Ben Roberts-Smith denies killing Afghan civilians, in a case that's shone a light on elite soldier units.

Taliban crackdown on Afghan women's rights could constitute gender persecution under the ICC, rights groups say.

During a CNN town hall earlier this month, Donald Trump acted as expected. He used the phrase “wack job” to describe E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in damages because a jury unanimously concluded that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. His statement elicited applause and laughter from the mostly pro-Trump crowd. He also described the January 6 insurrection as a “beautiful day” and declared that, if reelected president in 2024, he would pardon a “large portion” of the rioters. Those statements, too, brought applause from the raucous audience.

There was more. Trump called the Black police officer who had shot and killed one of the rioters storming the Capitol a “thug,” falsely claiming that the officer had bragged about the incident. Trump defended taking top-secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate. He wouldn’t say whether he hoped that Ukraine would win the war against Russia. And he spewed lie after lie after lie about the 2020 election and virtually every other topic that came up.

As the CNN anchor Jake Tapper said of Trump, summing up the night, “He declared war on the truth, and I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”

The day after the town hall, I asked a person in the talk-radio world how his listeners had responded. “One hundred percent approval of Trump’s performance,” this individual, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me. “I even tried to get people to call me who didn’t think he did well, but no luck. And I received a number of calls saying they had been either leaning towards [Ron] DeSantis or were firmly in his camp, and they said they have now decided to fully support Trump, based on the town hall.”

The question I’ve been asked more than any other during the Trump era is how Trump supporters—including tens of millions of evangelical Christians and Republicans who have long viewed themselves as champions of “family values” and “law and order”—justify their enthusiastic support for the former president. How do they rationalize their embrace of a man whose ethical transgressions and moral depravity so far exceed that of Bill Clinton, whom many of them attacked in the 1990s on moral grounds?

I’m intentional about trying to better understand the mind of Trump supporters. I read their articles and social-media posts, listen to their interviews, and track the findings of focus groups. I engage them in conversation and reply to their emails, less to debate than to listen. I think I’ve come to understand their perspective, even though I profoundly disagree with it.

[Read: The worst thing to come out of Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump]

Trump supporters can’t simply be dismissed as “a basket of deplorables.” Many are devoted parents and spouses, loyal friends and good neighbors, willing to reach out a hand to those in need. I can’t deny what I have seen with my own eyes; I can’t let my own aversion to Trump turn his supporters into caricatures. At the same time, they have aligned themselves with a malignant figure whose corruptions are undisguised. How can these things fit together?

Part of the explanation can be found in the realm of human psychology. None of us live comfortably with cognitive dissonance, the mental stress that results when people’s beliefs and actions come into direct contradiction with one another. This disharmony causes distress, agitation, and self-loathing. It can’t be sustained; something has to give.

The human mind creates defense mechanisms to eliminate such negative feelings: avoiding or ignoring the dissonance, undermining evidence of the dissonance, belittling its importance. What we human beings don’t do nearly enough is change our behavior so that it aligns with values that are estimable and ennobling.

If a person is on a diet and spends late nights eating snacks, they may tell themselves that they’ll work out the next day to burn off the extra calories. A smoker may justify her habit by reassuring herself that even though smoking can cause cancer, she knows people who have smoked and lived long, healthy lives. A man who cheats on his spouse may justify his actions by saying that the marriage was irretrievably broken, that he felt unloved by his wife, that he hasn’t felt happy for many years and she’s to blame.

“By coming up with these rationalizations, people are able to preserve the impression that their behaviors and attitudes are consistent,” Benjamin Le, a psychology professor of Haverford College, has written.

Which brings me back to supporters of Donald Trump. It’s a challenge for many of them, especially those who identify as people of faith, to reconcile what they claim to value—integrity, honor, truthfulness, decency, compassion—with the fact that they support a misogynist who has cheated on his wives and sexually abused women; threatened judges, prosecutors, and election officials; used hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to pressure a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent; catalyzed a violent insurrection and engaged in a multipart conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election; dined with white-supremacist and anti-Semites; cheated on his taxes; lied pathologically; routinely used cruel and dehumanizing rhetoric; and promoted political violence.

