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Thomas Small (4:13)

When the war in Afghanistan ended in a chaotic withdrawal, many of America's Afghan allies were left behind. But some secured what they had long been promised, thanks to programs established by the Biden administration permanent settlement in the United States. However, the Trump administration has put those programs on ice. And last November, when two members of the National Guard were shot, allegedly by an Afghan man who had entered the United States during the evacuation, the spotlight was once again on the foreigners whom America relies upon to fight its wars. Sean VanDiver is a US Navy veteran and the founder of Afghan Evac, a civil society network that emerged from the wreckage of the withdrawal to help Afghan allies navigate America's immigration system as President Trump moves to shut those pathways down. Vandiver argues the United States is, is in the process of abandoning not just people, but its word. I'm Thomas Small. This is my conflicted conversation with Sean Vandiver. Hello, Sean. How are you, sir? Thank you so much for coming onto Conflicted Thomas.

Sean Vandiver (5:49)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here today.

Thomas Small (5:51)

We're really glad to have you on the show. We've asked you on to discuss something very important, but which a lot of people don't know enough about or anything about, really, and that is the situation Afghans find themselves in. Afghans who in varying capacities worked alongside US forces in Afghanistan during America's 20 year occupation of the country, and who over the past several years, both before and certainly after the US Withdrawal, have found it increasingly difficult to secure legal protection in the United States, first through slow restrictive systems and later through sudden political and security shocks, as we'll discuss now. As you know, Sean, the subject hit the headlines in November when two members of the National Guard were shot in Washington, D.C. allegedly by an Afghan national called Rahmanullah Lakhinwal, who entered the United States under Operation Allies. Welcome to and who has been arrested, though he has pleaded not guilty. Much about the shooting remains unknown. We're not here to speculate, but the political consequences have been immediate. And I know you, Sean, will have some things to say about it.

Sean Vandiver (7:06)

I will, indeed. I mean, look, the baseline here is you can't hold one man's actions up as the reason why you wipe away an entire population.

Thomas Small (7:15)

When you say wipe away, I mean.

Sean Vandiver (7:17)

That'S what they're trying to do, right? They're trying to throw all of these folks out, people who are green card holders, people who are in some sort of limbo, who made it here fleeing violence and persecution. And it seems like they're doing everything they can do to disrupt the American dream that these folks had been promised and were seeking.

Thomas Small (7:35)

Well, before we get into the weeds of this larger subject, the subject of US Afghan allies and their struggles, perhaps you can tell us more about yourself, Sean. Who are you? Where do you come from? What journey did you go on that led you to sitting behind that microphone today?

Sean Vandiver (7:53)

Sure. Well, look, I often describe myself as a US Navy veteran from San Diego, California, but I wasn't born here. I was born in Springfield, Illinois, grew up in Bakersfield, California.

Thomas Small (8:04)

Bakersfield, California? Man, that is the heartland of the Central Valley. Well, I mean, I'm from San Francisco, the suburbs and originally from Orange county, so, you know, that's my backyard, but Bakersfield, dude. We passed through Bakersfield on the way up Highway 5, you know, to visit family up north. And I often wondered what it was like growing up there.

Sean Vandiver (8:23)

Well, you know, it was rough. I was a little bit of a troubled youth. I grew up the only child of a single mom. My dad was sort of an outlaw motorcycle gang guy in Illinois. My mom left, didn't want me to be dealing with that, and, you know, grew up in Bakersfield. I left at age 17 after having gone to boot camp for bad kids. Twice went to the Navy. I got a high school diploma and a ged, so if you're American, you know that something happened. And then I got into the Navy and, you know, got my butt kicked a little bit by my colleagues and got on the straight and narrow. And now I have two master's degrees and a bachelor's degree, and I lead a global effort. I actually ended up leaving the Navy and working for PlayStation right afterward.

Thomas Small (9:06)

Wow. A lot of guys leave the Navy and use PlayStation. I haven't heard of anyone leaving the Navy and working for the company.

