Montana veteran, Afghan interpreter reflect on return of the Taliban

By Paul Hamby

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    BILLINGS, Montana (Billings Gazette) — Evening started to fall at Shindand Airbase, Afghanistan, one of the most heavily trafficked airfields throughout Operation Enduring Freedom, when Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Myers heard the moan of a siren.

Standing on top of one of the few solid structures in his camp, he saw through the dust members of the Afghan National Army carrying bodies from two wrecked trucks. While on patrol with Spanish soldiers stationed in the region, their convoy came under fire. In the scramble for safety, the two transports collided and left dozens dead, dying and injured.

Myers, then a member of the Montana Army National Guard, watched the Afghans get turned away from a tactical operations center run by the U.S. military. He sprinted to the clinic in his camp, which within minutes was filled with those brutalized in the wreck and irate Afghan soldiers who wanted to get them treatment. As a lead non-commissioned officer in a NATO mission to train the Afghans to take the reins in fighting the Taliban, Myers was the lone American.

“The TOC just basically told them to get screwed, and that was the wrong thing to do. By the time they got to where I was in that dispensary, they wanted the Americans to pay for this … Those 500 soldiers had one person who they could point their finger at, and that was me,” Myers told The Gazette more than 10 years after his deployment.

The interpreter There to talk to the Afghans was a Kabul native in his late 20s who had been in step with Myers since he saw the wreck. Muhammad, whose full name The Gazette is choosing not to reveal in the interest of his safety and that of his family, reassured the mass of soldiers in Dari and Pashtu that Myers would do what he could to find a doctor.

With the help of a New Zealand soldier, Myers and Muhammad hauled 11 injured men out of the dispensary. In a haze of shouting, screaming and the almond scent of leaking brain fluid, the three crossed over the airstrip in the hope that an incoming jet wouldn’t cut their rescue operation short. After getting the attention of a sergeant major, help finally came from both American and Spanish doctors.

Muhammad is one of hundreds of thousands of Afghans who aided coalition forces over the 20-year war. While the majority worked as interpreters, they also assisted in other roles like mechanics, drivers and cooks.

“We lost three of those guys and [Muhammad] was with me the whole time. I can’t believe he stayed with me the whole time,” Myers said.

Muhammad was born under the mujahedeen, grew up through the spring and first fall of the Taliban through the ’90s and into the new millennium. When he left Afghanistan as a man, Osama Bin Laden had been shot, and Kabul remained under tenuous security of U.S., NATO and Afghan forces.

When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, a country containing several dozen tribes and ethnicities, their fundamentalism disrupted the brief period of peace. Movies, music and television were not enjoyed in seventh-century Arabia, and they wouldn’t be in 20th century Afghanistan.

“Before Taliban it was the mujahedeen, and there was constant war between the different factions of mujahedeen,” Muhammad, who is currently living in California, told The Gazette recently. “Kabul was one of those places where the people preferred the Taliban at first, because the whole of Kabul was under the control of one entity. It got rid of a lot of factional fighting. That was until they started to infringe on people’s personal lives.

“There was a real possibility of something happening to you … My family, we immigrated to Pakistan in 1999. Life was strict, and that was one reason. The second reason was poverty. There was no work,” he said.

Muhammad and his parents, brothers and sisters lived in Pakistan for the next three years. During a visit with family back in Afghanistan, a teen-aged and long-haired Muhammad was led away by Taliban members to a barber shop. A family member managed to convince them to let his hair go uncut.

In 2002, Muhammad returned to live in Afghanistan. During the first years of the United States’ longest war, he studied medicine at the University of Kabul, inspired in part by his childhood under the mujahedeen and the Taliban, when doctors operating their own practices managed to live comfortably. He also took several courses in English in preparation to work alongside the U.S. military.

Despite having his certification to practice medicine in hand, Muhammad joined an estimated 250,000 other Afghan nationals in supporting the occupying forces. After a vetting process that took several months, he contracted with the United States government to work as a translator. The job took him from his home in Kabul out west to Herat, only a few hours away from the Iranian border, and linked him to SFC Meyers at Shindand Airbase.

U.S. forces uprooted the Taliban from power in October 2001, but attacks persisted for the next 20 years. In some cases they came in the form of Afghan military members turning on NATO and American troops. Signing a contract to serve with the coalition occupying Afghanistan was an acknowledgment of possible retribution from the Taliban, Muhammad said.