So what are the psychological defense mechanisms Trump supporters employ to relieve feelings of dissonance, shame, and embarrassment?

First, Trump supporters deny the worst things he has done. Jury verdicts against him are always unfair; impeachments are unjust partisan acts. Investigations of him that have found wrongdoing, all of them, are “WITCH HUNTS.” That is true in perpetuity. So whatever Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith find, whatever indictments they may bring, the charges are by definition unwarranted. Trump is always the victim of persecution. “I think I have been violated as badly as anybody that's ever walked,” he recently said.

Trump is not perfect, most of his supporters will concede; he may be rough around the edges—a “bull in a China shop,” in the words of one friend of mine; a “wrecking ball,” in the words of another—and a man who does some unsavory things. But all of that, and far more than that, is acceptable because he is a “fighter” for their cause, which they are convinced is just, true, and right. His conduct may not always be ideal, and you may not want your son to model his life after Donald Trump’s. But more than any other Republican politician, he understands the viciousness of his opponents and will respond in kind. Trump will bring an AR-15 to a cultural knife fight, and his supporters find that to be anywhere from tolerable to thrilling.

Second, Trump supporters catastrophize the threats of the left. It’s one thing to believe, as some of us do, that the progressive movement includes dangerous, illiberal elements that need to be opposed. But that is quite different from believing that if Democrats gain or maintain power, calamity follows and America as we know it dies.

What we’re talking about isn’t just fear; it’s a sense of desperation and impending doom. Trump supporters feel that the political right has lost on every front over the past several decades, even though that’s clearly not the case. Since 1990, for example, the right has gained significantly more power in the courts, in Congress, and in the media—hardly unimportant institutions. Roe v. Wade was overturned after a half century, securing one of the great goals of the American right, and no land has afforded more religious-liberty protections to Christians than the United States today. Yet none of these victories offers much reassurance to people addicted to “doomscrolling,” searching social media for upsetting news.

Moreover, the unwillingness of others to share in their despair—the unwillingness to fight as if our lives depended on the outcome of this or that political election—is viewed as a sign of weakness. All of this is reinforced by a media ecosystem that is constantly promoting narratives that elicit feelings of fright, grievance, agitation, and rage. Those outlets take their cue from Trump, who last year said Democrats are responsible for “blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable.” He added, “Our country is going to hell.”

If the threat is truly existential, then it justifies—indeed, it demands—that patriotic Americans stand with Trump, regardless of his ethical transgressions. To offer anything less than full support would be a betrayal of our nation. A significant number of Trump supporters see themselves as embattled but heroic figures, involved in a great drama, standing against the demise of almost everything they cherish.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA is ripping itself apart]

But this disposition comes with a price. Perfect love may cast out fear, as the New Testament says, but the converse is also true. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.”

Third, Trump and his supporters are frantically trying to portray President Joe Biden as more corrupt than his predecessor. If Trump is an innocent man forever being framed, Biden is the head of a “crime family,” according to Trump, who labeled a set of unproven allegations against Biden as “Watergate times 10.”

The charge against Biden is led by the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer, who declared himself a “Trump man” shortly after the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

Comer’s target isn’t simply Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has engaged in problematic business dealings. The U.S. attorney in Delaware, David C. Weiss, will soon decide whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for crimes related to taxes and a gun purchase. (The investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018 and initially centered on his finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work, but later shifted in focus.)

However, Republicans are after the president himself, not his son, and so far, despite months of investigation, they have yet to uncover incriminating material about him. That doesn’t stop Republicans from accusing President Biden of wrongdoing. The Trump acolyte Charlie Kirk has admitted that “one of the reasons why Joe Biden is tough to beat is because he’s tough to hate.” Portraying Biden as unscrupulous is one way to change that impression, even if the specific charges made against him are false. If Republicans are able to get at least a draw between Biden and Trump on personal and public morality, they’ll take it.

