The Afghan Impasse, Part 6: Digital Dunkirk

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[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN WILLIAMS, HOST:

Welcome back to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jenn Williams. This is episode six of our special series, “The Afghan Impasse,” exploring 20 years of failed attempts to negotiate a peace deal in Afghanistan.

[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN: If you haven’t started with episode one, we recommend that you go back and do that now. 

In this episode, we’re going to hear from reporter Shirin Jafari. Shirin is a reporter for public radio’s “The World.” She focuses on the Middle East and has reported on conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. 

In August of 2021, Shirin found herself in the middle of a complex series of grassroots negotiations to get American citizens and allies out of Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power. The evacuations were coordinated online between strangers through text chains and chat groups. Here’s Shirin Jafari with “The Afghan Impasse, episode six: “Digital Dunkirk.”

SHIRIN JAFARI:

It’s morning. August 19, 2021. I wake up to the sound of a WhatsApp message notification. [ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION SOUND] I look up the name: Najiba Noor. Still dazed from sleep. I wrack my brain. Who is this? Najiba Noor. Najiba Noor? Suddenly it clicks. Noor, the young policewoman I interviewed two months before. As the Taliban forces were taking province after province in Afghanistan, some Afghans had banded together to fight them. They had one goal: To keep their towns, cities and villages under the control of the Afghan government. Najiba Noor was the police chief of a district in a small city in Jowzjan province in the north. She was five foot four and just 24 years old, and she was part of the resistance. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA NOOR SPEAKING IN DARI]

SHIRIN: In that interview, Noor sounded upbeat, determined, focused. She said she’s not worried at all. “The Taliban are not even worth our time,” she said. “I don’t even think about them all that much.” But that confidence was missing in her frantic text messages that August morning.

[SOUND OF TEXTING ON A MOBILE PHONE KEYBOARD] 

SHIRIN (IN VOICEOVER): 

Hi. I hope you’re well. 

SHIRIN: Noor and I texted in Dari, but I’ve translated our messages into English. 

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR (IN VOICEOVER): 

But I’m not well. I have been injured. Afghanistan has fallen. I lost everything. They have gone to our neighbors’ homes and attacked them. They ask about me. They want to know where I am. I don’t know what to do. 

SHIRIN: Her life was in danger.

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR (IN VOICEOVER): I’m in a lot of trouble. I need to leave. Can you help?

SHIRIN: Two days before Noor sent those WhatsApp messages, Afghanistan had fallen to the Taliban. The fighters had entered the presidential palace, their AK-47s slung on their shoulders. On Tuesday, August 17th, after two decades of fighting, the Taliban held their first press conference. Wearing the signature Taliban turban, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid addressed the crowd.

[NEWSCLIP OF ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID SPEAKING]

SHIRIN: “We want a strong Islamic system,” he said, giving little details about what the new government will look like. For all the Afghans who had lived through the Taliban rule in the 1990s, history seemed to be repeating itself. For younger Afghans like Noor, life had suddenly come to a standstill. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: That was a terrible day. I felt like I was being buried alive. 

SHIRIN: Everyone I talked to knew exactly what Taliban rule would mean for women. They would be relegated to their homes, robbed of their basic rights. Noor was the only woman in her family to go to school. This was by no means easy. Her father believed women should get married at a young age, stay home and raise a family.

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: It wasn’t just my father who was against my education. The elders in our town were, too. I had to fight them all. 

SHIRIN: But Noor grew up at a time in Afghanistan when most women and girls did have the opportunity to get an education. She says when she watched women on TV—reporters, politicians, activists—she thought to herself, “I want to be just like them.” There were no high schools in her city, so she had to travel to the nearby province of Mazar-e-Sharif. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: My mom has always supported me. To this day, she has supported me. Slowly and over time, I was able to convince my father, too.

