POLITICS: It’s undeniable US allowed child trafficking during Afghan withdrawal — now’s the time to make it right

It is an uncomfortable but undeniable fact that the United States government was complicit in child trafficking during Operation Allies Refuge, the evacuation mission that began in July of 2021 when the United States withdrew from Afghanistan.

What is most distressing, aside from the heinous nature of the crimes committed, is that the government quickly swept claims of forced marriage and sexual assaults under the rug.

The Associated Press reported that, during the evacuation, several young girls at the Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi, one of the largest temporary evacuation hubs, alleged that they had been sexually assaulted by older men that they had been forced to marry against their will. Others reported being forced into a marriage in order to obtain a spot on an evacuation flight.

Similar claims arose from evacuees who had been taken to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.

Trafficking & more

These claims echoed equally infuriating but equally ignored earlier reporting, such as a 2015 article that Afghan “allies” fighting alongside US troops committed serious atrocities, including keeping boys as sex slaves. Despite these credible claims, the government appeared reticent to hold Afghan men responsible for their disturbing crimes. Instead of ensuring that no child trafficker set foot on US soil, the State Department sought to punt the decision to other agencies.

In a cable titled “Afghanistan Task Force SitRep No. 63,” the State Department noted that “intake staff at Fort McCoy reported multiple cases of minor females who presented as ‘married’ to adult Afghan men, as well as polygamous families.” The report goes on to state that the “Department of State has requested urgent guidance.”

Rather than vigorously investigate these claims, the State Department waved them away, saying they “are anecdotal.”

This particularly galling response raises a number of sobering questions: If sexual assaults that would render a person inadmissible to the United States weren’t important enough to investigate when the victim was literally in the hands of the US government, what other issues were overlooked?

Procedures slack

The State Department’s Afghan resettlement office, known by the acronym CARE, deserves much of the blame for the lack of attention given to these grave crimes.

Not only did the CARE office gloss over the widespread trafficking of children, whistleblowers have reported that normal security procedures, including important name checks that search for derogatory information already in the government’s possession, were not followed during the evacuation.

And, in some cases, a government investigation found, “CARE directed case managers to push along files in which an applicant’s name appeared to match a suspect in official terrorist and criminal databases.”

There is a renewed focus on crimes committed by Afghan nationals in the wake of refugee Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s Nov. 26 attack on two members of the National Guard, Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe. We should use this opportunity to fix the mistakes of the past.

With the “re-vetting” that the Trump administration has promised, it is past time to look into the child trafficking and abuse that took place during the evacuation.

Phillip Linderman is the founder of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, a community of current and past State Department employees.