I recruited Afghans to help the U.S. government. Now I feel a deep sense of guilt.

“Mr. Jeff, if we don’t get out, our entire family is going to be killed.”

I was startled by this message from one of my local hires, just after I completed my final civilian stint working in Afghanistan in 2014. We had worked together at the height of the American troop surge on a U.S. government-funded economic development project called the Strategic Provincial Roads Program.

It would have been impossible to have built relationships with communities and stakeholders without her and my Afghan national team who worked tirelessly to help us build in-roads with some of the skeptical audiences that viewed the American presence as hostile to their way of life.

I would not have made it back safely without my staff’s insights and instincts to move us out of harm’s way. It’s an eternal debt.

Bureaucracy stifled evacuation hopes

I followed all the rules and protocols to help vouch, recommend and support the application process for Special Immigrant Visas to no avail. Form letters. Rejections. Bureaucracy. We agreed to revisit when the time came. 

But following President Joe Biden’s decision to end American involvement in the country in April, these messages quickly turned into a flood of desperate pleas from my former team. As the Taliban began taking over regional capitals with ease, it became clear that time was running out.

Service in Afghanistan for our country touched thousands of American families over the past 20 years, which resulted in the creation of a large, passionate community of military and humanitarian alumni of America’s longest war. I was able to tap into this world of Afghanistan veterans, experts and alumni – all singularly minded in trying to do our part.  

The past few days have been fraught with sleepless nights, with a keen obsession to get more information, intelligence and frantic updates from contacts in-country and peers across the globe. We’re all trying to do our part to bring our allies, their families, our teammates and our friends to safety to support the official Kabul airlift efforts. 

The scramble has been an avalanche of Google docs, walls of screens and hypothetical itineraries, and unfortunate virtual reunions set up to split administrative duties and share our latest leads. All of this in the hopes of keeping our word to our team members – that we would have their back when it mattered after they did so much to protect us.  

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But the haunting photos and videos of mayhem at the airport show just how the process available to Afghans is woefully and tragically insufficient to meet the moment. 

And for me, it has meant a deep sense of guilt that I simply can’t shake.

“If you join us, I promise you that you’ll learn. But more importantly, you’ll be in service to your country and a better future for your family.”

That was what I would write in messages to candidates I wanted for the team. The past few nights I've stared at those words with shame. It reads like a death sentence now.

Afghanistan: a second Vietnam?

I was a naive 20-something. What did I know about anything they were going through? What did I know about their culture? Who was I to be some arbiter of good and evil?  

Now, seeing the humanitarian tragedy unfold, I realize that I not only sold them lies but also I may have endangered them for nothing.

They were the ones risking their lives and making sacrifices on these dwindling promises. By working for me and Western organizations, they and their families had a bullseye on them from the Taliban.

That lesson is personal.

Like my family and many Southern Vietnamese, supporting the Americans in Vietnam meant a lurking danger from the Viet Cong.

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It looks just like April 30. But worse. Can you imagine still being there?

It’s the first thing my mom uttered when she saw the scene on TV unfolding in Kabul on Aug. 15 – of grim videos of people running onto the tarmac to jump onto planes and falling to their deaths to escape the collapse of their country. I was shocked that she’d bring up April 30. Because every Vietnamese American knows April 30, 1975.  

At an early age, we’re taught what happened that Black April: the defeat of the superpower Americans, the rise of the dictatorial communist North Vietnam, the end of the Republic of Vietnam and, for my family, the end of the country and our way of life as we knew it. For being the toughest people I know, it’s still the only day I’ve ever seen my family cry.

Chasing the elusive American dream 

For my parents and their generation who left everything behind and fled on rafts and boats to escape certain death, the experience haunts the entire community. When my mother and father landed in California after spending years bouncing among refugee camps, they clung to the American dream as their salvation. They found solace in the hope that their children would have access to the opportunities they never had after the fall of Saigon. 

But that didn’t erase the loss they felt having to flee their homeland and start over again in a country where more than half of the population didn’t want them. 

Think about it: This is my mother recounting the worst day of her life where she lost everything in 1975. And she thought 2021 was more horrifying.

A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan today conjures the comparison to the Vietnam War. There might have been similar echoes of intelligence shortcomings, bipartisan political failure and wishful thinking, and delusional beliefs of American cultural understanding in a deeply complex civil war, but this cold, academic retrospective removes actual humans and real families like mine from the story.

My family has regularly asked me why on earth I was going overseas and to conflict zones after they made sure that their journey across the ocean meant that “I didn’t have to live in dangerous places.”

