No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

A missing child is the existential nightmare of parenthood. This account from Afghanistan to America is a staggering story of a parent’s relentless audacity of hope.

May 4, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In October, 2021, I wrote a post entitled “Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility.” It was critical of the poorly planned and chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan that diminished the U.S. President and America’s reputation in foreign policy. My post highlighted, among other truths, the $80 billion in U.S. military weapons left behind to be exploited by the Taliban. But that was not all that was left behind.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a heart wrenching story by Jessica Donati entitled “A Dad Hunts for His Lost Boy in Kabul,” (April 16, 2022). It’s a well written account of a little known incident that took place during the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, 2021. An Afghan man, identified only as “Mohammad” to protect his family, was among a vast crowd trying to leave the Kabul airport that day. Just two days before, an ISIS-K bomb exploded at the airport killing 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. soldiers. Both the Marines and the Taliban waiting for them to leave were on high alert. On the day the bomb exploded, Mohammad’s wife gave birth by emergency cesarean section. She was in no condition to travel, but travel they must. Days earlier, Taliban fighters showed up at Mohammad’s house looking for an American. Then the U.S. State Department advised all Americans to leave Kabul. Mohammed, who was trained in psychology and addictions treatment, had served as an advisor to the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan. He also held dual American citizenship.

He also knew that his family would be in danger if they remained so they were among a mob desperately trying to board a last chance American transport plane. At the Kabul airport, they were cleared by soldiers to pass through a gate to board the plane. Mohammad carried a few hastily packed necessities and the newborn baby while escorting his ailing wife, Bibi, who took the hand of their eight year-old son, James.

The Taliban were watching close by. Pressed by a crushing and panicked mob, the family was pushed through the gate to board the plane. In the chaos, their son became separated from Bibi and forced back into the crowd. Once the parents realized he was missing, they could see no sign of him in the mob on the other side of the fence. Mohammad tried to go back, but soldiers barred him saying that he would not be able to return.

With his wife on the verge of collapse and still holding his newborn infant, Mohammed was faced with a crushing spontaneous choice. Does he abandon his wife and newborn to save his son? He had to get his wife and infant aboard that plane first. There were no seats on the crowded transport and most people were standing, but someone on the packed floor of the plane gave up a space for Bibi who then collapsed.

Placing the infant with her on the floor, Mohammad again tried to go search for James. Outside the plane, panicked mobs were barring his exit as they tried to force their way aboard. We all saw footage of fleeing Afghans trying to cling to the outside of that plane. As it prepared for takeoff, Mohammad could only pray in despair for the safety of his son.

Few of us reading this can fully comprehend the existential state of anxiety such an event would produce in any parent.

Afghans crammed onto an Air Force transport plane to escape Kabul.

A Parallax View

Mohammad tried to phone James from inside the plane on the tarmac, but because of the bombing two days before, soldiers were on high alert. They threatened to smash his phone if he tried to use it again. None of the fleeing passengers even knew where the plane would later land. Then the WSJ account switched to a parallax view, a view of the same event from another perspective: that of eight year-old James.

Being small, the crush of the crowd forced James from his mother’s hand while pushing him ever more deeply into the frantic mob. When he realized he had lost his family, he sat on a curb and cried under the weight of his own despair. He was holding only a small plastic bag with his passport and a cell phone. As he heard the plane’s engines, he became one of an unknown number of children separated from parents and left behind stranded and alone in Afghanistan.

The WSJ article points out that the State Department was overwhelmed by the flood of refugees seeking admission to the United States. In addition to those from Afghanistan, the ongoing refugee crisis was also impacted by daily chaos at the U.S. Southern Border. President Biden has since pledged to also accept 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine, a story I wrote of in “Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us.”

Back to eight year-old James: Another Afghan man at the scene with his nephew was unable to get his own family onto that plane. He saw James on the ground crying and knew he had become separated. He also knew that the Taliban would only exploit him. So he, too, was forced into a spontaneous decision. He took James with him and his nephew in search of safety.

The courageous stranger (unnamed for his own safety) later told The Wall Street Journal, “I found a little boy crying in a corner. I couldn’t just leave him there.” He brought James to his home in Kabul while his nephew tried to call a number programmed on James’ phone. Aboard the plane in flight, Mohammad’s phone was receiving no signal.