SHIRIN: During the day when her father worked at the family orchard taking care of apple and pomegranate trees, Noor quietly went to school. Later, when she heard about an opportunity to join the police force, she had to go to war with her father once again. A woman joining the police force was unheard of in her town. She would be defying all cultural norms and expectations, something her dad didn’t want to deal with. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: He hated me. He used to tell me that a girl who studies and works among men is not respectable.

SHIRIN: Undeterred, Noor signed up. She got training and worked her way up the ranks. By August 2021, she was the police chief of her district. She stood out, she says, when she walked around in her uniform, her hijab wrapped tightly around her head. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: I love my job. I had become a media celebrity. People wanted to take selfies with me.

SHIRIN: But the life that Noor had worked so hard to build for herself was about to come to an end. Emboldened by their takeover of the country, Taliban fighters were going after anyone who had fought against them. Not just that, they were also targeting anyone who had worked in the previous government: Judges, lawyers, officials, women’s rights advocates. On the day Taliban forces entered her city, Noor and her fellow police officers got involved in a battle. It was suffocatingly hot, she says. She was thirsty. As they exchanged fire, Noor was shot in the leg. Her colleagues quickly pulled her to safety. She passed out.

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: My life was on the line. They were after me to kill me. It was such a difficult time. 

SHIRIN: Two days later, shortly after the morning call to prayer, Noor disguised herself in a blue burqa she had borrowed from a friend. She took a cab all the way to Kabul, her heart pounding throughout the eight-hour journey. [SOUND OF TEXTING ON A MOBILE PHONE KEYBOARD] 

That’s when Noor reached out to me. 

[ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION SOUND]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR (IN VOICEOVER): If I stay here, I will die. Tajikistan. Uzbekistan. Anywhere is better than here. Please help. Be quick. 

SHIRIN: As journalists, we’re always taught that we don’t do activism. We are told to draw a thick, bold line between ourselves and the stories we tell. But to me, Afghanistan has always been more than a story. I was born in Iran, which borders Afghanistan and has deep cultural and linguistic ties with this land. Besides, even without those ties, I still couldn’t look away. I know that it was the same for many other journalists who’d covered the war. We’re not activists, but we are human. 

NEWSCLIP OF AMERICAN FEMALE REPORTER:

Seven Afghans died in a frantic scramble at the Kabul airport …

NEWSCLIP OF FIRST BRITISH MALE REPORTER SPEAKING OVER SOUND OF AIRCRAFT:

People are literally clinging on to US military aircrafts as they try to take off … 

NEWSCLIP OF SECOND BRITISH MALE REPORTER SPEAKING OVER SOUND OF SHOUTING CROWD:

Tens of thousands are trying to get through. At the front, they’re being crushed.

SHIRIN: I’d returned to the US about two weeks before the fall of Kabul. And like all other journalists covering the country, I was getting desperate messages from Afghans pleading for help.

A movement was taking shape in real time; what became known as the Digital Dunkirk. Bit of history here: “Dunkirk” was in reference to the evacuation of the British and other Allied forces from the French port of Dunkirk during the Second World War. And in the aftermath of the fall of Kabul, journalists, aid workers, diplomats and army veterans were banding together online to help American citizens and Afghan allies get out of Afghanistan. Online—hence “digital.”

Sometimes we didn’t even know each other. Like, I was in touch with this former British Army guard, Luke. Was that even his real name? Probably not. I’d be chatting with Luke in Beirut, some Matt in London and a Greg in Kabul. It was weird. But lives were on the line, and there was no time for trust building. What mattered was that here we were, in this extraordinary moment together, and we shared a common goal: To help as many people as possible. It was time to brush up on our negotiating skills and pull any and all strings we could.

UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN MAN:

1. I’m—I’m just going to shut WhatsApp off so it doesn’t ding around and stuff. 

SHIRIN: Kirk Wallace Johnson was one of those helping out. Johnson and I were not in touch at the time. I found out about him later. Johnson worked for the US Agency for International Development—or USAID—in Iraq in 2005, coordinating the reconstruction efforts in the city of Fallujah. When he got back to the states, he started getting messages from his former Iraqi colleagues pleading for some way to get out of Iraq. They were being hunted down because of their work with the US forces. In 2010, Johnson testified in Congress about the need for a special visa program that would allow those who had risked their lives fighting alongside Americans to resettle in the US.

KIRK WALLACE JOHNSON: I was imploring them—even 10 years before Kabul fell—in congressional testimony to say: Build the evacuation plans into your withdrawal plans. Don’t focus on how to get, you know, a golf cart or a computer that’s on this remote outpost logged and tagged and tracked on its way back to the United States. Just burn it, blow it up, smash it, whatever, and use that space on the planes to put humans on it.

SHIRIN: Johnson says as soon as the timetable for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was announced, he knew evacuating at-risk Afghans was not going to be a priority. 

NEWSCLIP OF FEMALE AMERICAN INTERVIEWER:

Kirk, why wasn’t the Biden administration and the US and other administrations more prepared to get these people, our friends, out? 

SHIRIN: On August 17th, two days after Kabul fell, he went on CNN.

NEWSCLIP OF KIRK WALLACE JOHNSON ON CNN:

For decades now, the United States has been making promises to these people, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, that—you come forward and you help us. You risk your lives to help these 18-year-old Marines from, from Ohio who don’t speak Dari or Pashto. And we got your back. And guess what? We don’t.

KIRK: When I got out of the CNN building here in Los Angeles, there was a text from an old colleague of mine inviting me into this Signal group. 

SHIRIN: Signal is this encrypted messaging app. 

KIRK: I joined the Signal group and was completely stunned, motivated, overwhelmed, overtaken by this thing within moments. 

SHIRIN: It was a group of people with connections, he says. CIA folks, people from the State Department, Pentagon and USAID. The feed, Johnson says, was just a long list of cases of high-risk Afghans desperately needing help. 

KIRK: We saw thousands and thousands of people who were running for their lives and had nobody helping them. 

SHIRIN: They got to work. They collected intel and used it to build up a heat map that showed, almost in real time, where the threats were. This was invaluable, Johnson says, for those trying to navigate Taliban checkpoints. They connected with Afghans on the ground and walked them through how to safely store their documents on their phones. And in the US, Johnson worked his contacts. 

KIRK: I’m friendly with the deputy national security adviser, John Finer. You know, he’s got the ear of the president and some considerable power. So was I texting him throughout this? Of course. Was I reaching out to friends in the Pentagon? Yeah. I have a lot of friends on Capitol Hill, 

SHIRIN: But while a lot of those on the Signal group had contacts inside the US government and military, Johnson says they needed somebody who could be trusted on the ground. 

KIRK: It felt like trying to operate one of those arcade claw games, you know, but from 7,000 miles away. And there were a lot of people involved in helping figure out where to navigate it and when to press the button, if that made sense. 

SHIRIN: They needed someone who was outside the airport in Kabul, who spoke the local language and who could negotiate with the Taliban. Through a friend, Johnson, connected with someone who could help.

UNIDENTIFIED AFGHAN AMERICAN MAN:

My name is Safi Rauf and I am 29 years old. I’m a corpsman in the US Navy and run a nonprofit organization called Human First Coalition. 

SHIRIN: Born to Afghan parents in a refugee camp in Pakistan, Rauf had immigrated to Omaha, Nebraska when he was a teenager. He had one foot in Afghanistan, the other in the US. And he knew how to talk to the Taliban.

SAFI RAUF: You can talk to them from a level of being an American. Being an American diplomat, or being in the US military or going to Western schools. 

SHIRIN: Rauf had buses full of evacuees that needed to get to the airport. 

SAFI: The one thing that we needed from the Taliban was a safe passage. All of the streets were basically completely blocked. People were driving their cars and then just parking on the street and walking to the airport. 

