Op-ed: The Afghan Refugee Program Is an Unfixable Mess — and May Bring the Next Terrorist Attack
The State Department has resettled 200,000 Afghans in the U.S., but whistleblowers point to corruption and lax security vetting.
By Phillip Linderman on March 14, 2025
History will rightly lambast the Biden administration for the tragic and disastrously managed evacuation from Kabul in 2021. In the wreckage and chaos of that withdrawal, the Biden administration's National Security Council (NSC) set up a program to assist Afghans who had worked with U.S. authorities to leave the country and resettle in the United States. The State Department’s “Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts” (CARE) has largely managed the resettlement operation, but not without controversy. Whistleblowers have credibly alleged that CARE officials have tolerated unacceptable security risks in resettling unknown Afghans, while also ignoring internal corrupt screening practices. There is little doubt that CARE has prioritized resettling Afghans over protecting the American homeland.
The good news is that the new Trump administration has paused resettling Afghans. The bad news is that Congress wants to continue the program. Trump has not yet permanently terminated CARE, and program contractors are still in place, ready to turn the processing back on. The right move is to end this program.
Besides the usual open-border lobby, most supporters of continuing CARE are those well-meaning Americans, many of them veterans of the failed 20-year Afghanistan nation-building project, who believe Washington has a continuing obligation to those Afghans who worked with us. This view, admittedly, is a noble recognition of a debt, and Americans can, and should, debate when that obligation has been honorably discharged.
But that question is far from the only issue. Whistleblowers have made the case that unacceptable deficiencies riddle the program. Just as with the Afghanistan nation-building project, the ability of Congress to snap its fingers and throw money at an issue does not mean that a U.S. government solution can be successfully implemented. CARE’s proponents dangerously overestimate the operational capability of U.S. officials to identify, vet, and safely resettle those deserving Afghans we want to extract.
https://cis.org/Linderman/Oped-Afghan-Refugee-Program-Unfixable-Mess-and-May-Bring-Next-Terrorist-Attack
