeatedly listed in the Inc 500 index as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America” (further details here). This was Metis Solutions, which Waltz helped found in 2010. Described by one business media company as providing “strategic analysis, intelligence support, and training,” it had, according to The Intercept, offices in Arlington, Virginia, Tampa, Florida, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates and Kabul and “won coveted contracts US government contracts, including to train Afghan special forces, including a controversial program to develop artisanal mining operations in strategic villages.”
The company was sold in November 2020 for “approximately $92 million in cash,” according to the buyer, PAE, one of the largest US defence contractors, which described Metis Solutions as a “leading provider of intelligence analysis, operational and tactical training and program management” with a majority of its “more than 450 employees” having “top secret clearances with subject matter expertise across a broad range of critical national security issues.”
Waltz expressed strong concerns about the Doha Agreement and the withdrawal, fearing it would open the way for the Taleban to return to power and strengthen al-Qaeda’s position. See, for example, his interview from 1 February 2019 on WBUR radio:
My first thought is will you verify by keeping a counterterrorism presence on the ground so that if the Taliban can’t — or won’t — stop al-Qaida, ISIS and terrorist groups from launching, then we can take matters back in our own hands? We also have to continue to build the Afghan army’s capacity to eventually do this on their own. And … those missions are what we currently have forces there for now. So it’s the withdrawal that really has me concerned.
Waltz agreed with the WBUR interviewer that the Taleban would rush into power if US troops withdrew and would then “repress the people,” saying:
We’ve made huge gains in the last 15 years in girls’ education and women’s empowerment and sowing the seeds of democracy, but it’s going to take a long time and I think the investment — look, we can debate this all day long. I really don’t think we have a choice. The United States must lead and we must keep our foot on the neck of these terrorist groups. There is a reason we haven’t had any major attacks in the last few years and that’s because these groups are on the run. They can’t plot, plan, and train and attack the United States. So we need to stay on offense, and we can fight these wars in Kabul and in places like Damascus, or we can fight them in places like Kansas City. I prefer the former.
In the last days of the US military presence in Afghanistan, on 16 August 2021, Waltz told CNBC: “I think at the end of the day you have two choices in Afghanistan, you have a small presence focused on counterterrorism and supporting the Afghan military, or you face what we’re facing now, which will be a cesspool of terrorism.” Waltz also predicted the resurgence of al-Qaeda, “working closely with the Taliban” and asserted that it does “intend to attack America again.”
Days after the fall of the Islamic Republic, Waltz, along with fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, publicly backed the anti-Taleban ‘resistance’, which at that time, on 27 August 2021, was still holding out in Panjshir, as reported by Politico:
After speaking with Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh and representatives of Ahmad Massoud, we are calling on the Biden Administration to recognize these leaders as the legitimate government representatives of Afghanistan. … We ask the Biden Administration to recognize that the Afghan Constitution is still intact, and the Afghan Taliban takeover is illegal.
Mike Waltz in Afghanistan. Photo from the biography page of his website, https://waltz.house.gov/about/ (undated)
The question of the UN cash shipments
It is easy to see why Saleh and others in the NRF have become more optimistic since these two nominations were made, especially after one NRF talking point in particular was picked up, via friendly US Republican politicians, by Donald Trump himself – the shipments of US dollars sent by the United Nations to Afghanistan to fund humanitarian aid. Saleh has described the transport as “the Biden administration’s shipment of billions of dollars was a misguided endeavor to buy and bribe a semblance of calm under the Taliban, only serving to veil the pervasive corruption in the process.”
On 7 January 2025, Trump decried the Biden administration for giving “[b]illions of dollars, not millions – billions … to essentially the Taliban Afghanistan.” The US is currently the biggest donor to Afghanistan, spending approximately three billion dollars since August 2021, largely on humanitarian aid, channelled via the United Nations, the World Bank and NGOs. (For details, see the October 2024 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) report.) However, Trump’s reference appeared most likely to be to those shipments by the United Nations of cash, in the form of US dollars. Getting money into Afghanistan via the banking system is so difficult – despite waivers to US sanctions, banks are reluctant to transfer money, even when it is legal under US law – and the shipments were the workaround to keep aid work going.