Sean Vandiver (9:14)

That's right. That's right. So I left the Navy, worked for PlayStation, and then I worked at a veterans nonprofit. I was the chief operating officer of a veterans nonprofit called the Three Wise Men Veterans foundation, where we focused on reducing the stigma associated with ptsd. After that, I worked on Hillary Clinton's campaign, and we did not win. What a campaign that was, Let me tell you what. And then I went to work at Deloitte. I went to work at a major consulting firm, and all through PlayStation, through Deloitte, I started and led the San Diego chapter of a group called the Truman National Security Project. So I've always been somebody who's been sort of civically engaged. I'm a big believer in, like, we have to bring government closer. And if, like, a tattooed guy like me who got kicked out of boot camp for bad kids twice can run around with politicians and presidents, then anybody can. And I'm really passionate about that civic engagement. And that's what Afghan evac is. Right? It's just civic engagement at the global scale.

Thomas Small (10:07)

Okay, we'll get to Afghan evac downstream. Now to help the listener understand the story you want to tell. We want to tell. I'll just briefly give them some background info. So, long before the US withdrew from Afghanistan at the end of summer 2021, the Special Immigrant Visa program, known as SIV, was established for Afghans who worked with US government and armed forces in Afghanistan. It involved a complex processing system and capped numbers pretty carefully. Sean, what did this system look like from your vantage point before the US Withdrawal in terms of who was eligible and how the process was supposed to work?

Sean Vandiver (10:47)

Sure. So the special recruitment visa program is one leg of the groups of wartime allies that we have an obligation to. Right. And it was broken from the beginning. Congress built it in such a manner that it was already difficult to use. The onus of maintaining paperwork was on the wartime allies that served alongside of us, which invites a lot of attempts at fraud right now. The system on the government side was built in such a manner that fraud is very hard to commit there. Afghans have to apply. Apply through an email. They have to fill out a form, including in that form, they have to have a picture of their badge, a letter of recommendation from somebody they served with, and an HR letter from a company they served with. They have to have the contract number that they worked on or numbers, and then the US Government will go and validate all of that. They validate their identity, they validate the contract and the validity of their employment. And to be eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa Program, you had to, for some period of time, have served alongside us for two years. It was reduced to a period of service for one year. But there were some missing things, right? There remain some missing things. One, if you get injured serving alongside the US and you can't work there anymore, there's no, like, provision that lets you in.

Thomas Small (11:59)

Wait, wait, explain that. You mean if you're working for the US if you were working for the US In Afghanistan and in the course of that work, you got injured, why would that disqualify you?

Sean Vandiver (12:07)

Well, say that you had a leg blown off, right? Like, say you were in a convoy and the American veterans, and you got blown up. American veterans would be medically retired, sent home, taken care of for life. Afghans just get fired and lose their jobs.

Thomas Small (12:23)

Oh, my God.

Sean Vandiver (12:23)

Yeah. It's insane, right?

Thomas Small (12:25)

But this. This actually makes me want to. Want to know more about these men, the Afghans themselves. Like, who are these men and what sort of work were they doing for the. For the, you know, U.S. forces and the allied forces in Afghanistan.

Sean Vandiver (12:36)

Sure. So the way that I like to describe them are they're, you know, people who believe in the idea of democracy, people who believe in the very idea of America. These are folks who, you know, my buddy Lucky, who I got involved to help, he was at a tire shop. He was at his brother's tire shop. In Afghanistan, in Irgun. And American troops came in and said, does anybody speak English? And they were like, yep. They did an interview, they did some vetting, and they said, hey, will you come help us with our mission? These are folks who grew up, right? It was 20 years of war there. So these folks grew up with American ideals. Americans running around service members and aid workers and diplomats, telling them the stories about the American dream, telling them the history of America, and they bought it. They believed in this idea. These folks are people who served alongside us in roles like interpreters and translators, drivers. Some of them were like shopkeepers on the base, but they worked on the base, so they were in danger. Right? These are folks who enabled our mission. Some were intel collectors, in the case of some of the more elite units, these are folks that were fighting our wars for us. Like we were giving them arms and weapons and saying, hey, go kick in this door. Go kill that guy.

Thomas Small (13:49)

And so at some point, the siv, the Special Immigrant Visa Program, is set up for people like this. Now, why would they have wanted to leave Afghanistan before the US Withdrawal? What was motivating them to move away?

