When the Taliban swept back into power in August 2021, Afghanistan’s elite special operations forces were among the last holdouts. These were the final defendersholding ground against daily Taliban attacks while surviving 45 days of “just rice” and maintaining their positions in cities such as Mazar-i-Sharif long after other unit commanders had fled.
Four years later, the interpreters and special operations forces that faithfully served alongside U.S. troops face a different fight: a frenetic policy landscape that has left many in administrative limbo despite their documented service and compliance. Over the past six months, the Trump administration has tightened vetting, suspended humanitarian programs, and created new barriers to family reunification. These changes have already affected thousands of Afghan partners who have come to the United States and who have been described as “the most vetted immigrant population in our country’s history.”
When the Taliban swept back into power in August 2021, Afghanistan’s elite special operations forces were among the last holdouts. These were the final defendersholding ground against daily Taliban attacks while surviving 45 days of “just rice” and maintaining their positions in cities such as Mazar-i-Sharif long after other unit commanders had fled.
Four years later, the interpreters and special operations forces that faithfully served alongside U.S. troops face a different fight: a frenetic policy landscape that has left many in administrative limbo despite their documented service and compliance. Over the past six months, the Trump administration has tightened vetting, suspended humanitarian programs, and created new barriers to family reunification. These changes have already affected thousands of Afghan partners who have come to the United States and who have been described as “the most vetted immigrant population in our country’s history.”
On July 10, the State Department confirmed to staffers that it was eliminating the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts office (CARE). With this move, it destroyed not just the office but also the institutional knowledge and human networks that made Afghan resettlement possible.
The administration’s recent policy changes have created the impression that the United States’ commitments to its partners are conditional and temporary. This threatens a strategic model that the country has relied on since its founding: utilizing local partnerships to amplify military effectiveness beyond what any single nation could achieve alone. The treatment of Afghan partners serves as a real-time credibility test, whose results will be observed by potential partners from Syria to Taiwan as they calculate the risks of working with Washington.
Instead of betraying the country’s Afghan partners, Washington should be embracing them. These are battle-tested professionals whose expertise and proven loyalty could strengthen the United States’ national security infrastructure for decades to come.
Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, a cascade of executive orders and administrative actions has methodically severed critical pathways for Afghan allies to reach safety. Executive Order 14161 imposed entry restrictions that, despite narrow exemptions for interpreters who were already special immigrant visa (SIV) holders, effectively excluded Afghanistan’s elite special operations forces. Executive Order 14163 paused refugee processing globally, cutting off Afghans midway through family reunification cases. Executive Order 14169 suspended foreign aid, including the travel and relocation services that make resettlement possible.
Officials weren’t finished. May brought the termination of temporary protected status for Afghanistan, stripping protection from 11,700 Afghans already in the United States. Then came the July 1 elimination of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) office, which had received both bipartisan support and legal backing through 2027 and vetted more than 40,000 Afghans who now find themselves approved to come to the United States but abandoned. These people can no longer reach the United States unless they finance their own travel—an impossible requirement for most.
The justifications for these restrictions collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Officials describe Afghan evacuees as an example of “destabilizing migration” while also citing improved security conditions in Afghanistan. The numbers tell a different story.
Afghan immigrants are 11.6 times less likely to be incarcerated than American-born citizens. Among Operation Allies Welcome evacuees, only 11 individuals (0.01 percent) had been convicted of criminal offenses as of March 2023. Just one was returned to Afghanistan for terrorism-related concerns, and he never even left the receiving military base.
In an interview my organization—the Corioli Institute—conducted, one Afghan special operations veteran described the perverse experience of being treated as an immigration liability. “During the asylum process, they asked me if I had ever used a weapon,” he laughed. “You guys gave me the weapon and taught me how to fight!”
Moreover, the security conditions in Afghanistan remain just as dangerous as ever, particularly for former U.S. partners. The very article from the U.S. Institute of Peace that the administration cited as evidence that conditions have improved refers to this perception of stability as a “façade.” Violence has increased, but that’s only because the people committing it have taken power. The U.S. State Department has maintained Afghanistan at a Level 4—or “Do Not Travel”—status within its travel advisory database. The Taliban’s interior minister remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted list as a specially designated global terrorist.
The Taliban regime also remains committed to persecuting former U.S. allies. Its own code of conduct orders the execution of those who worked for “foreign infidels.” In this effort, the Taliban benefits from the Afghan Personnel and Pay System, a U.S.-funded database containing biometric data on just over 300,000 Afghan security force members. This system creates a road map for persecution that extends to family networks.