A fourth justification that supporters of Donald Trump have constructed is that his presidency was an unqualified success, that Trump did practically everything right. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary: failing to build the wall or to get Mexico to pay for it, to reduce illegal immigration, to handle the coronavirus pandemic, to close the trade gap, to narrow the deficit or, pre-pandemic, substantially grow the economy and real wages. The Trump presidency, however, did witness health-care costs and drug prices increasing; income inequality growing; abortions rising after a three-decade decline; homicides spiking, including the largest single-year increase in murders in more than a century; the erosion of U.S. credibility worldwide; a posture of petty feuding with allies and abject capitulation to dictators; and a U.S.-Taliban agreement and subsequent announcement that the American military would withdraw, which had a devastating effect on the Afghan military’s morale and was a “catalyst” for its collapse, according to a May 2022 interim report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Yet all of these things, and more, are either ignored or explained away.

Let’s assume that Trump supporters believe, contrary to the facts, that every bad thing that happened on Trump’s watch was not because of his policies but in spite of them. Even then, they’re conceding how easily thwarted Trump was and how, in many cases, he was ineffective.

[Peter Wehner: Trump supporters think they’re in a fight to the death]

A fair-minded assessment would conclude that on Trump’s watch, some things got better and some things got worse, some of which he’s responsible for and some of which he’s not. But no one can reasonably make the case that America was markedly better or stronger during the Trump presidency than under either his predecessor or his successor. And certainly America under Bill Clinton, reviled by many on the right, prospered in ways that far exceed anything we saw under Trump. But back then, unlike now, we were told that character mattered.

The psychological phenomenon I’ve described in this essay isn’t exclusive to members of one party or to politics. We all live in ways that are at odds with our deepest beliefs. We all rationalize our shortcomings; we all engage in forms of denial. Each of us has blind spots, seeing confirmation bias in others but not in ourselves. But there are varying degrees of self-deception, different lengths to which we go to justify our decisions. What is so striking is just how much Trump demanded of his supporters. He has gone to the darkest places, and they have followed him every step of the way.

So, will anything invalidate the rationalizations of Donald Trump supporters? Or do his violations bind them to him more tightly than ever? For almost eight years, the answer has been the latter. Trump’s sensibilities have become theirs; they have thoroughly internalized his will-to-power ethic. An extraordinary psychological and moral accommodation has occurred.

If a decade ago you had told Trump supporters that this is the kind of man they would defend, that this is what they would become, most of them would have been horrified.

At this stage, though, for Trump supporters to call him out would be to call out themselves, and that’s too painful for too many people. The greater the ethical compromises we make, the fiercer our justifications become—and the angrier and more frustrated we get at those who won’t go along for the ride.

If most Republicans finally do break with Trump—and at this point, very little evidence suggests they will—it won’t be because of any road-to-Damascus revelation. It will be done respectfully, even reverentially, not because they have rejected his style of politics, but because they sense that his time has come and gone. And if Trump is dethroned as the leader of the Republican Party, whoever succeeds him will have modeled themselves after him. Trumpism will outlive Trump. It’s the cost of the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I have advocated for giving Donald Trump’s sociopathic behavior full exposure. But CNN’s decision to run a town hall with the former president enabled that behavior and managed to harm journalism, the network’s reputation, and the American political process all at once.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

MSG is finally getting its revenge. America’s unconvincing reasons for denying F-16s to Ukraine Night at the Vatican

A Trump Dream

I have long argued that Americans need to see more, rather than less, of Donald Trump.  Because I believe that Trump is an existential menace to American democracy, I have encouraged covering Trump as closely as possible. I know this seems counterintuitive: Trump built a following over the years by being on television, and his base can’t get enough of him, so why should the media encourage more adoration? But for ordinary Americans who did not join the cultish following that congealed around Trump in 2016—many of whom are the independent voters who will decide the next election—“Trump exhaustion” is a real thing, and the more of it, the better.

Watching Trump for any extended period of time is enervating and deeply uncomfortable. The man is a quivering bag of weird verbal and physical tics. And when he gets rolling, listening to a Trump speech is like standing nearby while someone throws a match into a box of cheap bottle rockets: When the fusillade of annoying noise, misfires, duds, and smoke is over, all that’s left is a general stink in the air.

This discomfort is exactly my point: If you want to stop Donald Trump from returning to power, putting him on TV is the way to go. But doing so requires either that you hand him a microphone and let him immolate himself, or that you sit him down with a reporter who will not let up on calling out his lies and fantasies until he melts down.

