I've lost more of
my partner nation brothers than I
have on my U.S.
side.
I've buried all of them.
They would put their lives in front
of mine, and I would do the same for
them.
And that's going to continue for the
rest of my life.
The nightmare scenario of...
Desperation engulfed...
Panic at the airport...
Desperate people pour onto the
run...
Confirm an explosion
Chances of getting on them are growing
slimmer and slimmer.
My national security team and I have
been closely monitoring the
situation on the ground in
Afghanistan.
The truth is, this did
unfold more quickly than
we had anticipated
In August of 2021 as the U.S.
government pulled out of
Afghanistan, Air Force veteran
Travis Petersen decided to go back
into the country on his own.
While everybody is trying to leave
Afghanistan.
I'm trying to get back into.
OK.
Yes. Before I knew it, I was
jumping on an airplane.
I had no idea what was
going to happen after that.
Peterson, who served two years in
Iraq and 10 years in Afghanistan,
wanted to help the men and women he
had worked with and fought with to
escape.
Afghans who had partnered with the
U.S. government during the 20 year
occupation could be eligible
for special immigrant visas
or SIV's.
So for your special operation guys,
why do you think that the U.S.
is obligated to bring them
here? Because that's what you've
been doing.
Yes, there's a huge obligation
to bring them here.
I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for
these guys. There's a thousand
other individuals just like me that
wouldn't be alive because
of the intelligence
on the battlefield as well of
putting themselves in front of me.
There's numerous occasions where
they would yell at me for getting
off the helicopter to go grab
somebody because they knew it was a
bad situation, or
they would surround me and
it would encircle me as I
was going to move to get to somebody.
Eventually, Peterson would connect
with a group of other veterans,
private citizens, active duty
military and philanthropists
who had also decided to take matters
into their own hands.
It just became this massive push
to get these guys out.
Many of these individuals were
members of Afghan special operations
units trained and funded by
the American military.
They participated in direct combat
against the Taliban and are
currently in hiding because their
lives are in danger
because they weren't directly
employed by the American military.
The State Department hasn't
evacuated them.
We've talked about how most
of these guys took on missions in
collaboration with the U.S.
government. You have been training
around this whole time.
You know why?
Why did you have to do this
as a private effort?
Where is the U.S.
government in this?
It's different with the Soviet
process with interpreters
because they worked for an entity.
They worked for a company.
My guys didn't, they worked for the
Afghan military.
If we could just re designate these
guys as being
SIV or on a humanitarian
parole, we could have them out
today.
During that chaotic week following
the U.S. withdrawal, Peterson
physically extracted some of the men
he had worked with, picking them out
of the crowd.
He escorted them to a security
checkpoint at the airport and
verified their identities
through private donations.
He arranged for four flights out of
Afghanistan over a two week period.
Peterson was at the airport in Kabul
on the day it was attacked by ISIS,
which killed an estimated one
hundred and seventy civilians and
13 U.S. soldiers.
I saw airplanes
in the ditch. I saw airplanes on
their sides. I saw helicopters
completely destroyed.
I saw that the terminal of the
airport completely
demolished.
Not everyone who was able to escape
had worked with the U.S.
forces and the course of searching
for his men. Peterson also
encountered three siblings outside
the Kabul airport trying to get on
a plane, and he decided to help
them.
They now live in an East Coast city
and asked that we not reveal their
names or location.
They looked distraught, but
terrified.
So I kind of took these
three under my wing and the other
two that were with them.
They got special treatment.
Are you going to go back to
university as well?
Are you finished?
Yes, my university is
going to finish.
Yeah, just to my two subjects
remain.
Oh, take them online.
Ok, maybe
when you get the bottom,
I want to get a copy of.
When he got back to the U.S.,
Peterson connected with a growing
community of volunteers also
committed to doing whatever they
could to help stranded Afghans.
Zach Van Meter, a venture capitalist
from Florida, rented a conference
room at the Willard Hotel in
Washington, D.C., in August to
coordinate a private volunteer
effort to get people out.
It was the Peacock Lounge,
which I'm not sure what it's exactly
used for, but it is a
couple of thousand square foot space
in the back of the hotel, next to
the restrooms and away from
everybody.
And we set up tables and
there were anywhere from 40
to 60 people working in there
for a week straight people sleeping
on the ground.
They convinced the United Arab
Emirates government to help with the
evacuation effort, and it assisted
in getting out 13,000 Afghans.
Very, very first flight out was a
young lady and her family who
had been directly threatened by the
Taliban, and it was kind of a test
for us.
And they went in, they got her,
they walked her through the airport.
They put her on a UAE
military plane like a C-130.
It was pretty neat moment.
And so they flew over, and then
the UAE said, Let's do more.
Private entities and the U.S.
government together worked to
airlift out nearly 130,000
people.
Most are now living in camps in the
United States and other parts of the
world, awaiting a lengthy vetting
process.
Tens of thousands are still in
hiding.
You guys are maintaining safe
homes inside Afghanistan.
Tell me how that works.
So we keep the rent paid.
We keep them warm.
We try to keep them from getting
bored. We'll send
coloring books for kids.
Try to find activities.
You know, we keep food going, and
that's a constant struggle.
Ben Owen is the founder of Flanders
Fields, a nonprofit that helps
resettle refugees inside the U.S.
and maintains a network of safe
homes.
We are trying to provide and I don't
know how long we can continue to
provide.
Flanders Fields is part of a network
of nonprofits that maintain
60 safe homes in Afghanistan.
