Too Late

No one can say Biden wasn’t warned. As soon as the administration announced in April that U.S. forces would imminently depart Afghanistan, human rights advocates—including those who opposed the war from the start, and the U.S. crimes perpetrated in the course of it—expressed fear for what would happen to Afghan allies of the U.S. war effort if left behind. They laid out comprehensive recommendations to the administration, calling on them to evacuate at-risk civilians to U.S. territory, using emergency parole until a path to permanent status could be found. 

The administration delayed. The result is that today Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, and only around 2,000 Afghan interpreters and other U.S. partners have so far been successfully evacuated. Untold thousands of others remain behind in desperate peril. 

There are reports U.S. planes are now trying to take as many applicants for U.S. humanitarian visas out of the country as possible, in the final hours before insurgents take the remaining airstrips. Which is certainly welcome. But it has very much the feeling of too little too late. One can only wonder how many more lives could have been saved if the administration had acted with the same alacrity as soon as the U.S. troop withdrawal was announced. 

One is reminded of a passage about the perils of waiting from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse.” While the author’s prose can strike one as comically melodramatic when applied to the harmless procrastinations of everyday life, his words take on a more haunting resonance in the present context: 

We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. [… A]nd yet we put it off until to-morrow; [….] The last hour for action is at hand. […] The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies—it disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!

Likewise, when one thinks of all the earlier chances that Biden’s administration had to undertake a large-scale evacuation—how many months went by while they dawdled and made excuses... punted questions from advocates and journalists about their plans... how long it was between the overdue announcement of an evacuation program and the first actual arrival of any Afghan partner to safety... and how many lives may be lost as a result of these delays—one calls to mind the caption on one of Goya's sketches in the "Disasters of War": They did not come in time.

So too, one thinks of the words of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell. 

And indeed, as the poet implies, the past is unalterable. All that can be done now is for the administration to learn the lesson of their terrible procrastination. We need to come together now to advocate for immediate evacuation and permanent resettlement for Afghans threatened by the Taliban, whether on account of their former affiliation with the U.S. military or otherwise. 

Moreover, this commitment needs to be independent of whatever we thought of the war or the merits of withdrawal. Jean-Paul Sartre, no fan of either French or U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, nonetheless was a consistent enough humanitarian to acknowledge in the 1970s that France had a responsibility to shelter people displaced by that conflict—including refugees persecuted by the victorious Marxists following the collapse of the Western-backed regime in South Vietnam. 

As Sartre is quoted as saying at the time, "These are men in mortal danger whom we must rescue because they are men." It's a simple enough truth (and one in need of an update to use gender-inclusive language, particularly considering that many of the worst Taliban persecutions and depredations are likely to fall on women). The world shouldn't need philosophers to tell it such obvious things. But sometimes, plainly, it does. 

Here is an equally simple truth: Afghan interpreters and allies answered the U.S.'s call for help when it came. It is hard to imagine a more dishonorable course now than to turn our backs on their pleas in turn.