Last night, however, CNN chose one of the worst possible options. Instead of a candidate interview, CNN Chairman Chris Licht apparently thought it would be a great idea to cast Trump in a remake of The Jerry Springer Show, complete with vulgar jokes, hooting fans, and a mild-mannered host—in this case, the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins—stuck with the thankless of job of trying to intervene in the shouting and angry finger-pointing. Instead of an important one-on-one interview with a dangerous and malevolent demagogue, CNN presented another episode of Trump’s ongoing reality show.

The result was a disaster that was not only foreseeable but also as predictable as the laws of physics, a cringe-inducing display that damaged CNN’s reputation, put one of its rising stars in a no-win situation, cheapened journalism, and undermined our political process—all in the span of little more than an hour.

To be clear, I am not taking issue with CNN offering Trump time on the network. Trump is far and away the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Neither CNN nor any other network can refuse to cover him; as I’ve said, it would be a disservice to let him spread his toxic slurry out of the public eye. But “covering” Trump does not mean packing an audience with supporters and then setting the resolutely misogynist Trump against a young female reporter in a situation that practically could have been designed by the Trump campaign itself.

Indeed, Licht and his producers seemed determined to place Trump right in his comfort zone. Although Collins tried repeatedly to contradict Trump, Licht had to know—perhaps was even expecting—that Trump would simply steamroll her, as he did. (She also missed several opportunities—particularly on abortion—to stop Trump as he rocketed beyond the Van Allen belts, but I accept that correcting him is basically impossible.) Only once did she finally manage to get under his skin with repeated questioning, and in response, he pulled out his standard insult of calling her “nasty.”

The audience, for their part, was a Trump dream, even standing and applauding his entrance and exit. But where did they come from? I emailed CNN’s head of strategic communications, Matt Dornic, and he referred me to his tweet this morning explaining that the attendees were “curated by CNN through community groups, student politics and government, faith groups, agriculture and education orgs, as well as [Republican] groups. The school and campaign also invited guests.” I asked Dornic whether he had reached out directly to the New Hampshire GOP, and he replied that it was “just one of many groups we tapped for audience.”

(The chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, in an email to Atlantic senior editor Kelli Korducki, said that CNN had provided some seats for New Hampshire party attendees and had the email addresses of the party’s executive-board members, adding that he saw CNN’s email invite “shared around” and that it was all “very professional,” whatever that means.)

Whoever they were, Trump was jazzed by their support. Every slimy comment got a laugh or applause, including many about E. Jean Carroll, the woman who successfully sued Trump for sexual abuse and defamation this week. (Trump was so vile, Carroll says, that she is reportedly thinking of suing him again.) Collins had to ask about Carroll, of course, but after that, the plan—if one existed—seemed to be for her to stand there and take it while Trump talked over her, made dirty jokes, and basked in audience laughter. Trump’s sleaziness, like everything else in this train wreck, was completely foreordained—and, again, Licht and his producers had to know it.

So what, exactly, was CNN’s objective here? According to a transcript obtained by Politico, Licht praised Collins in an editorial call with CNN’s troops this morning: “If someone was going to ask tough questions and have that messy conversation, that damn well should be on CNN.” Collins indeed asked the questions, but there was no conversation. Trump commanded the stage, played to the crowd, and swatted Collins aside as if she were an annoying intern trying to fix his lapels.

Licht then added:

While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story, because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America. And the mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist.

How anyone—especially the head of a news network—can believe that this group of people has been ignored is astonishing. Perhaps he missed the many years of journalists conducting ritual pilgrimages to America’s diners and asking every angry old guy in a red hat to please, please tell us what he wants.

Perhaps what Licht really meant is that CNN should see MAGA world as an underserved community that is up for grabs while Fox News reels from its scandals. It seems an odd strategy, however, to push Collins onstage as the blood sacrifice for an hour, and then follow that up with Jake Tapper and other CNN hosts wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of talking about what a miserable fiasco their own network just splattered across the nation’s screens.

As many observers have noted, CNN has learned nothing since 2016. Or maybe CNN has learned everything since 2016, and intends to do it all over again.

