By Stephen Watt

the co-founder of Northern Lights Canada, which facilitates private sponsorship to Canada.

 

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has triggered a humanitarian crisis on a massive scale, with extremist troops now in control of most regions of the country, including its capital city. For those belonging to the country’s Hazara ethnic group, who for decades have been driven from their lands and murdered by these same extremists, the situation is dire. The prospect of their tormentors now holding the reins of power is very frightening indeed.

Each day brings more bad news. The airport in Kabul: seized. The Pakistan border: closed. The highways: jammed with Taliban checkpoints. Your choice in crossing such a checkpoint, if you are on the Taliban hit list (because you’re a Hazara, or female, or a journalist, or a government worker, or a civil society advocate… the list goes on) is to be beaten, or killed.

The sheer weight of the tragedy, and its lack of obvious solutions, are enough to cause the world to lose interest and turn away. “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires,” say the lazy armchair pundits reading the morning newspaper. The US should not have been there in the first place (goes this line of thinking), and now that they’ve left, we’re witnessing a return to the natural state of things in that violent, tribal society.

Those who have family and friends in Afghanistan will have a harder time shrugging their shoulders and turning the page. For them, this is a time of staying up all night and calling every connection they know, the taxi drivers and people smugglers who may give their loved ones a fighting chance to escape and survive.

Many of these desperate helpers live right here in Canada. They may be your friends, coworkers or neighbours. And while we don’t all have a habit of getting to know our neighbours, Canadians have other reasons to care.

For one thing, the events in Afghanistan have become a hot button political issue in this country. The Liberal government, which in the last election based much of its feel-good messaging on its response to the crisis in Syria, has aimed to repeat that success by promising to bring 20,000 Afghans to this country. It has staked its credibility and reputation as a force for good in the world on how well it can deliver on its offer to help those fleeing for their lives.

So far those offers have not added up to much. The first ‘special project,’ a precursor to the 20,000-people version, was announced July 23, and aimed to relocate the interpreters and other Afghan helpers of the Canadian military. They and their families would be flown from Kabul to Canada, both as a reward for their service and to get them out of harm’s way.

In some ways, the program was announced years too late. The Canadian military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2014, and our military brass – many of whom developed a personal and deeply respectful attachment to these Afghan helpers – have been pleading with the government to bring them here ever since. The time to do so was when the country was relatively stable, not when it was in the midst of a military invasion from within.

Even when the good news of the first special program was announced, the rollout was badly mishandled. Applicants were instructed to submit a series of challenging documents, dreadfully familiar to those of us who are involved in our country’s private sponsorship program. These PDFs require advanced language skills and attention to detail, and can only be opened on computers.

Meanwhile the interpreters being asked to complete these documents were hiding in safe houses and rural areas where the cell phone towers had been destroyed by the advancing troops. They did not have the luxury of going to the office or local business to complete, print, sign, and scan their application forms, as our callous and cruelly out-of-touch Immigration officials seemed to assume was possible.

As often happens, there emerged a drastic disconnect between what our leaders were stating publicly and what the bureaucrats were doing in the background. While the talking heads from immigration, the military, and the prime minister’s office were on camera making self-congratulatory statements about Canada and its role as a champion of goodness and humanitarian values, the paper pushers who actually run the show were making it as difficult as possible for people to get the help they needed.

Those who miraculously managed to complete the application documents (often with the assistance of volunteers in Canada and some very kind Afghan refugees in Indonesia), found their email submissions went unanswered. The word was that Immigration only put two staff members on the entire project, which now had thousands of applications to wade through.

Rumours flew fast and furious in the absence of any concrete information, since these same bureaucrats failed to show up at planning meetings or to take emails or phone calls from those in Canada who had a reasonable right to ask what the hell was going on.

Because all this took place in the context of a federal election campaign, the messages we heard from our elected officials and military brass were uniformly positive. Canada was doing all it could to get these people to safety! We had empowered our military on the ground in Afghanistan to use creative means to get the interpreters to the airport and out of the country.

I came into contact with a number of the interpreters (called ‘terps’ in military lingo) over the past month or so, through my friend Wendy Nouri Long. Wendy, who lives in Niagara Falls, helped establish the Afghan Canada Interpreters group, which has been advocating for the terps for years and includes many of their highest-ranking allies in the military, both current and retired.

When the first ‘special program’ was announced in July, it was the good news that Wendy’s group had been hoping for, even if it came as too little, too late. Given the onerous demands that the project placed on the terps, who were now on the run for their lives, Wendy put out a call for volunteers.

One of the odd things about the vacuum of leadership shown in this moment of crisis, when Canada claimed to be helping, but in fact was washing its hands of its responsibility to its helpers, is that ordinary people like me become an important point of contact. And not just me. Heather Hedges, a public school teacher in Peterborough, was far more involved, providing a lifeline for many terps who had a thousand questions about how to complete their applications, and why their applications were being ignored, and how long should they stay in a country where they were targets, where the Taliban noose was getting tighter with each passing day.

The lucky ones who actually had their emails answered by someone (there was a confusing number of points of contact) were told to go to the airport. They made the hours-long journey along a very crowded highway, passing Taliban checkpoints where they were beaten until their heads bled. They stayed at the place where they were told to wait, either by a gas station or a moat of dirty water, sitting in the sweltering heat with their families, hoping for the Canadian troops to show their faces, and to bring them into the airport and onto a waiting airplane, as they had promised they would do.

For most of them, the promised help never came. And they’re still there, in Kabul, hiding from the Taliban troops who are quickly figuring out where they are. And they’re still being told that Canada (despite all evidence to the contrary) will still find a way to help them leave.

The lies keep coming, and now they have lethal consequences. It may seem naïve to say, but until this recent experience of trying to help the terps – and others, like the Hazara women, journalists, gay people, and activists who are all in the Taliban’s crosshairs – I never really understood how much the government could bend the truth to suit its needs. Obviously government officials are famous for lying, but for whatever reason, I thought that Canada (and its Liberal government) might do a little better.

Quite the opposite! Each morning, I would talk to the guys on the ground in Kabul and hear about their abuse at the hands of the Taliban, or about their callous neglect by Canadian officials. And each afternoon I would watch a press conference on CPAC where everything I knew to be true was denied in a confetti storm of happy talking points.

Eventually reality catches up to the PR spin, and it seems that the government may suffer for its mistakes in Afghanistan. My own personal hope, perhaps ironically enough, is the Liberals survive their mistakes to win another election, since the only other party with a decent chance at becoming government tends not to care very much about refugees or displaced people when it’s actually in power.

But let’s remember: despite everything I’ve said about the situation in Afghanistan being a Canadian political issue, this is not really about us. It’s about the mom with the three kids, whose husband was killed by the Taliban for being a police chief, and who has no way to support her family. It’s about the Hazara family with the sixteen-year-old daughter, who was just taken away at gunpoint to serve as someone’s unwilling bride. It’s about the journalist who is hiding in a safehouse, waiting to be discovered.

These are the people that Canada once supported, through our decades-long efforts to build a civil society in Afghanistan, and who are now being left to their own fates, while we turn our distracted minds to another news cycle, and another election win.