Sean Vandiver (14:03)

So there were a lot of dangerous things, right? Afghanistan was not a traditional war with fronts and, you know, trenches. This isn't World War I or World War II. This is like urban warfare. This is an entire country and it's asymmetric, right? So the Taliban and terrorist organizations were routinely blowing things up all over Afghanistan. The people who served alongside the US Forces were in grave danger because of their work with us, Right? They were directly confronting the Taliban and other organizations in our fight for their country.

Thomas Small (14:38)

So the situation for these Afghans, US Afghan allies seeking asylum in or seeking to migrate to the U.S. their situation grew trickier when President Trump first entered office in January 2017. People will no doubt remember Trump's controversial so called Muslim travel ban, part of a series of increasingly restrictive executive actions on immigration, which critics obviously argued created a really hostile environment for all immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, including Afghan allies seeking entry through the siv. Sean, how did Trump's first term in office make it harder for these Afghan allies of the United States? I mean, Afghan SIV processing was already backlogged, cuz, as you said, the system wasn't great to start with. But Trump's policy moves must have only made the situation more difficult for these U.S. afghan allies.

Sean Vandiver (15:35)

That's actually why I got involved in this in the first place, right? Was he did this first Muslim ban and it had the impact of making it much harder for. For our wartime allies to get here. So we sort of organized around that. That's how I met the guy that I got involved to help. It wasn't just the Muslim ban, though. It was the Muslim ban plus deconstructing the entire refugee program. The entire refugee system in the United States was sort of piecemealed, deconstructed. And then Covid came, and they just shut down visa processing all over the world. When President Biden took over, it was a system in ashes. Everything that Stephen Miller was trying to do. Stephen Miller is President Trump's, like, immigration guy. He's now his Homeland Security advisor and his deputy chief of staff. The group of guys that he comes from, the center for Immigration Studies, the America First Policy Institute, many of them believe that we shouldn't have immigration at all to the United States. And so they took actions throughout the last administration, the last Trump administration, to make it really, really hard for people to get here. And it was sort of indiscriminate. It wasn't just Muslim countries, it was everybody. But they did focus in many cases on specific subsets of populations, including the Muslim population.

Thomas Small (16:47)

So you say it's around this time. It was during Trump's first administration that you got involved. Tell us that story. What did that first phase of your involvement in helping Afghans who wanted to come to the United States, what did that involve?

Sean Vandiver (16:58)

I had written an op ed back in, like, 2013, just essentially saying, like, we have an obligation to stand by our wartime allies. That was my first entree to it. But I wasn't involved day to day. I had been involved with the group. I was, like, on an advisory board for a group, but I wasn't doing it day to day like I am now in 2017, when the Muslim ban came out. As the leader of the Truman Project chapter in San Diego, I called a press conference to say, Mr. President, you get to do what you want with immigration, but you need to know the second and third order impacts that this policy is going to have on our wartime allies. People fighting wars, and surely you must stand with these folks, like so many veterans do, that got picked up by ap. So it was everywhere. And at that press conference, I had invited some recent arrivals, two of those guys, Wolf and Lucky. Wolf was from Iraq. Lucky is from Afghanistan. We became buds, we became really close friends. And over the course of time, we got to know each other's families, we got to know each other's, what we cared about. April 2021 comes around, and President Biden announces that were going to be Pulling out of Afghanistan, I asked Lucky, like, hey, man, what's your plan? One, I helped him write an op ed. We all wrote op EDS about what that meant, what it should look like, where I said, we need to leave Afghanistan, but we also need to make sure that we take care of these wartime allies. And Lucky painted a picture of what that would look like for him.

Thomas Small (18:18)

Before we get to the US Withdrawal or indeed the negotiations that led to that withdrawal, tell us more about what your friends, men like Lucky in Afghan, what they were feeling as the turn happened during that first Trump administration, where anti immigration sentiment, including for men who had served alongside US Forces, became more acute in American politics and in American policy. Because of the Trump administration, what were they feeling? Because they must have felt some allegiance to the United States by that point. And they'd served alongside American troops facing great risks themselves, often, you know, exposing themselves to the accusation by their fellow countrymen back home that they were traitors. I mean, these are not people who had lightly worked alongside US Troops. So how did they experience that shift in politics in America?