Related:

The worst thing to come out of Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump. Entirely unrepentant

Today’s News

Title 42, a COVID-era public-health restriction that allows authorities to swiftly expel migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border—in many cases preventing them from applying for asylum, but with almost no legal repercussions for crossing—expires tonight. Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the release of former Prime Minister Imran Khan as protests swept the country. The White House called for a “thorough investigation” into the death of Jordan Neely, who died after being choked by a fellow New York City subway rider.

Evening Read

Olivier Douliery / AFP / Getty

‘We Are Not Ordinary People’

By George Packer

There are few ways of escape from the Taliban’s Afghanistan. One of them crosses the mountainous eastern border with Pakistan in a town called Torkham. Last September, Safia Noori; her husband, Fakhruddin Elham; and their four-month-old daughter, Victoria, traveled to Torkham and joined a throng of Afghans waiting to be allowed across by Taliban guards. The day was hot; the baby was crying; the crowd pressed in. Noori and Elham, in their early 20s, were carrying just two small bags, one with the baby’s clothes, the other with their own. They had sold everything else, including the furniture and handmade curtains and bedspread that made up Noori’s wedding dowry, to buy passports. They hadn’t seen their parents since the fall of Afghanistan a year before.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I won’t be back with you here at the Daily until next week, but I want to remind you to keep your eye on this week’s episode of HBO’s Succession, and particularly on the set at ATN, the fictional, Fox-like network owned by the Roy family. You’ll see a pundit on the network’s screens, a rather portly fellow in a blue suit and the de rigueur flag pin. He bears a remarkable resemblance to a writer of your acquaintance.

Fine, it’s me (playing a role, not as myself), and it’s a banger of an episode. Titled “America Decides,” it takes place on Election Night, and … well, that’s all I can tell you. But I’m writing about what it was like to be on the set of this amazing show, and about my too-brief tenure as a right-wing ATN commentator. Look for it in The Atlantic after the show airs on Sunday night.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

There are few ways of escape from the Taliban’s Afghanistan. One of them crosses the mountainous eastern border with Pakistan in a town called Torkham. Last September, Safia Noori; her husband, Fakhruddin Elham; and their four-month-old daughter, Victoria, traveled to Torkham and joined a throng of Afghans waiting to be allowed across by Taliban guards. The day was hot; the baby was crying; the crowd pressed in. Noori and Elham, in their early 20s, were carrying just two small bags, one with the baby’s clothes, the other with their own. They had sold everything else, including the furniture and handmade curtains and bedspread that made up Noori’s wedding dowry, to buy passports. They hadn’t seen their parents since the fall of Afghanistan a year before. As former special-forces soldiers who had fought alongside Americans, and as a mixed couple—he is Tajik, she Hazara, a persecuted Shia minority—they were prime targets for revenge killing by Afghanistan’s new rulers. They had spent the past year in flight from town to town, safe house to safe house. At times, Noori later told me, she’d considered suicide, even after she knew that she was pregnant. Only the baby’s birth gave her the strength to keep going.

Border guards searched their bags and examined their documents. “Why is a Hazara married to a Tajik?” a Talib demanded. “You should have married a Hazara, and you should have married a Tajik. Why did you crossbreed? Why does this family exist?”

“In our eyes, we don’t see black and white,” Noori replied. All that mattered was whether someone was a good human being. Noori’s answer didn’t please the guards. “Why are you leaving?” they asked. “Why aren’t you happy here in Afghanistan?”

Noori showed them hospital documents requiring medical treatment for her C-section. The baby’s name caught a guard’s eye.

“Why Victoria? Why didn’t you give her a proper Islamic name?”

Noori dodged the question. It would have been dangerous, maybe fatal, to tell the Talib that she had named her daughter after a United States Army reserve captain named Victoria Marshman. Marshman had served in Afghanistan, where she trained all-women Afghan special-forces units called Female Tactical Platoons, or FTPs, and joined them on dangerous combat missions with male Afghan and American commandos. Marshman became close to several members of the FTPs. In August 2021, just before the fall of the Afghan government, one of them, a female commando named Mahjabin, was murdered in Kabul. As the Taliban took over, Marshman, working with other American military women, and texting from her house in Honolulu, helped guide more than two dozen Afghan military women and their family members into the Kabul airport and out of Afghanistan, heading to the U.S. (In my account of those events in this magazine, she was given the pseudonym Alice Spence.) Scores more women were left behind, including 32 FTPs, all thoroughly vetted by the U.S. military.