SHIRIN: Rauf started reaching out to lower-level, younger Talibs.

SAFI: All of these guys who are actually on the ground and doing a lot of the work—not making decisions, but doing a lot of the work—are really young. They’re basically lost of what to do. Every time you talk to them, they’re like, “Well, our leadership is—it’s, it’s for our leadership to decide.”

SHIRIN: Many phone calls and meetings later, Rauf managed to get on a WhatsApp call with one of those younger Talibs. He then handed the phone to someone who had the power to make the decision: Mullah Baradar. 

KIRK: Right now, he is the second-most influential person in the Taliban. After the supreme leader, he is basically the authority. 

SHIRIN: Baradar was not pleased with the images we were all seeing on TV. 

KIRK: He was so mad, for the very reason that the airport was such a chaotic scene. And this chaotic scene was playing all across the world. He was basically yelling. He’s like, “Who is going to control this? The Americans have made us look like a joke.” He basically told us, like, “What do you guys want for, for us to do to basically turn this into more organized fashion of an evacuation?”

SHIRIN: To be able to get people to the airport safely was a big deal. And the Taliban agreed to escort a convoy of evacuees from the Serena Hotel in Kabul. Success. 

[SOUND OF VOICE-MESSAGE RECORDING OF SHIRIN SPEAKING IN DARI]

SHIRIN: Meanwhile, policewoman Najiba Noor and I stayed in touch over the weeks. She was in hiding in Kabul. 

[SHIRIN FINISHES SPEAKING AND HANGS UP] 

SHIRIN: We sent texts and voice messages like this one. Here, I was asking her to send a selfie, so the guards at the gate of Kabul airport could identify her. Sometimes, she would disappear for days, making me wonder if she’d been taken by the Taliban.

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: I couldn’t leave the house. It was really hard. I had no money. I was separated from my family. 

SHIRIN: On August 22nd, Greg, one of the guys who was helping Noor, messaged to tell her to get to the airport immediately. This was her chance to leave. But Noor was in the basement of a friend’s home and had no cell reception.

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: I had no internet connection. I missed his message. 

SHIRIN: Two days later, she finally saw it and reconnected with Greg. He told her to rush to the airport. She did. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: So many people had come to the airport. The situation was bad. If it wasn’t for Greg, I wouldn’t have been able to get in.

SHIRIN: The next time we messaged, Noor was on the plane. I asked her if she knew where she was going. No, she said. Anywhere is good.

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: I cried all the way. I lost my home. 

SHIRIN: By the end of August 2021, America was out of Afghanistan. 

NEWSCLIP OF PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN:

Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety.

SHIRIN: Now, Afghans were on their own. There was no plan, nor guarantee that those at risk of being abducted, detained or killed by the Taliban would actually be able to leave. Former Afghan security forces, who had fought Taliban fighters for two decades were on the run. Government employees, aid workers, activists, judges were in hiding. Afghans I was in touch with spoke of shock, anger and a sense of abandonment. For many women, their worst fears had come true. They had no doubt that under Taliban rule, they would be treated as second-class citizens, that they would be banned from going to school and from working. They told me they no longer saw a future for themselves in Afghanistan; that their future laid elsewhere, somewhere outside their homeland.

JENN: You’re listening to “The Afghan Impasse,” a special seven-episode season of The Negotiators from Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

SHIRIN: Safi Rauf returned to the US, but kept working to evacuate people out of Afghanistan, even after the US withdrawal. And what was clear to him was that he couldn’t pull off this evacuation by himself. He needed a bigger team. And he didn’t have to look too far. After all, thousands of Afghans had lost their jobs overnight. 

SAFI: I had about 50 individuals, and a lot of them included former special forces, Afghan special forces. People who had also served in senior positions on a tribal level. They were not in the official government, but they had served on tribal levels, and for Afghanistan, that’s really important, because a lot of the dealings that happen within the tribes, within the Taliban, happen through those different, kind of, tribal councils. 

