“THERE’S GOING TO be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan,” argued President Joe Biden in July 2021 as he prepared to end America’s 20-year war there. It was “highly unlikely,” he claimed, that the Taliban would be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.”
Biden was proven wrong just a month later. That August, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the Afghan forces outmatched.
Desperation engulfed the capital, Kabul. Afghans intent on escaping the impending regime clung to the side of a U.S. military plane leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport, several falling to their deaths. Outside the airport gates, scores of men, women, and children crowded together in the mud and summer heat in hopes of safe passage. More than 160 of them—along with 13 U.S. service members—would die in a suicide bombing carried out by an Islamic State affiliate.
One Afghan man who worked closely with the U.S. military was in Kabul during the fall. He spoke to Reason from his new home in the United States. Out of privacy concerns, he asked to go by the pseudonym Baryalai. (It means “victorious,” he explained, adding a smiley-face emoji.)
Back in August 2021, Baryalai was tending to business at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs when he was urged to take an alternate exit out of the building. “By the time I got out of the ministry, the government vehicles were rushing here and there. I did not know what was happening,” he says. “The Taliban were not supposed to enter Kabul. There was supposed to be a transfer of power.”
The city had fallen into “a nightmare,” he continues. “The president escaped and it looked like a whole army was left without any commander.”
Baryalai spent the next two and a half years on the run. Since he had worked with the U.S., the risk of Taliban retribution was high. Interpreters have been hunted down, tortured, and killed since the Taliban took power. “I was living in hiding with my family. From one city to another, changing locations,” he says. Eventually, he had to leave the country.
Things weren’t supposed to go this way. In return for his service to the