Only in flight did the passengers learn that they were bound for a U.S. air base in Bahrain on the western side of the Persian Gulf. Upon landing, Mohammad charged his phone, but he and others learned that their SIM cards would not work outside of Afghanistan. The base was crowded with thousands of Afghan refugees. Mohammad tried in vain to get someone to try to contact his son. Soldiers wrote his name and description down. Three days later, Mohammad and his wife and baby were placed aboard another plane bound for a military base in Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, Mohammad heard accounts out of Kabul that some of the Taliban were searching for lost children with American ties so they could hold them under torture for ransom. He feared revealing to contacts in Kabul that his son was alone and stranded there. He finally reached Bibi’s sister in Northern Afghanistan but no one knew the whereabouts of her brother, Sayed, the one person who Mohammad knew would go to any lengths to find James.

Mohammad tried in vain to arrange his own return to Kabul to find his son, but ran into the same roadblock as in Kabul. If he went back there he would not be allowed to return. Finally, on his second day in Wisconsin, he was able to get a Wi-Fi signal and learned that his son had been rescued by a stranger in Kabul. A full week had passed when, to his great relief, there were multiple messages on Mohammad’s newly accessed phone from James and the stranger who rescued him.

He called right away and tearfully heard his son’s voice. There are 1,500 Afghan children who arrived in the U.S. on refugee flights without their parents. To date, only about 60 have been reunited with family members. Most remain in U.S. Government custody. But the problem with James was the opposite. There seemed to be no protocol for bringing a minor child from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to reunite him with parents in the United States.

Task Force Argo helped some flee Afghanistan. Here they are about to leave Mazar-e-Sharif. Photo courtesy of Task Force Argo.

Task Force Argo

Mohammed learned from another evacuee at the Wisconsin base that a volunteer group of American veterans and former government employees known as Task Force Argo was working to charter evacuation flights out of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Mohammad kept trying to reach his brother-in-law, Sayed, who had been studying in Kabul. When the city fell, Sayed relocated to a remote region with no phone reception. He worried about his family in Kabul so a friend climbed with Sayed to a remote mountaintop to try to get a signal. When he connected, he saw multiple urgent messages from his sister, Bibi. By chance, his phone rang just then. It was Bibi.

When Sayed learned what happened, he vowed to return to Kabul to search for James. While there, he messaged Mohammad for the name and location of the stranger who rescued him. Sayed then learned of the hope that Task Force Argo might help. In Kabul, he and his traumatized nephew had a tearful reunion. Then they boarded a bus bound for Mazar-e-Sharif. Jesse Jensen, a co-founder of Task Force Argo, told The Wall Street Journal:

“America needs to step back up to the plate and demonstrate that we don’t abandon allies or children of American citizens. If the U.S. government won’t do this, we will.”

The day after Sayed retrieved his nephew, the stranger who had rescued him in Kabul was visited by Taliban fighters looking for the son of an American. They searched the house, but found nothing. The man then took his own family and hastily left Kabul.

Task Force Argo arranged to get Sayed and James aboard a flight from Mazar-e-Sharif to United Arab Emirates where they were relocated to a secure compound of 9,000 Afghan refugees called “Emirates Humanitarian City.” The U.S. Embassy there has an office for interviews, but progress in vetting the stranded — many of whom were allies who assisted the American effort in Afghanistan — is very slow.

The story, for now, ends with Sayed and James safe but now stranded in the United Arab Emirates. It was not the fault of eight year-old James or his parents that the process for evacuating them from Kabul was so poorly planned and chaotic. Eight months after that day, the U.S. State Department could easily fix this, but hasn’t. I hope the attention to this by The Wall Street Journal, coupled with the heroic efforts of Sayed and Task Force Argo, might bring a happy ending to this horrific but still hopeful account.

Under current White House policy, the only other option might be for Sayed to somehow get James into Mexico and the Southern Border where they could simply wade across the Rio Grande into the United States with little in the way of obstacles.

Please pray for James and his family.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this story on social media. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us

The Annunciation: The Consecration of Russia and Ukraine

The Despair of Towers Falling, The Courage of Men Rising

James reunited with his uncle Sayed. Photo courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

In a frenzied flight from Afghanistan the U.S. left behind Americans, allies, $80 billion in weapons of war, some hard won credibility, and a leadership vacuum.

