When the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan collapsed suddenly last summer, the Biden administration made a frenetic attempt to airlift Afghan collaborators out of the country in advance of the Taliban takeover. To facilitate the evacuations, the government abandoned the usual refugee requirements in favor of the much more lenient program of “humanitarian parole,” an emergency measure originally intended to be used only rarely. Nearly 80,000 Afghans claiming to have assisted the U.S. during its 20-year presence in the country were quickly resettled in the U.S., most of them as parolees.
Since then, humanitarian parole has been used liberally by the Department of Homeland Security to admit Haitians and Cubans and most recently Ukrainians fleeing the war in that country.
Remaining in Afghanistan, however, were tens of thousands still claiming to be under threat by the Taliban authorities. Some 46,000 have applied for parole, but only about 4,246 of those applications have been so far adjudicated and, surprisingly, of those 93 percent have been rejected.
Asked by CBS News about the high level of rejections, officials at DHS replied that “parole is not intended to replace the U.S. refugee program” and that Afghans seeking refugee status should follow that route instead.
Afghan supporters, which include some former members of the U.S. military, have pointed out an apparent discrepancy between the treatment of rejected Afghans and the resettled Ukrainians. The latter, for example, have benefited from a program announced in April called Uniting for Ukraine, described as “a new streamlined process to provide Ukrainian citizens who have fled Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression opportunities to come to the United States.” No such programs exist for the Afghans remaining in Afghanistan.
The difference? The DHS has lamely argued that the Ukrainians are seeking a “temporary safe haven,” while Afghans want to come and stay. This argument ignores the fact that prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine was already a dying state hemorrhaging residents at the rate of 100,000 every few months. No one really believes most of the 37,000 thus far granted parole are seeking only temporary residence in America. Most, as much as the Afghans, are here to stay.
Instead, one would be forgiven concluding that the Afghans represent a bitter reminder of an old, already lost war in Asia whereas wholesale Ukrainian resettlement underlines Washington’s total commitment to its new proxy war with Russia, a war not yet lost.
The wholesale reliance on a humanitarian parole program that it was poorly equipped to manage (namely, the resettlement of the Ukrainians, Haitians, Cubans, and those initial airlifted Afghans) was an ill-conceived kneejerk response by the Biden administration. Now it faces uncomfortable questions suggesting a possible national bias, a suggestion it finds terrifying.
The lesson here? Emotional decisions made in haste, in particular those made for political and geopolitical reasons, have a way of redounding badly on those who make them. Just so.
For more, see CBS News.