Trump’s remarks came after an intervention by US congressman Tim Burchett, a supporter of the National Resistance Front – on 2 December 2024, he tweeted he had invited Saleh to Washington to “discuss the future of Afghanistan and its people.” Burchett had written to Trump on 2 January 2025 about the cash shipments and introduced a bill, the ‘No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act’, that would have specifically stopped “financial and material support from going to the Taliban.”[6] He launched the bill, he said in a 10 January press release, after:
It was brought to our attention that weekly cash shipments of around $40 million USD were being sent to the Afghanistan Central Bank. Additionally, after a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in December of 2024 Secretary Blinken admitted that around $10 million had been paid to the Taliban in the form of taxes.
UNAMA strongly refutes this evergreen claim that the shipments fund the Taleban. In a 9 January 2025 statement, it said the cash (amounting to USD 1.8 billion to date) was “essential in the provision of life-saving assistance to more than 25 million Afghans” and was:
placed in designated UN accounts in a private bank for use by the United Nations … distributed directly to the United Nations entities, as well as to a small number of approved and vetted humanitarian partners in Afghanistan … [and] is carefully monitored, audited, inspected and vetted in strict accordance with the UN financial rules and processes.
None of the money, it said, was “deposited in the Central Bank of Afghanistan nor provided to the Taliban de facto authorities by the UN.” Spokesperson for the US National Security Council, John Kirby, also stressed that the humanitarian aid was being sent to the Afghan people, not the Taleban (reported here).
A day after Trump’s remarks, on 8 January, IEA deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat denied that his government had received “a single penny” from the US. “Instead,” he said, “it [the US] has confiscated and frozen billions of dollars that rightfully belong to the people of Afghanistan.” The Islamic Emirate “neither anticipates any assistance from the United States nor has it ever sought such aid,” he said, while also asserting that a “thorough analysis shows that the U.S. directed all of this money under the guise of supporting Afghanistan, primarily to serve its own interests, and is now exploiting it as a means of propaganda against the Islamic Emirate.”
The following day, acting Deputy Minister of Economy Abdul Latif Nazari also spoke, more mildly, about the cash shipments: the aid was “not handed over to the Islamic Emirate but is used to improve the economic and livelihood conditions of the Afghan people.” The quote was carried by ToloNews, whose evening news bulletin also reported Nazari saying that political and economic matters should be kept separate, and that aid should continue as the international community had the responsibility to assist the Afghan people.
Those dollars are important, not only for funding aid but also supporting the macro-economy. Similar to remittances, the money helps keep people in jobs, helps cover Afghanistan’s trade deficit and supports the afghani. Because NGOs, like private sector companies, are taxed by the IEA, they do contribute to government revenues.[7] Any disruption to the shipments – in the absence of an easing of international banking transactions – would be disastrous for beneficiaries, the aid sector, the Afghan economy and the Islamic Emirate’s government. Whether or not that happens under Trump, aid allocations seem likely to drop further than they have already over the last two years. The decline in aid flows is seen in most donor countries, a trend that also threatens the Afghan economy.
Looking ahead
Donald Trump has given few indications of how, or indeed whether, he would change America’s stance towards Afghanistan. In general, he is against the US getting involved in foreign wars and is also likely to push for cuts in foreign aid globally. As to Afghanistan, he might be the pragmatic president who can do deals with the enemy and normalise the Islamic Emirate’s relations with the world – the Emirate’s hope. Or he could be the leader who will renew the fight against the Taleban by supporting the armed opposition or at least by undermining the Afghan economy – the NRF’s hope. Or, US policy could just muddle along, as it has done until now, with the superpower’s attention focussed elsewhere.
… but what about Guantanamo?
In our look at the presidential hopefuls ahead of the election, we wrote that the policy most likely to be affected by the outcome of this year’s US elections was on Guantanamo, the prison camp set up by George Bush in January 2002 to house ‘War on Terror’ detainees outside the rule either of US criminal law or the Laws of War. Afghans were the largest national contingent to be held there, numbering 225 out of the 780 men and boys detained.