October 6, 2021

The late author, Tom Clancy was widely considered to be a master of the Cold War techno-thriller. I once wrote about his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (Putnam, 1984), which kept me awake for a few nights as a young priest in 1985. President Ronald Reagan sent it to the top of the bestseller lists when he famously described it as "Unputdownable." I wrote about Tom Clancy and that book shortly after his untimely death in October 2013. My post, which found a wide audience among his millions of readers, was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s historical novels — some 15,000 pages — about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it. But it was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me into the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past.

And it was that same sequel that opened my eyes about Afghanistan. The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that invasion force. Everything that is happening in Afghanistan today has its roots in that decade. The Taliban were never mentioned in the book, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing as a result of that decade and all that followed.

On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important regions. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A man named Osama bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire, established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.

The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting mainly from the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the USSR an “Evil Empire,” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported the Soviet Union. He was much aided in this effort by Pope John Paul II who single handedly saved Poland from Soviet domination.

The Rise of the Taliban

In the mid-1980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in their war to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Up to 1.3 million people died in their struggle against the occupation.

Then in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance, over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum. From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born.

The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah). The name, “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools. For many youth in war-torn Afghanistan, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.

Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994, the movement imposed a strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation. Secondary schools for girls were closed and girls were barred from receiving education beyond a rudimentary level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I wrote recently in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, as al Qaeda was plotting against the United States, the Taliban blew up a 180 foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside where it stood for 1500 years.

Many of the Taliban laws alarmed human rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. The Taliban strictly enforced ancient customs of purdah, the forced separation of men and women in public. Men were required to grow full beards. Those who did not comply, or could not comply, were subjected to public beatings.

Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by the Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. Having lost hundreds of thousands of men to war, this left many widows and orphans in dire poverty.

As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran and ancient tribal beliefs and practices — and war.

The Rise of Al Qaeda

By the late 1990s, in the absence of a government, the Taliban had taken control of all of Afghanistan with the exception of a small opposition force known as the Northern Alliance. Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection with the world community.

From that pinnacle of power, the Taliban also provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion. Osama bin Laden had a single goal: to incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term, al Qaeda is Arabic for “base” or “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched.

Over the course of the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda trained, equipped, and financed 50,000 mujahideen warriors from 50 countries. Saudi Arabian nationals comprised more than fifty percent of the recruits. Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam motivated many young men to come to the defense of Afghanistan and the Muslim world against Western “infidel” influences.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered to be too tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with the Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.

From 1991 to 1996, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden quietly built al Qaeda into a formidable international terrorist network with cells and operations in 45 countries. Training camps were established in Sudan, and by 1992 most of al Qaeda’s operations were relocated there. From that base, attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. interests were launched in Yemen and Somalia and at a joint U.S.-Saudi military training base in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was especially angered by the presence of U.S. military in Saudi Arabia.

Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, were described recently in these pages in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”

In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued their front-line offensive against Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.

The U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan

The Taliban lost its hold on Afghanistan in November, 2001 when the Northern Alliance, aided by U.S. bombardments, captured the capital, Kabul. The Taliban surrendered its traditional stronghold of Kandahar in December 2001. A decade after the Soviets left, the United States now occupied Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban.

Around the world, a global anti-terrorism effort was underway resulting in the arrests or deaths of over 1,000 al Qaeda operatives and another 3,000 members of peripheral terrorist networks. One third of al Qaeda’s leadership was either dead or in custody. In May, 2011, U.S. Special Forces operatives killed Osama bin Laden at a house in Islamabad, Pakistan where he had been hiding in plain sight. Al Qaeda lost a general but gained a martyr.

Twenty years later, seven months into his term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden announced an end to the 20 year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. It will be one of the great ironies of history that the U.S. left Afghanistan just as it was found in 2001 — with the Taliban in complete control. Just days after President Biden assured both nations that it is highly unlikely the Taliban will ever again rise to power in Afghanistan, they took complete control of the country in a matter of days — even before the U.S. departure was completed.

