Backstory: Inside the SIV Process

By May Treuhaft-Ali

A U.S. soldier and an Afghan interpreter at their base in Laghman province. Lucas Jackson, Reuters, 2019.

When American troops began their occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001, the country had already endured ten years as a Soviet pawn, then five under the repressive control of the Taliban. To some Afghan men and women, the arrival of Western forces in 2001 signified that the international community had finally noticed their plight, and was ready to intervene. According to interviews that journalist Ben Anderson conducted for Vice News in 2014, many Afghans enlisted to interpret for the United States military not because they expected visas, or because they were paid particularly well, but because they believed that the U.S. would remove the Taliban from power once and for all. In Selling Kabul, one such interpreter named Taroon recalls his initial motivation for signing up: hope for a peaceful Kabul in ten years.

Many American civilians are only just learning the extent to which Afghan interpreters risked their safety to provide integral services to U.S. troops. They worked in the most dangerous combat zones alongside American soldiers and saved countless lives. As more and more troops withdrew between 2013 and 2021, these individuals found themselves stranded without income or protection from Taliban retaliation. Like Taroon, thousands of interpreters have lived for long periods in exile, unable to leave their houses or see their families, and ostracized by a society that views them as traitors. In 2014, one year after Selling Kabul is set, the International Refugee Assistance Project estimated that the Taliban murdered an interpreter every 36 hours. 

Obtaining a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) to emigrate to the U.S. is virtually an interpreter’s only hope of reaching safety. Taroon has already applied for a SIV when we meet him, and eagerly awaits a response from the American embassy. Unbeknownst to him, the majority of applications remain unanswered. In April 2013, when Selling Kabul takes place, the State Department had only granted 12% of the available SIVs. Between 2009 and March 2021, Congress approved a total of 21,000 visas, but fewer than 11,000 have actually been granted to applicants. The branch of the State Department that evaluates these applications is chronically understaffed, and lacks basic organizational resources like a centralized applicant database. 

The SIV application process is arduous, opaque, and expensive. Applicants must assemble a dossier of identification papers, recommendation letters from American supervisors, letters from the U.S. embassy, medical certificates, and photos that prove they worked with the U.S. army. The medical certificates alone cost $1,500, and they expire every six months, so interpreters must pay this fee repeatedly to renew them. Once these materials have been submitted, applicants undergo several months of security checks. For applicants facing immediate threat or requiring medical services unavailable in Afghanistan, a visa won’t come in time to make a difference, if it comes at all.

For many interpreters, the most challenging part of the SIV application process is proving that they provided “faithful and valuable service” to the U.S. Applicants must take polygraph tests, language proficiency tests, and counterintelligence tests. And yet at the same time, polygraph tests are not recognized by the U.S. government as a valid procedure because they are unreliable. Interpreters often fail the other two tests for reasons outside their control. For example, the International Refugee Assistance Project worked with one interpreter who had saved the lives of six U.S. soldiers. He was required to take a language proficiency test to receive his visa, though he had taken the same test before and passed. This time, however, the test was administered by a man from his province who failed him because their families were local rivals. Officials rejected his visa application on the grounds that, because he failed the test, he could not have provided “faithful and valuable service.” 

Kenny interpreted for the US military for 10 years and became severely hearing-impaired on the job. He failed a security check, and now has little hope of receiving a SIV. Erin Trieb, Smithsonian, 2016.

Other interpreters’ “faithful and valuable service” is discounted because of small human errors they made on the job: David Zucchino and Najim Rahim of The New York Times interviewed one man whose application was rejected because he complained that his combat vest was too small, and another who missed two days of work after his father had a heart attack. 

Finally, an interpreter must have served for at least two years to qualify for the SIV, even though the Taliban persecutes all interpreters regardless of how long they were employed. By contrast, most American soldiers deployed to Afghanistan for six to 12 months.

Given how frequently the Taliban attacks interpreters, it is indisputable that all interpreters have faced a “serious and ongoing” threat. Yet, many applicants have been rejected because they cannot supply written proof of the danger they faced. The Taliban delivers death threats by phone and rarely leaves written notes for its targets. If an interpreter was shot at, or if their home was looted, they cannot produce written evidence. 

Many interpreters give up hope of emigrating legally, opting instead to pay smugglers to transport them out of Afghanistan. Over 2.6 million Afghans are now refugees in Pakistan, Iran, Greece, and western Europe. According to the UNHCR, displaced Afghans form the largest refugee group in Asia and the second largest in the world. 

The cost, however, is high. Smugglers charge Afghan asylum-seekers $2,000 to $18,000 to forge visas and passports or to transport them to safety. The U.S. had paid its interpreters $1,000 a month at most, and now their only options for survival — assembling documents for a visa application or paying a smuggler — cost thousands of dollars. Interpreters did not earn enough to afford either option, especially if they supported families or had medical bills to pay. 

Since last April, when President Biden announced his intention to withdraw all U.S. troops by September 11 of this year, little has been done to improve the immigration process for families who grew increasingly desperate to escape almost certain death. In June 2021, Zucchino and Rahim reported that the State Department rejected 1,646 SIV applications in the last three months of 2020, and that 18,000 SIV applicants were still awaiting a response. The U.S. did not allot enough airplanes to evacuate all eligible Afghans within the expected timeframe for withdrawal, let alone by August 31. Decades of bureaucratic backlog, understaffing, and disorganization left the federal government unable to fulfill its promise to these families. At best, an interpreter might hope to be transported to a U.S. military base in a third country until their SIV application is processed; but there is no plan in place if their application is rejected. 

Selling Kabul speaks to the root injustice of the SIV program: that the U.S. placed these individuals in danger, and now has the power to decide whether and which of their lives are worth saving. In response to a system that has arbitrarily deprioritized thousands of lives, Sylvia Khoury portrays one Afghan family, in all of its humanity, as they respond to the direst of circumstances with bravery, sacrifice, and love. In doing so, she sheds light on what the U.S.  government has taken the most elaborate pains to conceal: the human cost of its foreign policies.