Aoun's says he has taken out $23,000
in personal loans to cover their
expenses.
How much does it cost you?
You know, roughly daily to keep
these safe homes going.
We go broke literally every single
day, so some days we spend 10
grand, some days we spend 20 grand
Sundays or spend 300 bucks.
It's it's all dependent on what
we're able to raise.
Although the Biden administration is
currently doing little to help with
the evacuation efforts, there are
many individuals within the U.S.
government who works directly with
some of the stranded Afghans and
are helping with private evacuation
efforts.
We have a mutual friend who
literally is taking some
of his government salary
to send money so people have food.
He's never met them before.
And then there's a lot of people who
don't want to
be in the press because they still
work in a place where
they're not supposed to.
The guys that are pushing me to do
this interview because they don't
want to do it. They worked while
on maternity leave.
They worked while on vacation.
The Afghans stuck in the country
face a Catch 22.
To qualify
for a special immigrant visa to
leave.
They must sit for an in-person
interview. But the U.S.
doesn't conduct in-person interviews
inside Afghanistan
Because we can't fly them straight
from Afghanistan to America
unless it's on a department of state
flight or some sort of trip
sponsored by the Department of
State.
Josh Jenkins is an army veteran
who served in Afghanistan for eight
years. Now he works for the
nonprofit Ampilo, which uses
technology to fight poverty and
is now helping with the evacuation
efforts.
We have no way of getting people
across unless we have a third
party willing to take them while
they wait for their SIV or P1
or P2 or parole applications
to be approved, or we just send them
to a different country that's
willing to accept them instead.
Owen, Jenkins and 15 other nonprofit
organizations joined a federation
started by Travis Peterson called
Moral Compass. The alliance
seeks to better coordinate all
of their funding, logistics,
advocacy and food programs
by putting them all under one
umbrella
With moral compass.
We have these 15 organizations,
and then we have an advocacy
organization. On top of that, The
Umbrella, which is the Special
Operations Association of America.
The federation, which relies
exclusively on private donations,
is exploring new strategies
to help more Afghans escape, such
as attempting to build a
humanitarian village in Kosovo.
A private citizen had donated
17,000 square meters of his
land to us to
build a humanitarian city.
We had doctors, lawyers.
Everything from the top to bottom
was covered in
volunteers willing to just come out
and volunteer their time to help
these people, and they had no
expectations of being paid,
Jenkins says the cost of our
government said it would sign off if
the US State Department agreed to
issue an unobjection certificate,
establishing that it does not oppose
the plan.
It refused.
Why should these guys?
Why should your guys qualify
for a special immigrant visa?
We made a promise to these people,
and if we want people to keep taking
us seriously in the future,
we need to follow through on that.
Thousands of Afghans are stuck in
vetting stations on U.S.
bases inside the US and around the
world. They have been awaiting
processing for over six months now.
If rejected, some will end up
stateless.
There are around 14,000 permanent
residents and 400 American citizens
still stuck in Afghanistan who have
no pathway to immigrate or
are unwilling to leave their
families behind.
During a press conference, Secretary
Blinken felt like it was important
to clarify that the American
citizens will remain in Afghanistan
carry dual citizenship.
Most of the remaining American
citizens are dual nationals
whose home is Afghanistan
and whose extended families live
there. So it's no surprise
that deciding whether or not to
leave the place they call home
is a wrenching decision.
I've got a woman, an American
citizen in Missouri
who has two daughters with her one's
20 and one's 23.
U.S. Department of State told her,
yes, you're an American citizen, you
can bring your daughter because
they're both unmarried. Oh wait, one
is 23. She can't come.
She's got to stay.
What mother is going to leave her 23
year-old, gorgeous daughter in
Afghanistan by herself
to give you an answer as to why I
think it is?
I have no fucking clue.
So the problem is it's bigger than
just us not letting people into
the US or not bringing people to the
U.S.
Noor you're not going to find a
smoking gun. There isn't a person
holding this up.
There isn't a,
you know, I mean, you can say the
buck stops here and it's all the
president's fault, but it's really
not.
There's literally a legal structure
that's been established for how
immigrants are allowed into this
country.
From when my ancestors came into
your, you came in.
That's part of the process.
Then compound that with the fact
that it's a country on the other
side of the world and you literally
need to hop them somewhere.
Or we need to
open up our camps
and, you know, stadiums in house,
hundreds of thousands of Afghanis
and just be prepared for that.
But I don't think our general
population wants that.
The Biden administration not only
oversaw the disastrous withdrawal.
It also has continued to enforce
and defend a broken immigration
system.
In 2021, it admitted
only 18 percent of the refugees
allowed under its self-imposed
cap.
The Biden administration has a new
program that will evacuate roughly
600 Afghans per week, but
there are an estimated 100,000
who qualify for SIV status,
which means the evacuations could
take years to complete and they'll
still have to go through vetting
facilities already backlogged with
thousands of unprocessed
obligations.
So a lot of people got left in the
lurch. There were people that
applied for SIV, maybe four or five
years ago. They were still waiting
on their interview.
So that process needs to be
modified or changed.
I understand that Congress is
looking at ways to do virtual
interviews and other things.
We're going to be a joke if every
time we ask someone to help us,
they're going to say no. Remember
Afghanistan? Not only did you lose,
but you left everyone behind.
And it's not going to get us
anywhere. We need to come through
and actually do what we said
we do.
They did everything that we've asked
them to do over the years, and
we need to be able to do
what we told them we would do and
honor that promise of
taking care of them.
They fought to the death, every one
of them,
and they're still fighting.