“It was a major concern at the time, but people didn’t think of a day like today that the Taliban would take over the whole country again … But people would say it’s a risk that had to be considered,” he said.

Muhammad stood next to Meyers in November 2010, and heard the sirens wail after the two trucks crashed.

“That was a devastating day … The guys who they brought to the morgue had no one to do a formal funeral for them. Sgt. Meyers prayed, and I prayed for them the way that I would in our religion,” he said.

During his time as a translator, he worked with mechanics and engineers in making helicopter repairs. He also worked with Meyers in improving collaboration between coalition troops and other interpreters.

That same year, Muhammad began the process of moving to the United States through the U.S. State Department’s special immigrant visa program for interpreters. With approval limited to just a few dozen a year, he made several trips to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and needed Meyers to vouch for his character and work ethic.

Muhammad made it to the United States, but only after a process that took about four years. When he stepped on American soil with his wife, he was approved for a green card and has continued his ambition to become a doctor. He’s currently applying for a medical residency at American hospitals.

For the past seven years, he has stayed in touch with his family back in Kabul through messaging apps like Whatsapp and Skype. He visited them only once in 2018 since leaving.

“I hoped I would return again before all this madness happened,” he said.

When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan during their second lightning campaign, they started with the border crossings. The religious and political organization reached an agreement with the United States during the administration of President Donald Trump to halt its attacks on American troops and sever its ties with the al-Qaida terrorist network on the condition that all U.S. troops leave the country by May 1, 2021. As negations disintegrated between the Taliban and the Afghan government, President-elect Joe Biden set a withdrawal date for Aug. 31.

By mid-August, the Taliban had taken the abandoned Bagram Airfield, nearly every provincial capital, and stormed into Kabul. Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and its ground forces put up little to no resistance. Stunned U.S. officials who expected more time to get Americans and their Afghan allies out of the country were left with only two weeks.

The evacuation effort, a modern Dunkirk, ended with more than 123,000 people being flown out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on round-the-clock flights. Of those, 79,000 were civilians. They left from the airport bearing the name of a president elected to run a government that no longer existed.

Footage from news organizations and cell phones showed Afghans flooding through the airport’s gates and onto the tarmac. Some clung to planes and landing gears, and were either pried off by hand or plummeted to the ground after takeoff.

On Aug. 26, two suicide bombs killed dozens, including 13 American troops. U.S. intelligence agencies blamed ISIS-Khorasan, a branch of the terror organization that flooded into Iraq and Syria during the past decade, for the attacks.

Most Afghans who choose to leave their homeland travel by car or foot to countries bordering to the east and west. Nearly the entire Afghan diaspora, which the United Nations estimates to be around 5 million people since the Soviet invasion in 1979, live in Iran and Pakistan. With the fall of the Afghan government, thousands have continued to flow through border crossings. The UN has projected that up to half a million more could end up fleeing by the end of the year. More than 80,000 Afghans have immigrated into the U.S., according to the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University.

The U.S. Department of State distinguishes those who have immigrated into the country by choice, and refugees forced to flee their homeland in the wake of danger to themselves and their families. The thousands escaping Afghanistan have blurred that distinction. About 24,000 Afghans have settled in the United States, according to the State Department, all of them spread across U.S. military bases. The Department of Homeland Security has been tasked to process more than 65,000 evacuated Afghans, screening and vetting them for their possible resettlement in the United States.

President Biden approved a massive increase in the number of refugees allowed to settle in the United States at the start of his administration, undoing a policy set by his predecessor. The annual cap on the nation’s resettlement program went from just 15,000 in 2020 to 62,500 for the fiscal year of 2021, according to a statement from the White House released in May. Biden campaigned on a pledge to eventually bring that number up to 125,000 refugees permitted each year.

In Montana, the International Rescue Committee has resettled nine Afghan refugees, the Missoulian reported. The IRC is one of nine organizations through which the State Department finds homes for refugees and asylum seekers. The IRC’s office in Missoula is Montana’s sole refugee resettlement agency.

Muhammad said his family still living in Afghanistan is keeping off the streets as much as they can. Many have been able to make the few flights that have resumed out of the country, assisted by startup campaigns led by veterans with whom they served. For the Afghans with no such connection or support network, Muhammad said, they are stuck waiting in their homes.

“I have family members and have been worried about them. Some of them are really afraid and they would like to get to a safe place, but the evacuation flights are winding down and it’s like a prison right now…They don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel and neither do I,” Muhammad said.

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