SHIRIN: Rauf’s brother, Anees Khalil, ran a Coca-Cola franchise in Kabul before the fall of the Afghan government. He employed about 600 people, Rauf says.

SAFI: Now these 600 people, although they were working for him, they didn’t have anything to do. So we pulled a lot of guys from that mission as well. 

SHIRIN: Next step was to get the support of the top Taliban decision makers. One way in was to speak with the Emiratis in Afghanistan. See, one of the top Taliban officials, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is married to an Emirati woman. Rauf returned to Kabul and got a meeting with one of Haqqani’s sons, Anas. He’s now a top Taliban leader. And on a crisp September morning, Rauf went to the UAE mission in Kabul to meet him. 

SAFI: They have this tent. It’s massive. Massive tent. It’s the size of a big hall. And then what they have done is they have retrofitted it with, like, wood fireplaces. So we were sitting in, in this, and, you know, they were serving Arab coffee. I was really nervous because, you know, Anas has spent so much time in Guantanamo. They didn’t know that I was in the US military before. So I was a little nervous as well. I was like, “What are the chances that they know that I’m in the US military?”

SHIRIN: Anas Haqqani showed up wearing a light blue shirt and pants and a skullcap. And he brought his entourage of about 10 or 15 people, Rauf says. Haqqani’s entourage sat on the floor. Haqqani himself sat on the couch next to Rauf, and they started talking. 

SAFI: We talked in Pashto. He was very frank. He was joking. And he was saying, like, “Oh, welcome back to your country,” and, you know, “Your country needs you. You should stay here and, you know, continue to work with us. And, you know, you—you’ve probably learned a lot by living in the West. We could, we could benefit from that.”

SHIRIN (TO SAFI): What were you thinking as he was saying that? 

SAFI: It was … you know, these guys have spent the last 20 years, you know, murdering—basically, they’re ruthless killers. At heart, they’re still those people. And it’s, it’s very hard for me to look past that. What we needed from them was the security, their promise that their Badri brigade, who was doing the security for the airport, would not harm our passengers. 

SHIRIN (TO SAFI): What was his response?

SAFI: He said, “We will cooperate with you 100 percent.”

SHIRIN: According to Human First Coalition, Rauf’s organization, they managed to evacuate more than 7,000 at-risk Afghans. But in December 2021, Rauf’s relationship with the Taliban turned sour. He was arrested and taken to jail. 

SAFI: It was basically an eight-foot-by-eight-foot room with very tall ceiling. 

SHIRIN: After spending a week in solitary confinement, they put his brother in there as well. 

SAFI: For the first two weeks, it was sort of, like, just a shock, and anger, because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t see the sun for about 80 days. And they would bring us food there. Rice and beans every day, rice and beans. 

SHIRIN: As the days went by, Rauf and his brother started to come up with a plan. They would try to enlist the help of one of the guards.

SAFI: And then, day 15—that’s a really funny story, actually. So this guy, he comes in and he’s really, like—we can visually see that he’s distressed. And I was like, “What’s wrong?” He’s like, “I have a fiancé. And my father-in-law told me that if I don’t get married, he’s going to break the engagement.” And I was like, “Well, why, why can’t you pay for the wedding?” He’s like, “Oh, I asked my commander. He wouldn’t pay me to go get married.” And I was like, “Well, you know, we are, we are sort of, like—we support humanitarian causes. And this seems like a humanitarian cause. We can support your wedding. But here’s the problem. If I give you the address of my organization, and you go and talk to my employees and tell them I told you to give you money, they’re not going to do it, because it’s just—feels weird. But if you give us your phone, and we call them and tell them to give you, you know, money to get married, that would be a better idea.” And he’s like, “Oh, OK.”

SHIRIN: Rauf and his brother were finally able to let their friends and family know where they were and to ask for help. Eventually, their case made it all the way up to the White House and got the attention of first lady Jill Biden. 

