But there’s also women activists. You know, there’s also Hazara and our Shia community who are being targeted, whose doors are basically being marked. They’re being tracked down. And so, the situation is deteriorating by the hour. And so that remains our top focus.
Our secondary ask is that the world, but specifically that the U.S., open its door to Afghan refugees and to kind of mirror what it has done in the past. It has opened its door to refugees from places where we have been involved in in some capacity or have interfered, or has invaded quite frankly, you know — whether that’s Cuba or our American involvement in Vietnam. You know, there’s this specific evacuation of Kurds that dates back to 1996.
Our third and fourth demands are to kind of drop the legal red tape that currently exists. This current immigration system in the United States, which has been in the news for quite a few years, it exists to reject people. This discourages folks from even trying to apply. And so we are asking the Congress as well as the Biden administration to kind of drop all these rules and weird stipulations that exist. You know, we’re trying to get Afghans who are vulnerable and at risk and are worried about dying in this very moment, to allow them to be entered to the U.S. on a humanitarian pool.
And so then our last demand brings us also to this precarious situation that lot of Afghan people find themselves in, which is not only is it dealing with this oppressive force that’s now taking control of the country — you know, aided and abetted essentially by the United States and its NATO allies — and now it’s dealing with oppressive rule as well as the drought, as well as the banks that have no U.S. dollars. People don’t have jobs. The folks who had a government job last week, don’t have one today or are not getting paid or are unclear about what their status is. And so the Afghan people just find themselves in a desperate situation and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse. So we’re asking for an emergency humanitarian aid package, but that Afghan people can have access to basic needs and services.
SCOTT HARRIS: Arash, the United States media by and large ignored Afghanistan for many of those 20 years of the U.S. occupation. But now we’re seeing a succession of politicians and military officers on cable TV news, and in newspapers, decrying what’s going on now with the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. And there’s a lot of hand-wringing about losing the war in Afghanistan, humiliation of the United States, as well as a real loss is being perceived for the U.S. empire across the globe. How do you respond to what you’re seeing in terms of commentary on our media these days?
ARASH AZIZZADA: I’ve not had time to watch cable news, fortunately. But I still see that certain op-eds are making the rounds. And I still see that certain policymakers who are responsible for the failure in the first place are still being elevated, when the media is also partially being complicit. They could have spent 20 years shining light on how the Afghan army was dysfunctional. They could have shed more light and let the American taxpayer say, “Hey, whatever is happening many, many, many thousands of miles away is not helpful. Now we’re entrenching corruption and things such as ghost soldiers. You know, they keep citing this number of 300,000 Afghan soldiers. Well, they exist on paper, but they don’t exist in reality. And when the army kind of dissolved rather quickly over the past week, we saw why they didn’t fight.
Nobody really wants to fight for a cause that’s not worth fighting for, right? It has to be a worthy institution, worthy leadership, competence that is representative of the people. That’s not something that was in place. I mean, U.S. is responsible for it, right? Like the European Union, the world community is responsible for enabling those folks. And I think this should be a moment of reckoning for folks in the media as well, like, this is your time to elevate Afghan ways. This is your time to say, “Hey, also, like we don’t relate, you know, we should have done this a long time ago and, but at the same time, like we can hold accountable. So then somebody like Ryan Crocker, who in the New York Times in an op-ed, writes, “You know, this is an affordable status quo, we should have just kept on going with this occupation for a long time.”
And they look at places like Japan or Korea or Germany as those are places that are a mirror, like what the situation is in (inaudible). And former Afghanistan Ambassador Ryan Crocker is advocating a status quo that was killing 10,000 people a year. I mean, that is just such a cheap disregard for human life and Afghan human life. And it’s painful. It’s disheartening, it’s infuriating. It’s angering to read the ambassador’s words in such a prestigious publication. Now I think it’s also a time when folks in American society say these people got it wrong for 20 years, let’s listen to some new voices. Let’s listen to some people who were warning about it. You know, two, three years ago, we rang the alarm bells and say, “Hey, the Trump administration is having direct talks with the Taliban. We don’t think this is okay.”
And quite frankly, no one really paid attention. It was not a hot topic, a situation there. Nobody was falling off airplanes and cargo planes. But now that we hear it, let’s have an honest discussion about this. Let’s elevate folks that were insightful and could speak to, for example, the society that they were building. The U.S. spent 20 years telling women and activists and young folks, “Hey, break barriers, start this business. Be daring, speak your mind.” This is exactly all those things that (are) putting them under threat and oppressive rule under the Taliban. Now those, these people are framed and scared.”