Today, just one Afghan remains, Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar, who was rendered to Guantanamo in 2007, the last man to be taken there and also the last to go through a CIA black site. The account of his torture and interrogation by the CIA after he was rendered from Pakistan to Afghanistan is detailed in a Senate 2014 investigation.[8] Rahim has acknowledged that he translated for and worked with ‘the Arabs’, as al-Qaeda was called in Afghanistan before 9/11: he denies dealings with them much beyond the fall of the first Islamic Emirate. The CIA asserted that he continued to be one of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden’s most trusted associates, although the Senate report revealed that its accusations were probably based only on information passed on by Pakistani intelligence, the ISI (see AAN’s most recent reporting on Rahim here).
Rahim is one of three detainees who are neither cleared for transfer nor among the seven slated for trial at Guantanamo’s military court, nor has he been convicted by that court. Rather, he is in indefinite detention: the US continues to claim that his repatriation would pose a threat to its national security despite not having had forces on the ground in Afghanistan for more than three years.
During Trump’s first term, just one detainee left Guantanamo, a Saudi, who was repatriated to a Saudi jail.[9] All other cases were effectively on hold. In AAN’s pre-election report, the author wrote: “If Trump wins, transfers out of the camp would likely dry up again. If Harris is victorious, Rahim might be freed.” That might have been the case if the panel which reviews cases, the Periodic Review Board, had considered him safe to transfer.
In the last few weeks of the Biden administration, it has undertaken mass transfers: twelve men have left the camp in recent weeks. Unlike Rahim, all had been cleared for release. It repatriated a Tunisian detainee – Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi, who had been cleared for transfer in 2007 – and sent eleven Yemenis, including one cleared for release in 2010, to Oman (see Department of Defense statements here and here and news reports here and here). We saw a similar rush to clear as many detainees as possible from Guantanamo at the end of President Barak Obama’s second term. They included six Afghans sent to the Gulf, in what proved to be yet more indefinite detention and alleged torture for four in the United Arab Emirates, and happier circumstances for the other two in Oman. All were eventually allowed to go home, where one has subsequently died (for more details, see here and here). Another Afghan, affiliated to Hezb-e Islami, Harun Gul, was repatriated in June 2022 after a US court upheld his petition for habeas corpus, ruling that the US state was detaining him unlawfully (reporting here).
Trump has been strongly pro-Guantanamo, but even he may now be baulking at the cost. According to Carol Rosenberg, the last comprehensive study of the costs of running the prison, carried out by The New York Times in 2019, put the cost at more than USD 13 million per year for each prisoner. Most of that, she wrote, was spent on prison staff and the court. At the time, there were 40 prisoners and a Pentagon staff of 1,800 US forces. There are now just 15 men left. “By that measure,” she wrote on 9 January 2025, it would cost $36 million to hold each prisoner there in 2025.”
A possible prisoner exchange
In recent days, negotiations have come to light concerning the possible exchange of Rahim for three Americans, Ryan Corbett, George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi. The Wall Street Journal reported the talks on 3 January. It is behind a pay wall, but the story was picked up, among others, by Reuters.
George Glezmann, an airline mechanic, writes the Foley Foundation, was visiting Afghanistan lawfully, as a tourist, when he was seized by the Emirate’s intelligence service, the GDI, on 5 December 2022.[10] It said he is being held without just cause or formal charge.
Corbett and Habibi were both detained in Kabul on 10 August 2022. Corbett had been in Kabul on a 12-month business visa when he was detained, says a website dedicated to getting him released, which said he had long worked with NGOs in Afghanistan and had been there to train staff working at his social enterprise, Bloom Afghanistan. The website says he was detained along with a German colleague (released in December 2022) and is held without charge in a basement cell. It alleges that “the only suspected reasons being their value as political leverage.”
Habibi’s case is more difficult. The Taleban deny holding him and the FBI speaks not of his detention, but his disappearance. In a request for information, it said Habibi was working as a contractor for Asia Consultancy Group, a Kabul-based telecommunications company, and that he was taken from his vehicle, along with his driver, near his home in Kabul. “It is believed that Mr. Habibi was taken by Taliban military or security forces,” it said. He has “not been heard from since his disappearance.” 29 other employees, also detained at the time, have since been freed, but not Habibi or “one other.” The FBI gave no information about that other missing person.