SAFI: Doctor Biden was my English teacher when I was in college, so she knows me. 

SHIRIN: Rauf’s father came to Afghanistan to meet with the Taliban director of intelligence and ask for his release.

SAFI: “I’m here asking you what my son has done wrong that you are holding him. Either you take him to court of law so he can prove his innocence, or release him.” 

SHIRIN: Rauf says the Taliban had only one demand. 

SAFI: The only thing they wanted was a diplomatic visit from the US. And then they would release me. But the State Department and the White House were still hesitant to send a plane, because there’s a lot of things to consider here, like, it’s—they have never been back to Afghanistan. They don’t know what the Taliban are going to do to that mission that goes to Afghanistan. But then they agreed. They agreed to send a plane. 

SHIRIN: But just days later, the Taliban suddenly banned girls from secondary school, and Rauf says the US decided it was the wrong time to send a diplomatic mission to Afghanistan. Rauf decided to go on a hunger strike. 

SAFI: I was basically like, either the US is going to come get me, or I’m going to die here in this prison.

SHIRIN: Finally, on March 30th, after 105 days in detention, Rauf and his brother’s ordeal came to an end. Rauf got the news on his smuggled phone. 

SAFI: The text basically was, “Uncle Joe said yes.” The green light needed to come from the president. 

SHIRIN: Rauf was soon faced with a new problem. When word got around in the US about the work Rauf and his team were doing in Afghanistan, some organizations reached out to get their teams out. The US Institute of Peace, or USIP, an independent institution funded by the US Congress, was one of them. USIP says it paid Rauf’s attorney $600,000 to evacuate its staff. But it later filed a lawsuit against Rauf, claiming that he never delivered on that request. Rauf says it was all a misunderstanding. 

SAFI: My captivity was completely kept secret for several reasons. And USIP, all of a sudden they had no communications, so they basically had no option but to file a lawsuit because they were like, “Who are we supposed to talk to?” And then when I came out, we—all of us talked, and reached a resolution of where the money was spent, and how everything happened on the ground. So at the end, they were happy to drop the lawsuit.

SHIRIN: I reached out to USIP and they sounded less than happy. They told me that after they paid Rauf, he admitted that he would not be able to evacuate their staff, and they were forced to take legal action to get their money back. Quote, “When Rauf repaid the entire USIP demand, USIP dropped the lawsuit.” Others, including individuals who worked for Rauf, accused his organization of misusing donation money. And some Afghan refugees that Human First Coalition relocated to Pakistan complained that the safe houses they lived in were not up to standard. Rauf dismisses these allegations. 

SAFI: Every single penny is been accounted for, and nothing is misused. It’s all false. None of those allegations have been substantiated. 

SHIRIN: The evacuation of thousands of Afghans in the summer of 2021 was a daunting task. In a matter of days, a ragtag group of people from different parts of the world came together to help. This work required skills that many of us didn’t have. It was disorganized, dangerous and messy. Planeloads of educated Afghans left their country to start new lives elsewhere, and the Taliban were watching this unfold. What was that like?

UNIDENTIFIED AFGHAN MAN:

From a personal perspective, it was very disappointing. 

SHIRIN: Abdul Qahar Balkhi is the spokesperson for the Taliban-led government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

ABDUL QAHAR BALKHI: Because the image that—not just the Afghans, but everywhere across the world—I think they’ve viewed too many Hollywood movies. They think grass is greener on the other side. For the United States to deliberately send out messages that everyone that makes it to the airport will be airlifted out of Afghanistan? We saw people coming from very far provinces, coming to Kabul, because that’s the message that they received. While the United States was giving us lists of name who was allowed to enter the airport. We, we communicated to the United States that this is very disingenuous, to be giving out open messages of evacuation while you’re coordinating with us and only allowing select people. Why put Afghans through such humiliation? You have no intention of airlifting hundreds of thousands of people that had gathered at the airport. Yet you continue to summon them.

