to pick up Hamed, the Iranian grad student who stayed with us for a week. We had arranged that I would take him shopping for furniture, bed clothes/pillow, and kitchen items he needed for his room at the International House, a dorm for foreign students. We had given him stuff, but he wanted to return our things and buy his own. So, off we went to Walmart, Hamed armed with his new FNBO credit card.
After the shopping, we returned to IH to unload the stuff and take it to his room. At the entrance, we met Wais, a young Afghan grad student. Wais and Hamed have become friends, a process aided by the fact that Wais is from Herat, a small city in western Afghanistan where Farsi is the lingua franca. Wais helped us unload the stuff. Friendly, chatty, handsome young man, perfect English—I liked him immediately.
I asked him if he wanted to join us at the house for dinner. He declined—another time—but we had a chance to chat about: his course of study here (MSE, construction management); his post-graduation plans (stay in the US, find a job—no future for him back home); his family (mother, father, two sisters). His father, a translator during the war, is in hiding, and his sisters have been booted from school. Wais hopes that once his dad obtains the visa he was promised, he can get his family out of that hellhole.
Is there anything more humiliating for an American than hearing these stories? I was ashamed for the rest of the day—at dinner, my wife asked me what was wrong. The following morning (yesterday), the shame returned when I read an editorial by Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) in the WSJ entitled, “The Immigrants That We Shouldn’t Forget” (01/29/24, pg. A15). Senator Moran makes the case for the Afghan Adjustment Act he has jointly introduced with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) which he proposes be included in any border supplemental package.
The fiasco is yet another example of the Administration’s fecklessness. How many more times must we refer to Bob Gates’ assessment before this hapless crew is gone? And not only Biden—it is also an indictment of the State Department and all the Federal agencies involved in the process. Coming up on three years ago, I wrote a piece on the withdrawal from Kabul. The concluding paragraphs follow below:
“…In the meantime, we will have the witch hunt. The Democrats will expend enormous energy trying to convince Americans that all this is Trump’s fault. The Republicans will repeat the Benghazi festival and try to turn it into a major campaign issue. But it was a bad show, and Biden will suffer from this self-inflicted wound. He should—Kabul is a lot worse than Benghazi.
There will be all sorts of epitaphs written in the coming days with much of it referring to the “graveyard of empires” nonsense. In the first instance, it hasn’t been a graveyard for everyone. It was not a graveyard for the Mongol Empire. If there were graveyards, they were large, messy ones filled with Uzbek, Tadzhik, and Pashtun victims of spectacular cruelty visited upon them by the Horde.
The Mongols came and went, leaving nothing behind except for their Hazara descendants whose facial features remind us of what “rape and pillage” is all about. The Persians left behind a pervasive cultural tradition and a camp language, Dari, that is for Afghanistan what Urdu is for Pakistan. The British left cricket behind. As usual, what we leave behind is a memory of incompetence, cynical expediency, and treachery. We can debate when it started, but there’s no debating that it’s bipartisan. It’s our style.”