Wall Street Journal columnist and former presidential speech writer, Peggy Noonan — no fan of Mr. Biden’s predecessor — had written some flattering prose about the new tone in Washington led by an empathetic gentleman in the White House. In the aftermath of this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, she wrote, “The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden” (WSJ, September 4, 2021):

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“August left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of ‘This isn’t how we do things.’ We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the president looking determined on the anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves.

“We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night — in the middle of the night! — without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military play-acting and drive up and down with guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it — they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat is as a perception problem as opposed to a reality problem. We don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends.”

— WSJ, Sep 4, 2021

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In regard to Ms. Noonan’ s sentence, “We don’t leave our weapons behind,” the London Times composed a basic inventory of what was left behind in Afghanistan in addition to a number of Americans and allies who are still there and still in jeopardy. Scattered across Afghanistan in several former U.S. military depots — and now in the hands of the Taliban — are the following:

“22,174 American armored military humvees [like the one featured atop this post], 42 trucks and SUVs, 64,363 machine guns, 358,000 military grade assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition; 162,043 military grade night vision goggles and military radios; 126,295 pistols, 176 heavy artillery weapons, 100 helicopters including 33 Blackhawks, four c-130 transport planes, 60 other fixed-wing aircraft, and lots of ammunition for a total cost of eighty billion dollars in advanced military assets.”

— London Times

There was a lot more left behind in Afghanistan. Peggy Noonan and other writers spoke of a humiliating transformation in this U.S. departure. The U.S. set a deadline for leaving, but somehow the “leaving” seemed more like an expulsion with the Taliban dictating the terms. In the end, America fled, taking only as many citizens and allies as conveniently possible while leaving many more behind. Senator Tom Cotton said that the U.S. left behind 1,000 Afghan allies who were fully veted to come to the United States, while taking 1,000 Afghan about whom the U.S. knows nothing.

The Rise of ISIS-K

Then a new terror group emerged on the scene. ISIS-K, also known as Islamic State Khorasan, managed to smuggle a suicide bomber into Hamid Kara airport in Kabul. The explosion killed ten U.S. marines, two U.S. army sergeants, and a U.S. Navy medic along with 95 Taliban soldiers. ISIS-K is a mortal enemy of the Taliban and has extreme hostility to the United States.

The “K” in its title refers to Khorasan, a once powerful Muslim territory that spanned Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Both the U.S. and the Taliban knew that ISIS-K was operating and planning attacks in Afghanistan. In May, 2021, ISIS-K bombed a Kabul school for girls. The group accuses the Taliban of growing “soft” on imposing Islamic “Sharia” law. Since then, the Taliban capitulated by banning all secondary education for Afghan girls.

In House and Senate hearnings, Generals Miley and McKenzie said that they recommended leaving between 2,500 and 3,500 troops in Kabul to maintain control over the evacuation and assure that Americans would not be left behind. They were overruled by the White House.

In response to the ISIS-K killing of 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden warned that “we will hunt you down and you will pay.” But without boots, eyes, and ears on the ground in Afghanistan now, that was easier said than done. Days later, the Pentagon and the President told the nation that a U.S. drone strike successfully killed ISIS-K terrorists. They said the reprisal was well vetted and “a righteous strike.”

It took several days for the truth to come out. The U.S. drone missile instead struck a white Toyota Corolla killing three innocent adults and seven children ranging in age from two to 15, all trying to flee Kabul and the Taliban.

Then our national attention was turned quickly once again to the other human disaster, the one at the Southern Border. While all eyes had been on Afghanistan, some 16,000 people amassed under and around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. There was some gruesome footage of men on horseback chasing down and coralling desperately fleeing Haitians. The footage was not what it first seemed, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indictment of current policy.

An embarrased President Biden reacted with a declaration that the buck stops somewhere else. He vowed that the massively overwhelmed Border Patrol “will be held responsible and will pay.” It was the same thing he said when ISIS-K killed 13 U.S. soldiers in Kabul.

Rules for leadership are universal, and America is no exception. Nature abhors a vacuum, and fills it with chaos.

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post, and if you haven’t already, please Subscribe to Beyond These Stone Walls. You may also like these related posts from Father Gordon MacRae:

Christians and The Crusades of Islamic State

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October

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