SHIRIN: Balhki blamed the US for the chaos at the airport, and for their response to the attack carried out by the Islamic State on August 26th. 

ABDUL: After the explosion, a lot of people lost their lives, due to the indiscriminate firing from inside the airport at those that had gathered outside. So it was a very disappointing scene.

SHIRIN: He said while thousands of Afghans have left, many others have stayed, and that if anyone wants to come back, the door is open. 

ABDUL: Our current policy is, we are recalling back all professionals, Afghans that have left. There was general amnesty announced, and the policy is that of a reconciliation and healing the wounds of Afghanistan, which can only be done by the Afghans themselves.

[SOUND OF TEXTING ON A MOBILE PHONE KEYBOARD; ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION SOUND]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR (IN VOICEOVER): Hi, my dear. How are you? I’m in desperate need of shampoo. 

SHIRIN: Najiba Noor, the policewoman, was placed in a camp for displaced Afghans in Abu Dhabi. We exchanged messages from time to time. 

[ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION SOUND]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR (IN VOICEOVER): Life in the camp here is really tough. I don’t know anyone. They won’t let me leave the camp. 

[SOUND OF TEXTING; ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION SOUND]

SHIRIN (IN VOICEOVER): Do you know where you go after Abu Dhabi?

[SOUND OF TEXTING; ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION SOUND]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR (IN VOICEOVER): I told them today I want to go to America because you are there. 

SHIRIN: I could tell from her tone that even though she was physically in a safe place, she was still suffering. For one thing, she was still mourning the life she had lost. Her family, her friends, her job, her country. For another, the Taliban kept harassing people close to her. One time she messaged to say that they had killed her uncle. My heart is bleeding, she wrote, followed by five sad and crying-face emojis. When I asked her recently about that time, she teared up. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING TEARFULLY IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: They even killed my bodyguard. His wife contacted me and said, “They took away my husband and it is because of you.”

SHIRIN: Nine months later, Noor left Abu Dhabi for the US. She’s now settled in Georgia. She works as a security guard and takes classes at a local college. She says she loves her new life in America. I ask her if she thinks she will ever go back to Afghanistan. 

[CLIP OF NAJIBA SPEAKING TEARFULLY IN DARI]

NAJIBA’S TRANSLATOR: I have no hope for Afghanistan. So long as the Taliban are in power, I have no hope for my country. I never wanted to leave my country, but this was my fate.

[MELANCHOLY INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

JENN: More than 124,000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan in August and September of 2021. But Afghanistan is a country of 40 million. Who’s negotiating on their behalf now that the Taliban is back in power?

UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN WOMAN:

I would say I’m a humanitarian. I’m not equipped to have these discussions. And yet we were the only ones on the ground for them to have those discussions with. 

UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN WOMAN (IN INTERVIEW):

What does the Afghan government want from the international community? 

UNIDENTIFIED MAN (IN INTERVIEW): That, that is a question that we’ve repeatedly posed to the United States, the European countries and the UN—as what do you want from Afghanistan? 

JENN: That’s next time on “The Afghan Impasse” from The Negotiators. 

The Negotiators is a podcast from Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. This episode was reported by Shirin Jafari. Karen Given is this season’s executive producer. Original music written by Afghan composer Arson Fahim, and performed by Arson Fahim and Afghan rubāb player Siddique Ahmad. Our production team includes Laura Rosbrow-Telem, Rob Sachs, Rosie Julin, Claudia Teti, Japhet Weeks, Jigar Mehta, Amjad Atallah and Dan Ephron. Thanks to Nelufar Hedayat, Govinda Clayton and James Wolley for helping create the show. 

Foreign Policy is a magazine of news and ideas from around the world. We encourage you to subscribe at foreignpolicy.com/subscribe. 

Doha Debates is a production of Qatar Foundation, where the most urgent issues of our time are discussed and debated. Learn more at dohadebates.com.