Corbett and Habibi were detained in the aftermath of the US assassination of then al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, by drone on 31 July, in the middle of Kabul (AAN reporting here). The Foley Foundation has explicitly linked Habibi’s detention to that strike. That the Taleban deny holding Habibi suggests he may no longer be alive.
It appears that the negotiations have been ongoing for a long time. Emirate spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid spoke publicly about Emirate demands at a press conference held on 3 July 2024, saying the US must accept its conditions for the release of two American prisoners, which were the freeing of Afghans held in US prisons and Guantanamo: “When American citizens are important to them, Afghans are important to us.”
Rahim’s lawyer, James Connell, told Reuters that neither the Biden administration nor the Taleban had informed him or Rahim of the negotiations. “It does seem important to include Rahim or his representative in the conversation,” said Connell. “As it happens, he is willing to be traded or exchanged.”
Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for national security adviser met Corbett’s family and warned, in a 14 January tweet: “We will do everything we can for these families and to stop this madness.” The next president, he wrote, “will not look kindly upon groups and countries holding Americans hostage.”
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
One line picked up by the Afghan media was an apparent threat by Trump, made in September 2024, to recapture Bagram airbase. ToloNews reported his rambling comments:
Speaking to his supporters, Trump said: “You take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up, uh, we should be, we should have that air base we should have that oil, we should have, we would have had a whole different country, but to give up … to give up the biggest airbase military airbase in the world, and they left it — behind but we would have been, we would have been, we would have been a much different country right now but we’re going to get it back and I promise you we’re going to get it back.”
In another part of his speech, Trump mentioned that if he had been the US president, he would not have abandoned Bagram Airbase. Earlier in the campaign, Trump claimed China controlled the airbase (media report here).
After three years in post, West left his role as Special Representative on 1 October 2024. West was a key figure in getting waivers to US sanctions and pushing for what the State Department called a “robust humanitarian effort that prevented a wider famine and met the urgent needs of millions of Afghans.” Engagement was difficult: moves towards an easing of the relationship in the days before girls’ secondary schools were due to re-open in March 2022 were stymied by their being almost immediately re-closed; moves were stymied once again when al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was discovered living in the middle of Kabul and assassinated by US drone on 31 July 2022. West has not been replaced. Instead, chief of mission at the US embassy (located in Doha), Karen Decker now “leads on Afghan diplomacy.”
↑4
The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF) Resistance is a coalition of former Northern Alliance members and other anti-Taleban factions. It was founded by the son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, Ahmad Massoud, former first Vice President Amrullah Saleh and former Defence Minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi.
↑5
According to the US State Department website, a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) designation makes it unlawful to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated group, while any US financial institution that becomes aware that it has possession of or control over funds in which a designated FTO or its agent has an interest “must retain possession of or control over the funds and report” it to the government. The designation also supports efforts to “curb terrorism financing and to encourage other nations to do the same, stigmatizes and isolates designated terrorist organizations internationally, deters donations or contributions to and economic transactions with named organizations” and “signals to other governments our concern about named organizations.”
Being designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism puts a country under “four main categories of sanctions,” including “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.” It also “implicates other sanctions laws that penalize persons and countries engaging in certain trade with state sponsors.”
↑6
Bill HR 6586 passed unanimously through both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House of Representatives, but said Burchett, “unfortunately then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.”
Ahmed al-Darbi was transferred after a plea agreement which saw him plead guilty to charges relating to an attack on a French oil tanker in 2002 to serve out the balance of a 13-year prison sentence in his home country. See ‘Detainee Transfer Announced’, US Department of Defence press release, 2 May 2018.
↑10
The Foley Foundation advocates for American hostages and wrongful detainees held abroad and promotes journalist safety. In order to try to prevent future hostage-taking, it develops and shares tools that help journalists, aid workers and all Americans to stay safe abroad. It was established after the kidnap and murder of the journalist, James W Foley, by ISIS while he was reporting in Syria.
Trump 2.0: What difference will the new US president make to Afghanistan (if any)?
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
