Some 200 Afghans, according to media reports, were to begin new lives in the United States on Friday as an airlift got under way for translations and others who risk Taliban retaliation because they worked for the United States during its 20-year war in Afghanistan.

The number of Afghans who worked for the US in various capacities during the two decades must be running into tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands. It is the US that has placed them in a highly precarious situation because it did little or nothing to help various Afghan stakeholders to arrive at an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned solution to the conflict.

Shamsher Khan (Peshawar)

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021