Sean Vandiver (19:09)

Well, I'll tell you, it was rough, right? But it was not as acute as it is this time. In that case, the administration didn't ever say they were targeting the Afghan population. They just slowed things down within government. And there wasn't a group like ours out there making a lot of noise about how it was all jacked up. But I'll tell you, I've never seen one of these folks belief in the idea of America waver. They still felt a lot of loyalty to us and they sort of just didn't understand. But they were used to waiting, right? Like they grew up in a war zone. Weird stuff happens. So they would just wait. They would hide and wait. Now we're in a place where it's a lot different and people are feeling the strain.

Thomas Small (19:52)

Well, the change. One of the many changes that occurred was that U.S. withdrawal at the end of summer 2020, behind the scenes during that first Trump administration. For years, peace efforts in Afghanistan that would lead to the US Withdrawing from the country. These efforts had oscillated on and off with very limited progress, mainly because the Taliban did not recognize the U. S backed Afghan government as legitimate, so basically rejected all talks with them. This changed in late 2018 when U.S. officials began negotiating directly with the Taliban leadership in Doha, the capital of Qatar. This was seen by some people as a betrayal of the whole US mission in Afghanistan. Since the invasion back in 2001 had framed the Taliban really as the ultimate enemy of the United States. But it was also a breakthrough moment because these back channel negotiations did create some sustained diplomacy after years of failed attempts at reaching a peace deal. After 18 months or so of talks, this process resulted in the signing of the Doha Agreement on 29th February 2020. The agreement included a rough timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Taliban made some counterterrorism commitments. Sean, did the Doha Agreement include anything that addressed the situation of US Afghan allies in the country?

Sean Vandiver (21:14)

It did. Not at all. There was nothing about what would happen to our wartime allies there, and that was a mistake. A lot of us point at the Doha Agreement as a. I don't know if I want to call it pie in the sky, but sort of a haphazard deal that was made. I think Trump asked Khalilzad Zal Khalilzad to get it done no matter what. Look, some of the highlights of the Doha Agreement are that they released 5,000 Taliban criminals from the jails. You know, a lot of people think that that's part of the reason why the country fell so fast. They had these hardened warriors that were pretty angry. President Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David, which I think a lot of veterans felt like was a slap in the face. You know, my generation of veterans, of US Veterans, and certainly veterans in allied countries around the world, we spend our youth fighting these people, fighting the Taliban. And so it feels a little bit, not disingenuous, but dishonorable that our government was inviting them into this. And now diplomacy takes a lot of forms. We have to have diplomacy to get to a good place. But what did we get? We got a bunch of dead allies, 13 dead Americans on the way out, 200 dead Afghans in that bombing, the one bombing alone. We just don't know what we really got out of this agreement.

Thomas Small (22:25)

Well, I suppose a lot of Americans, a lot of people looking back at the 20 years that America was in the country, they might ask what America got out of it at all. And in a way, you know, I have some sympathy for the Trump administration's position. A little bit like the Nixon administration's position when it came into power, having inherited a pretty unwinnable situation in Vietnam and then having to negotiate behind the scenes with the North Vietnamese. And in the end, you know, they lost the country and the south was overrun. Many people suffered. You know, it's almost like maybe we shouldn't get involved in such conflicts in the first place. Of course, this is what, you know, most optimistically or most generously framed is the Trump administration's view on these things. At least that's what they say. We'll see. Things seem to be changing a bit, but between the signing of the Doha agreement in early 2020 and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan on 15 August 2021, Trump left office and President Biden came to office. Now, here on Conflicted. We have been critical of the way the Biden administration carried out the withdrawal. You've suggested ways in which the Doha agreement itself would have, you know, invariably caused chaos. My co host, Eamon Dean, believes that Trump's team would have avoided some pretty cardinal errors that Biden's team made, errors which Amon says led to the withdrawal being such a shit show. As the withdrawal unfolded, Sean, you must have been keeping close contact with Afghans who were there on the ground. What were they telling you?