Marshman never stopped trying to get them out. Through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Slap, Dobbs v. Jackson, Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, Mahsa Amini, the midterm elections, Sam Bankman-Fried, ChatGPT, earthquakes, floods, fires, two Super Bowls, six Trump investigations, dozens of mass shootings, and the return of Biden versus Trump, Marshman, on her own time, has worked single-mindedly to keep her network of Afghans alive and bring them to safety. She gives priority to single women and mothers with young children, and her list keeps growing as other Afghans hear about her and send desperate WhatsApp texts. The list now includes 206 people—90 principals, mostly former military or police women, and 116 dependents.

“I have to triage all the time who should get what amount of money based on need,” Marshman told me. “Who is in really bad shape, who cannot feed their children, whose child is going to die if they don’t get medicine, who is going to be executed if I don’t move them into a safe house in Afghanistan, who can be linked together. And honestly, a lot of it is preventing suicide.” When one of the women runs out of food, Marshman sends cash from her own funds. When Noori spent two weeks alone in a Kabul hospital waiting to give birth—because of her military background, it was too risky for her family to visit her—Marshman sent encouraging texts and then money for the C-section. When the Taliban raided a woman’s house, Marshman stayed awake to advise her:

           “Dear Victoria, I’m in danger. Talib came to our house for inspection.”

           “Are you ok? Did they hurt you?”

           “I ran away from home.”

           “Ok. Are you safe now?”

           “My family is in great danger. The Taliban are looking for me and want to arrest me.”

           “I am so sorry and I am very worried. Are you in a safe place now?”

           “I have no place to be safe.”

When a woman reaches an extreme state—when Talibs have discovered a safe house, when a relative has been kidnapped or killed, when money has run out, when suicide seems imminent—Marshman, working with the undercover Afghan staff of two American humanitarian organizations, pays for passports, visas, and the overland journey across the border. Then she takes responsibility for supporting the women and their family through the process, which could stretch years into the future, of applying for refugee status and admittance into the country at whose side they once fought in a two-decade war.

A mystery lies at the heart of any obsessive commitment to strangers. It’s hard but not impossible to understand why Marshman is spending every free moment trying to rescue these women. It’s harder to understand why she’s been joined in her efforts by four other Americans who have no direct experience of Afghanistan at all: her mother, Ann, retired from the corporate world, and three men working in law, business, and entertainment, scattered across the country, and connected to one another and to Marshman by ties so loose, they’re difficult to explain.

One of them, a lawyer named Tom Villalon, was so troubled by how the war ended that he quit his job at the white-shoe law firm Covington & Burling, cashed in his retirement fund, and devoted himself to rescuing a pro bono client’s family still trapped in Afghanistan. He even taught himself Dari, the country’s main language. Eventually, he found his way to Marshman and the others.

“I feel a deep, bizarre connection to this part of the world I never had any interest in,” Villalon, whose professional work had focused on Chinese investment in Latin America, told me. “And part of it is the mystery of this group. I’ve never been exposed to people acting this honorably and to this nobility of character, which you don’t see too much in our society. It changes you and makes you see it’s easier to sacrifice things than it might have seemed.”

The group calls itself Rescue Afghan Women Now. Its existence is entirely informal; the members constantly debate whether incorporation as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization would bring legal and financial advantages or simply result in time-consuming paperwork. It meets weekly by Zoom to discuss current emergencies, weigh difficult decisions, report back on meetings with U.S.-government officials, and worry about finances, which become more and more dire as RAWN incurs more expenses. The group raises almost all of its money through personal ties and at the moment has less than $20,000 on hand. In the past few months, RAWN has moved several threatened families across the border to Pakistan, where the group continues to support them, and its monthly costs now exceed $10,000.