When the United States evacuated 130,000 people from the fall of Saigon and resettled into the United States, we celebrate the lives saved. We talk about the positive contributions that immigrants make to our economy and our communities. But those are the lucky ones. 

Imagine the millions who never got out of Vietnam. The families who were broken apart and never put together – the countless who died from retaliation, retribution, reprisals and reeducation camps.

This was exactly my family’s experience. Because of the breaking of diplomatic ties, I didn’t meet many of my extended loved ones until relationships were normalized between the United States and Vietnam in 1994-95, two decades later. The fact that I couldn’t connect or understand what they went through sat in the pit of my stomach for years.

So why did I go to Afghanistan as a front-line civilian for multiple years supporting the U.S. military, international forces and championing women’s rights? Partly because of the naive belief that we would transport Afghanistan back to its roots as the Paris of Central Asia.

Partly a desire to repay the United States for taking a leap on us. Partly the thrill of adventure that so many young professionals in foreign affairs feel. I wanted to be in the mix. I wanted to tell cool stories. I didn’t want to read books and pieces. I wanted to see it for myself. I was young. 

But upon honest reflection in the past few weeks, I went to Afghanistan mainly because of the guilt – the guilt of living every day of the American dream that my parents gave to me under the painstaking manual labor of 18-hour workdays. I didn’t want to waste it.

I looked at Afghanistan as an opportunity to channel the guilt into something positive – to give many forgotten communities and neglected women a fighting chance. But it was also a secret hope that maybe the blood and treasure would ensure that Afghans wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the Vietnamese, as my family did, as countless other refugees with tragic stories.

Foreign policy failures in Afghanistan

And I certainly had an education in the real world from my years there. I was disappointed to learn the realities of foreign policy and international development on the ground. Each year I was there, the projects felt the same with a middling output of success.

Pockets of potential emerged among amazing women and some spritely groups, but generally these works languished. Roads were left unbuilt or were sabotaged in perpetual repair as aid money flowed in with little, to no tangible effect on the country's infrastructure. Community projects stalled because of violence, fraud, and corruption.

Like being on an exercise bike, no matter how hard or fast our team pushed, we were stuck in the same place. It felt like every year, there was a new strategy, new surge or new initiative. It was a new acronym, but it spelled the same hapless result.

While it was frustrating for me, it was far worse for my Afghan staff. I could go home at some point. I did go home. I went back to the trappings of a comfortable life.

Later I worked for a State Department-funded human rights program that worked with extraordinary women leaders and organizations. It’s not that I’m not proud of the hundreds of women judges and paralegals we trained on how to advocate for themselves, enshrined in their constitution. 

It’s not that the women entrepreneurs we supported didn’t produce some improved quality of life. But in already seeing the erasure of women in Kabul, it’s easy to see that those gains are all but certainly gone.

As footage of cities across the country fell to the Taliban without much resistance, hearing pleas from staff and colleagues for assistance and the feelings of helplessness was overwhelming and suffocating. I was emotional seeing photos of where I lived – Wazir Akbar Khan – covered with Taliban fighters and seeing soldiers quickly disposing of their uniforms to survive. 

It was my adopted home, too. And it has vanished.

While I’m absolutely terrified for the country and especially for the women, girls and their children, it’s the relationships, the stories and memories that keep me motivated now to not just get my former team members out but to also get as many Afghans out as possible.  

The execution of the withdrawal has been an unmitigated disaster that risks our geopolitical standing in a tumultuous region. The Biden administration has declared that America is back and has oriented its foreign policy priorities toward human rights. Yet the tragic similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam suggest that humanitarian conditions and factors were not prioritized in transition planning, and that lessons from the past were painfully ignored. 

Whether the Biden administration miscalculated the precipitous timeline for evacuating our allies, their families and our fellow Americans serving in-country, or banked on the American public continuing its popular bipartisan support of ending the American presence, it failed to prioritize the key tenets of our foreign policy – that keeping our word matters and abandoning allies is a clear and ominous sign for both friend and foe. From a family of refugees adopted by a country built by refugees, this folly is pure irony.

If we can’t get our allies and their families out before the country reverts to a terror-filled theocracy, we’ll all be living with the guilt of what we could have done when it mattered most.

This could be the worst type of betrayal. The one we didn’t learn from. And I own it. We all should.

Jeff Le (@JeffreyDLe) is a political partner at the Truman National Security Project. His international development and human rights work took him to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2013.