The 'arbitrary distinction' leaving USAID's Afghan partners at risk

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is facing criticism for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan without a plan in place to ensure the safety of those who have worked with the U.S. government and could now be under threat from the Taliban.

Much of the attention has focused on translators, interpreters, and other Afghans who have supported U.S. military efforts. The White House is under pressure to expedite the issuance of special immigrant visas so that those eligible and desiring to leave the country may do so.

The SIV process is open to nationals of Afghanistan who were employed by the U.S. government for at least two years and who now face a credible threat as a result of that service. It requires multiple layers of application, verification, and approval — which have given rise to stopgap proposals for applicants to be temporarily evacuated to U.S. territories such as Guam.

But these significant logistical and legal challenges are only part of a much larger moral dilemma brought on by the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw. U.S. reconstruction and development engagement has depended on partnerships with far more than interpreters and translators, and many people who are not eligible for evacuation through the SIV process — or who don’t intend to leave — are now potential targets for persecution by the Taliban.

Speaking at the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power described one of the more glaring limitations: The special visa process is only open to people who were employed under contracts and not those who worked under grants or cooperative agreements.

The U.S. government typically uses contracts to procure specific goods or services, while grants and cooperative agreements are generally used to support organizations in carrying out their own missions. However, many of the same organizations implement programs under both contracts and grants, and the distinction “is really challenging to try to describe to Afghans who’ve given so much of themselves for these programs over time,” Power told lawmakers.

“I hope that we will find a way as an administration to work with you [Congress] to make sure that that kind of arbitrary distinction does not prove material if and when it comes to needing to evacuate and resettle people,” Power said.

The two-year employment requirement presents another hurdle for those whose lives may be at risk.

“About half of our current staff have served under the two-year requirement — some barely under,” Power said.

The duration of service has little bearing, however, on whether those who have worked for USAID face credible threats, and Power said that many of them have.

“Once you’re a target for working with USAID, you’re a target,” she said.

At the beginning of July, approximately 18,000 SIV applicants were in the pipeline, and the U.S. government is still scrambling to come up with a plan to expedite their applications and provide security in the meantime.

“It is ... a very fraught situation we face right now. We have those 18,000, and as we seek to move them out through a plan that clearly is being put together as it is implemented, none of this is going to be easy,” Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event last week.

That number represents only a fraction of the people who have worked with the U.S. government and could be at risk as a result though, and it disproportionately omits a particularly vulnerable demographic, as contract work for the U.S. military skews toward men.

“When you look at it for all those who worked on grants and cooperative agreements, that’s probably in the hundreds of thousands — and those are disproportionately women’s organizations,” Megan Corrado, director of policy and advocacy at the Alliance for Peacebuilding, told Devex.

“One of the major success stories of our intervention over the last 20 years has been the empowerment of women, the huge capacity gains civil society has made. You have women that are doctors and lawyers, parliamentarians and government officials. Now those women in particular have huge targets on their back,” she said.

For example, the U.S. government has funded women’s domestic violence shelters in Afghanistan.

“Lots of the women that went to those shelters were fleeing from the Taliban,” Corrado said, adding that those providing services could be targeted for having “interceded in family matters.”

Groups that have worked on education programs could also face backlash, alongside anyone doing “work that is antithetical to the Taliban’s beliefs and Taliban rule,” she said.

The SIV eligibility restrictions are “really just a symptom of the broader problem,” according to Corrado.

“We are leaving without a coordinated, comprehensive strategy in terms of our continued development engagement, our humanitarian engagement, our peace-building engagement, and that leaves all of those folks exposed.”

In the absence of a clearly articulated U.S. government plan to ensure the security of its at-risk partners, some organizations are trying to mobilize support on their own — even through public donations online.

Patricia Cooper of the Women’s Regional Network has so far raised over $30,000 through a GoFundMe campaign “to protect the lives of Afghan women human rights defenders who have been working on the front-lines to uphold democracy in Afghanistan.”

Cooper wrote to Devex that she is “raising the funds as the [United Nations] and none of the international countries engaged in Afghanistan are providing any protection in wake of the security vacuum the departure of international forces created and the targeting of those upholding Afghan democracy.”

Corrado said there is currently a “big push” to create safe houses in Kabul for women human rights defenders in hopes that “at least getting them in one place can offer some kind of protection.”

“It’s pretty dire,” she said.