In December, a family on Marshman’s list received a phone call from the Taliban. Khalid Wafa and Sediqa Tajla, who have four children, are another mixed marriage of former commandos. (I have given them pseudonyms because their oldest son remains in Afghanistan.) Tajla, like most women who served in the Afghan special forces, is Hazara; Wafa is Pashtun, which makes him unusual both as a former special-forces soldier and as the husband of a Hazara woman. He still carries a bullet in his shoulder from a combat mission with U.S. Marines. Like Safia Noori and Fakhruddin Elham, the couple went into hiding after the fall of Kabul, traveling the length of Afghanistan and back, running whenever their whereabouts became known. When the phone call came, Wafa told me, they were in Herat, in the far west.

“Are you Khalid?” the caller asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are you at the moment?”

“Jalalabad,” Wafa lied—a city clear across the country, near his hometown.

“When will you come to Kabul?”

“Where in Kabul?”

“I’m calling from a military center.”

Wafa grew tense. He thought he recognized the voice, familiar from media appearances, of Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s director of intelligence, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee. Wafa pretended not to understand, and the caller repeated himself several times.

“Why do you want to see me?” Wafa asked. “Is everything all right?”

“We all need to serve our homeland.” The caller made it clear that he knew Wafa’s home address, military record, and extended family’s whereabouts. He reminded him of the Taliban order for all former special-forces soldiers to return to duty—a trap that had cost a friend of Wafa’s his life. “We have received information that you are planning to leave the country. Is this true?”

Wafa denied it and claimed that he was about to start a new job with UNICEF. He said that he had debts to repay, or else he would happily report to Kabul and serve the new government. Before hanging up, the caller demanded that Wafa keep him informed of anyone he knew who had left Afghanistan or planned to leave.

Over the next two months, the family moved almost every night. At one point, Wafa considered fleeing through Iran and Turkey to Europe and earning enough money to get his family out. At another moment, he thought of killing himself. Tajla, his wife, wrote to Marshman: “Dear sister, we have many pains. We dare not even say it. Living among the enemy is not normal. We fought for 20 years. We are not ordinary people. We remain friends of America and NATO. We were fighting for the interests of America and NATO. America and NATO dominate the whole world. America and NATO can help in any way. Will the friendship be the same?”

Marshman now kept in daily contact with the couple, and RAWN paid undercover humanitarian workers in Afghanistan to provide a safe house in Kabul. But one night in late January, Taliban fighters were seen searching houses in the neighborhood. Wafa fled first, and Tajla afterward with the children. She spent hours wandering through the snow, unable to find a taxi that would stop for them or a guesthouse that wouldn’t demand her ID. In the dead of night, her father-in-law arranged for her and the children to stay with an old family friend. The next day they traveled to Jalalabad, where her husband was waiting for them in yet another hideout.

This fugitive existence finally ended when Marshman and her group decided to spend scarce funds to exfiltrate the family to Pakistan. A six-month visa, never easy to obtain, now costs $1,700. But on the last day of February, Wafa, Tajla, and their three younger children were able to cross the border at Torkham to the relative safety of Pakistan (their oldest son is stuck waiting for a passport in Afghanistan). Since then, RAWN has brought two more families out.

On the last night of Ramadan, Wafa, Tajla, and their children traveled from Peshawar to Islamabad to celebrate the feast of Eid with Noori, Elham, Victoria, and another family of new RAWN evacuees. The Americans joined them over Zoom from Hawaii and Connecticut.

“After the fall of the state, this is the first place for us all to come together,” Tajla wrote to Marshman, her text accompanied by a picture of an American flag and the Statue of Liberty. “Thank you dear friend Victoria. All this is the blessing of you and your team.”

“Everyone lives for himself,” Wafa wrote. “But the good life is the one spent in the service of others.”    

Last month, the White House released a 12-page report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan: key decisions, lessons learned. It’s an astonishingly self-congratulatory document. There’s no sign of an actual lesson learned, except that “we now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation.” This refers to the evacuation of American embassy personnel—who never faced any serious obstacle to their departure from Kabul—and not to the tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives as they tried to flee, and whose earlier evacuation would have done much to prevent the tragic scenes at the airport.

Meanwhile, the Republican-led House of Representatives, amid hearings that pile more blame on the Biden administration, refuses to take up a bill—the Afghan Adjustment Act—that would allow most of the 82,000 Afghans evacuated to this country to receive permanent status and begin living productive lives. Without such a bill, their presence here depends on a series of temporary presidential measures that can be revoked at any time. There is more than enough blame to go around.