Sean Vandiver (23:58)

That it was just mass chaos. They were depending on us, people that were a world away, to navigate checkpoints, navigate all of these things. It should have been so much more smooth, and it wasn't. There's no question that the withdrawal was a shit show. It was just absolutely insane. I don't have anything good to say about the Biden administration's performance in the withdrawal.

Thomas Small (24:17)

I think you told me about you calling someone up as the withdrawal was happening. Was it Lucky? This guy Lucky, wasn't it?

Sean Vandiver (24:23)

Lucky called me. So I had sent a text to Lucky and said, hey, man, are you. Are you okay? Do you need flights? Do you need anything? Are you still there? And it was a couple days that passed, but August 14th, I was sitting right here at my desk and I get a text message, not a phone call. He texts back and he says, brother, I had to go to the top of a mountain to get cell service. We're surrounded by the Taliban. We're running out of ammunition. I think I'm going to die. Will you grant my last wish and help get my family back to San Diego? He was in Irgun eight hours outside of Kabul. His family was all back in Kabul. He had taken a cab to go help some of his family members and people from his village, and he got trapped.

Thomas Small (25:02)

So Lucky had Ben in San Diego because you met him four years before. He had worked with you in your initial response to the Trump admin administration's immigration policies.

Sean Vandiver (25:10)

That's right.

Thomas Small (25:11)

So why was he in Afghanistan at all? I mean, he'd left, hadn't he?

Sean Vandiver (25:14)

Everybody in the world knows about Texans, right? If you told a Texan that Texas was gonna go away and you had six months, they would Put on their cowboy boots, their hat, and their belt buckle, and they would haul ass to Dallas.

Thomas Small (25:27)

Right, I see. So when the Biden administration announced the withdrawal, men like Lucky said, well, this is probably my last chance to see the old country. That's right. And maybe even go and start with working with family members, advocating for them, getting them over, you know, saving them from what was likely to unfold. So he texts you, he's on the top of a mountain surrounded by Taliban. It's a pretty hairy situation to be in.

Sean Vandiver (25:48)

But he escaped. He stole a jingle truck. He talked his way through 10 Taliban checkpoints. He knew how to drive the jingle truck, which is like a commercial vehicle. He knew how to drive it because he had just recently gotten a commercial driver's license in the United States. He was going to be a truck driver. But he had gone back to see his mom, who was on her deathbed, to introduce his mom to her two grandbabies who were American citizens. And he got trapped there. He thought he had time. His flight was out, was supposed to be on August 28. But he talks his way through 10 Taliban checkpoints, gets back to Kabul, calls me, is like, hey, brother, I made it. I'm like, what? I thought you were dead. We got him on a black helicopter, got him to the airport, and he got home safely.

Thomas Small (26:27)

So he made it out. I'm having images of the sort of fall of Saigon here, like guys grabbing a hold of helicopters as they take off. Was that the sort of thing that your buddy and other men were going through? I mean, just being shoved into last planes and stuff?

Sean Vandiver (26:39)

Yeah, I mean, after he got to Kabul, he went to the airport to try to get through, but he had two little babies with him. Right. He had a eight month old and a two year old and his wife, and they couldn't get to the gates. That's why he called me again and was like, hey, man, I can't get through. What am I supposed to do? And you know, he had blue passports with him. So we sent him over to the Eagle base, which is the CIA base, got him on a black helicopter and flew him to the base.

Thomas Small (27:05)

He's lucky he knew you. His name isn't lucky for nothing.

Sean Vandiver (27:08)

I mean, I didn't arrange that. Somebody else arranged that, but we were all working together. And by that time we had pulled together the Afghan evac coalition. We had pulled together. We didn't call it that yet, but we had pulled together these sync calls because I was in like 40 group chats and I was like, yo, we all need to be talking to each other. This can't be happening in silos. We have to have a place to convene. So I built that place to convene, and we called it Afghan Evac eventually, but it was 6am and 6pm Pacific Time phone calls. Each group had 45 seconds. We started with seven groups and got to, like, 50 by the end of the month. 15 seconds on what had happened the last 12 hours, 15 seconds on what you were expecting the next 12 hours, and 15 seconds on barriers to success and what you need. We ran a really tight call, and everybody had the information that they needed to succeed. And we were able to start identifying trends.