The full scope of this targeting came through in many of our interviews—and indeed is why we have chosen to withhold the names of our interviewees. One Afghan National Army Special Operations Command (ANASOC) commando told our team that his mother “has changed houses three times in two years” after multiple Taliban raids. Another confirmed that the Taliban focuses “especially on the special operations forces and commandos guys. They’re taking them from their homes and shooting them.”
A third recounted the fate of his best friend—a member of his unit who was unable to secure safe passage during the evacuation: “The Taliban took him and poured acid from a car battery on his body. When I saw the picture, he didn’t have a nose. He didn’t have eyes.”
For the women of the Female Tactical Platoons (FTP), retribution is doubly fierce. In London, one of Afghanistan’s first FTP commanders reflected: “I lost everything. Suddenly, I lost my house. I lost my country. I lost my years in the army. Everything.” Of her colleagues still trapped in Afghanistan, she added: “The Taliban knows their name, and they will search them out. They should hide for as long as they can.”
Even those who escaped find themselves and their families pushed ever closer to Taliban persecution by U.S. policies. Family reunification petitions for ANASOC and FTP veterans already faced a backlog of more than 7,800 cases before the 2025 changes. Since the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was closed in 2021, eligible families have been unable to complete visa interviews or medical exams in Afghanistan and must travel to third-country processing posts. This journey has become increasingly perilous as Pakistan and Iran have expelled more than 2.4 million Afghans back into Taliban territory since September 2023. This includes approximately 25,000 people with approved SIV applications who were stranded while awaiting U.S. resettlement.
These barriers create prolonged separation for soldiers and families alike. One ANASOC veteran described his isolation: “I haven’t seen my wife for almost two years. I have been sitting here for two years alone.” Another veteran described watching from afar as his brother, a former commando who was denied asylum, “changes locations every 15 days to avoid Taliban capture”—all while missing the son he has never met.
The human cost of abandoning Afghan allies reverberates through U.S. military communities, which have been vocal in opposing these policies. A 2022 study found that 41 percent of military personnel reported experiencing personal trauma related to the Afghanistan evacuation. Some veterans liquidated their retirement savings to help evacuate Afghan partners. Now they are witnessing their political leaders undermining those same efforts.
If the moral case against betraying former allies doesn’t move the administration, then there is also a more self-interested one. The United States is facing an ongoing military recruitment challenge. By 2017, special operations troops were responsible for 70 percent of Afghan military offensives, despite comprising just 7 percent of Afghan forces. These are precisely the kind of elite, proven operators that the U.S. military is now desperately trying to recruit.
Among those interviewed for the Corioli Institute study, 57 percent expressed a desire to continue serving in the U.S. military. “I want to serve my country,” one ANASOC veteran told us. “I am eating here. I am drinking here. I am [wearing] clothes in this country. Then, I should defend this country. Anywhere they want me to go, I’ll go.”
There is long-standing precedent for individuals such as these to serve. The 1950 Lodge Act provided pathways to citizenship through military service for Eastern European foreign nationals. The Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program, currently suspended, offered a step-by-step playbook for recruiting legal aliens with critical skills.
The United States is in a global competition for military talent, whether it acknowledges this reality or not. From Ukrainian forces to insurgent groups and transnational cartelsplenty of actors are eager to recruit U.S.-trained fighters. Afghan veterans have demonstrated their loyalty to the United States, but they could be forced to consider other offers when the alternative is death at the hands of the Taliban.
In purely financial terms, the costs of the administration’s shortsightedness are staggering. After spending nearly $90 billion training Afghan forces and $14 billion on evacuation operations, Washington is discarding them precisely when their experience could benefit American interests.
Worse, the administration’s approach reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how alliances work. By treating immigration security and protecting military partners as mutually exclusive, it undermines the very relationships on which U.S. security depends.
The latest reduction in forces notices targeting CARE leadership represent the administration’s most definitive signal yet that the United States’ partnership commitments are expendable. By eliminating the people who built relationships with Afghan allies and understood their cases, the administration has ensured that even future policy reversals cannot easily restore the trust and coordination mechanisms that took years to develop.
Fixing this problem is easy. The administration can reinstate CARE, restore other suspended programs, and clear application backlogs. Congress can pass the Afghan Adjustment Actwhich would address the immediate crisis.
If Washington fails to act, then the consequences will extend far beyond Afghanistan. Chinese and Russian propagandists were quick to cite the withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 as evidence that the United States abandons allies. Every stalled visa case adds new ammunition to these attacks. How the United States treats its allies today will determine who stands with the United States tomorrow.