The Afghans of this story are, in a sense, as mysterious as the Americans. One mystery is their abiding love for and loyalty to a country—this one—that abandoned them to their fate. Another is their belief in what Tajla called “equality.” She was referring to mixed marriage, but she might have been talking about gender. After all, the network is made up of women, and their survival depends on the strong bonds between them. The men seem to accept this, and during interviews they let their wives do most of the talking. These women and their families, including Victoria, who turned 1 a few days ago, should have been the future of their country. Instead, they’re fugitives with no home in sight.

Of the 206 Afghans on Marshman’s list, 23 are now in Pakistan, unable to work and dependent on RAWN for support. Nearly all of the others remain in Afghanistan under varying degrees of threat. Because they never worked directly for the U.S. government as interpreters, drivers, or other employees, they aren’t eligible for Special Immigrant Visas. (According to the State Department’s most recent report, more than half a million Afghan applicants and dependents are currently in the SIV line; the average wait time for a visa is almost three years.) Instead, the women must be referred—as Afghans who worked closely with American organizations in Afghanistan—to a U.S. program called P-1/P-2, which drops them into an immense pool of refugees around the world who stagnate there for years on end. Of the 50,000 Afghans who have been referred since August 2021, State Department officials told Villalon, not a single one has completed the process and been resettled in the U.S. (The State Department declined to confirm this to me.)

Even worse, U.S. policy requires them to leave Afghanistan for another country in order to be considered refugees. This is expensive, dangerous, and bureaucratically almost impossible anyway: None of Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Pakistan, currently allows the U.S. government to process refugee applications on its soil. The women are trapped whether they stay in Afghanistan or manage to escape across the border.

When I asked the State Department if Afghans like the women on Marshman’s list could be treated as emergency cases—evacuated from Afghanistan to, for example, Qatar, where they could wait in safety while their applications were processed—a spokesperson replied: “The most at-risk among Afghans who need urgent protection” and have been referred to the refugee program “may be considered for relocation.” At the moment this is no more than a notion. It’s hard to know whether the chief bureaucratic obstacle blocking the way for RAWN’s 206 Afghans, and so many others, is lack of staff, pointless rules, or sheer indifference. In the absence of official action, private U.S. citizens are spending their time and money to bring endangered Afghan women to safety.    

There are ways to motivate bureaucracy, and RAWN has brought the plight of female Afghan commandos to the attention of officials at the Department of Defense. “There’s good movement from DOD, but blockage at State,” Villalon said at a recent meeting. “The women get their refugee numbers, but after that it gets stuck. The same randomness with which some of them got out in August 2021—it’s the same now for P-1 processing.”

“I actually think it’s some intern with her coffee making decisions,” Marshman joked.

“The timetable means death, and they don’t get that,” her mother said. “The bureaucratic slowness is killing people.”

Last month, Marshman was invited, with other U.S. military women and the 30 FTPs already evacuated to this country, to a meeting at the Pentagon with top Army officials, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most of the Afghan women had expressed a desire to join the U.S. Army, but their asylum applications are stalled, and they asked for the Pentagon’s help. At one point Marshman spoke up: “Sir, there are still 32 FTPs stuck in Afghanistan.” This was news to Milley. The bureaucratic gears began to turn, and within a few days some of the women on her list received emails acknowledging their refugee applications and setting up interviews.  

Afghanistan is a painful, shameful memory, and most Americans have stopped thinking about it. Even people who worked feverishly to help Afghans escape from the Taliban in August 2021 have mostly moved on. Who can blame them? The need of those left behind in Afghanistan remains overwhelming, and so does the sluggishness of the U.S. government. It goes against human nature that an Army captain, from her post in paradise, is still at it night and day.

“Sometimes being here in Hawaii, at the ends of the Earth, is hard because you are surrounded by so much beauty and peace,” Marshman said. “But nothing really lasts in the end, except kindness. So I just do what I can do for them.”

'Discriminatory and unlawful measures' restrict Afghan women's and girls' participation in public life, report says.

The meeting is taking place following the Chinese and Afghan foreign ministers' arrival in Islamabad.

Pakistan army says it killed three fighters in exchange of fire in North Waziristan district near Afghan border.