Letter to Joseph Biden, President - Evacuate Our Afghan Partners

Letter

Dear President Biden,

Our Afghan friends and allies are at greater risk than ever before. We formed the bipartisan
Honoring Our Promises Working Group to prevent the Afghans who served by our side from
being killed in the wake of our withdrawal by groups like the Taliban, ISIS, and Al Qaeda. We
would like to follow up on our letter of April 21, 2021, in which we sought your commitment to
ensure that we honor our promises to them in the final days of this conflict.

In the past month, we have been closely following your developing withdrawal plans. We
appreciate the complexity of ending the War in Afghanistan, but we are increasingly concerned
that you have not yet directed the Department of Defense be mobilized as part of a concrete and
workable whole of government plan to protect our Afghan partners. At the request of your
Administration, members of the working group introduced legislation to streamline and
accelerate the process by raising the visa cap for the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV)
program and waiving the medical exam requirement. But even with those legislative fixes, the
SIV application backlog is likely to keep growing and our Afghan partners are certain to face an
even greater threat.

The current SIV process will not work. It takes an average of 800+ days, and we plan to
withdraw in less than 100 days. While our working group is investigating various process
efficiencies and options for expanding the number of SIVs available, it is clear that the process
will not be rectified in time to help the 18,000+ applicants who need visas before our withdrawal.

After examining this situation through multiple hearings, briefings, and our own offices' research
and outreach, our bipartisan working group has concluded that we must evacuate our Afghan
friends and allies immediately. No U.S. entity--to include the Department of Defense,
Department of State, USAID, et al.--has the ability or authority to protect them in Afghanistan
after our withdrawal. It would be a moral failure to transfer the responsibility to protect our
Afghan partners onto the shoulders of the Afghan Government. The time is now to honor our
promise and evacuate Afghan SIV applicants.

The United States has conducted evacuations at a far greater scale before. In 1975, we evacuated~130,000 Vietnamese refugees after the Fall of Saigon, holding most of those refugees
temporarily in Guam before transporting them to the continental United States to finish visa
processing. In 1996, we evacuated thousands of Kurds at the end of the Iraqi Kurdish Civil War,
also holding them in Guam temporarily before they reached their final destination in the United
States. We have experience with this type of evacuation in times of crisis, and the current
environment in Afghanistan clearly merits such action.

Previous evacuations have benefited from a coordinating body to ensure that all relevant
stakeholders are engaged and held accountable. For that reason, we call on your administration to establish a President's Interagency Task Force responsible for the visa management and
evacuation of our Afghan allies before our withdrawal from the country. We also recommend
that the President's Interagency Task Force specifically consider the option of using Guam as a
temporary evacuation site before moving our friends and allies to more permanent locations
within the continental United States. In consultation with our colleague from Guam, if Guam is
selected as a temporary evacuation site we recommend that the Task Force to develop a robust
vaccination and housing plan that defends against COVID-19 and its potential impacts on the
local community. The Task Force should ensure that evacuation plans do not interfere with
continued support of Afghan forces and officials in country and put in place expedited
procedures for Afghans who may choose to be evacuated later as well.

If we fail to protect our allies in Afghanistan, it will have a lasting impact on our future
partnerships and global reputation, which will then be a great detriment to our troops and the
future of our national security. Veterans in Congress understand this firsthand: when we
recruited our Afghan friends, we promised to have their backs. The Honoring Our Promises
Working Group stands ready to provide support and oversight for this critical mission.

Thank you in advance for your attention to this urgent matter of our national security.

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