The United States should open its borders to any Afghan who seeks refuge. After 20 years and an estimated $6.5 trillion dollars, the Taliban will be regaining control of Afghanistan shortly. The Associated Press estimated the human cost:
American service members killed in
Afghanistan through April: 2,448.
U.S. contractors: 3,846.
Afghan national military and police: 66,000.
Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144.
Afghan civilians: 47,245.
Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.
Aid workers: 444.
Journalists: 72.
By most accounts the war in Afghanistan is a failed war. Yet, there is potential for a silver lining.
In 2000, the percentage of females in Afghanistan considered literate was 15%. As of 2017 that number has more than doubled among adolescence to 37%. Perhaps the most visible representation of this spur in education is the Afghan Girls Robotic Team. Kimberly Motley, an organizer of the Afghan Girls Robotic Team, has been pleading with Justin Trudeau to allow the girls to settle in Canada. These positions should be in reverse.
Why should any person in 2021 have to advocate to allow young highly educated women into their country? Nowhere else in American society do we see this. In the NFL, no team limits who they will draft based on geography - they simply want the best. Google, Amazon, and many other of the most powerful companies in the world have expressed their desire to hire minority women… I do not know how much more minority you can get than a female engineer from Afghanistan. But we should not limit ourselves to just these girls.
What about the rest of the 37% of adolescent girls that can read? Well we have two options: A) we can also welcome them to the United States and allow them to continue their education or B) we can leave them in Afghanistan to be prohibited from reading and forced into arranged marriages. The decent thing seems quite clear, we welcome them. The practical answer also seems quite clear. Welcoming people into our country who will be able to contribute is not just a net positive for themselves, but a net positive for the United States and the world at large. In Afghanistan, their contributions to the world will be limited to what their husbands and Sharia will permit, which isn’t much outside of reproduction. And even if you consider the reproducing of humans to be a top order good, Afghanistan has long been one of the worst places on earth for infant mortality. In 2000, the infant mortality rate was about 1 in every 10 children would die before the age of 5. By 2020, that number was nearly cut in half to 1 in every 19. In the United States that number is 1 in every 175. Even if the number in Afghanistan continues to improve at the current pace (there is plenty of reason to be skeptical of this) it would take over 150 years to get to the U.S. levels. And then those children born in Afghanistan better hope to be males.
Speaking of males, should the United States limit itself to just the females of Afghanistan? Well a life for a woman in Afghanistan is undoubtedly worse than it is for a man. But that is a pretty low bar. Recently, former CIA analyst, Matt Zeller, was on MSNBC talking about his pleas with the Biden administration to evacuate the Afghan fighters who assisted the U.S. troops. About halfway through the interview he recalls an incident when two Afghani fighters saved him from being killed. Looking back at the Associated Press’s estimated human cost, the Afghan military and police lost more lives (66,000) than any other group, including the Taliban (51,191) and Afghan civilians (47,245). In comparison the United States has lost over 6,000 lives, which is less than 1/10 of Afghan fighters, and less than 1/18 of the combined Afghan fighters and civilians. In the interview on MSNBC, Matt says that getting the service men and women from Afghanistan out and into the United States would take little in the way of background checks because they are already in our database. The unfortunate fact is that the Taliban also has access to that database. This leaves us again with a similar choice: A) We welcome the Afghani’s who fought alongside us to join us in the United States, or B) We leave them there, and let the Taliban do as they see fit. Obviously option A is the more humane option, but again what about practical? Option A is also the more practical solution. A worry many people have about immigration is that good ole’ American work ethic. I think we can just take the worry of work ethic off the table. They are soldiers, trained by the U.S. soldiers, and risked their lives at great costs for anyone to seriously think they lack a work ethic. Another worry about immigrants is a lack of patriotism. The issue of a lack of patriotism among immigrants is normally (falsely) a caricature to achieve some sort of political end. Afghan fighters who have fought alongside the U.S. forces leave me hard-pressed to find a group of people with the potential to have more patriotism. They joined the U.S. cause (whatever that really was) and now the U.S. has the opportunity to save our comrades in Afghanistan and bring them from one of the worst places to be alive to one of the best. What’s not to love?
The war in Afghanistan will likely be seen as a failure on most fronts. But why not get the best out of a bad situation. A bittersweet ending.
Kevin Weis
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072357/child-mortality-rate-afghanistan-1800-2020/#:~:text=Afghanistan's%20infant%20mortality%20rate%20(among,child%20deaths%20occur%20during%20infancy.
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/afghan-war-vet-i-will-never-forgive-my-country-for-this-we-must-save-the-people-who-saved-me-118815813529?fbclid=IwAR2hihS3ARsPjAASTN6u3GDKiVOxsFji-hMJM2EXCwTN1z2HJXe0JO-vULo