Thomas Small (27:56)

And so what were you identifying? What was going on?

Sean Vandiver (27:59)

We were able to identify which checkpoints were more harmful to people, had more aggressive tallops, which checkpoints people were getting through just fine. Different mechanisms for getting people through, like what sort of cars were being left alone, how you could smuggle people in here and there, all sorts of different things. We were able to identify scammers and people who were trying to take advantage of the situation for their own monetary game or who knows what else.

Thomas Small (28:22)

So this is how Afghan Evac. This is sort of the germination of Afghan evac. It's growing. It's coming together in real time as the withdrawal is unfolding, as the Taliban are taking over Afghanistan, and as increasing numbers of Afghans who had worked with US Forces there were left high and dry. So after that initial flush of activity, how was Afghan evac then made more official? How was it put together? You must have started to deal directly with the government, with politicians, with policymakers.

Sean Vandiver (28:54)

So we didn't start dealing officially directly with them until September. In August, we had, like, unofficial comms where we would say, hey, we need to get people on this gate. Or we would talk to Marines at the gate, say, hey, we've got these people showing up. They're going to have this sign or this indicator. They're wearing a red sweatshirt with a blue hat or, you know, something like that. You know, that's my guy. Let him in. We had members of Congress that were writing letters saying, hey, this guy is known to her office. Let them in. My colleague Jessica would tell you that she has a picture of a note being passed through the gate through a fence that, like, makes her cry every time, because that note that came from her office, Bill Keating's office in Massachusetts, resulted in two young kids and their mom and dad being able to get to freedom. Nobody slept for two weeks. At the end of it. And after the Abbey Gate bombing, it was sort of like, we're not done. Luckily, the Secretary of State agreed. We sort of talked our way into a meeting and then took over, you know, and expanded the tent in September, in early September of 2021. And that ultimately resulted in this partnership that we built with the State Department. And then In December of 2021, we wrote a big letter, and that resulted in a partnership with the White House. And that sort of solidified Afghan evac as the overarching group interacting with government and sort of being the bridge between civil society Afghans and the government which.

Thomas Small (30:15)

Figures within the Biden administration. Were you working with most closely and how do you rate the Biden administration, not its record on the withdrawal? I think we all agree for whatever reason, it was a shit show. We've made that clear. But after the withdrawal, responding specifically to the plight of these Afghan allies left.

Sean Vandiver (30:32)

Behind, I'd say that we worked primarily with John Finer, the principal Deputy National Security Advisor. Curtis Reed, the National Security Council Chief of Staff. Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor.

Thomas Small (30:43)

These are high ranking people. They work closely with you?

Sean Vandiver (30:47)

Yep. Ron Klain, the Chief of Staff. Like, I worked with all these folks. It took us a while to build that up. That's just in the White House. In the State Department, we worked with Tony Blinken and Susie George, the Secretary of State and his Chief of Staff. We worked really closely with a man named Timmy Davis, who was ultimately ended up being the ambassador to Qatar. I'm naming the high level. Oh, John Bass was the number one. The former ambassador to Afghanistan, John Bass, who ended up being the Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources, acting the Undersecretary for Political and the Deputy for Management. He had a bunch of different acronyms.

Thomas Small (31:20)

I salute your ability to remember all these titles. So what were you doing with them? Afghan Evac is working now with government to put in new structures to simply revive the old SIV program. Is this when Operation Allies welcome is conceived? What are you actually achieving in policy terms?

Sean Vandiver (31:36)

Allies welcome was started back in July. That was their evacuation effort. That was their emergency evacuation effort.

Thomas Small (31:42)

I see. Before the withdrawal, they did lay down some kind of program to deal with this situation.

Sean Vandiver (31:48)

That's right. They dealt with the situation through Operation Allies welcome at the beginning, but it was, oh, shit show. Right. John Basket's called in to go to Kabul to, like, unfuck this mess. While he's there, he and Secretary Blinken have this phone call where he's like, hey, we got to keep this moving. We got to Figure out how to keep this moving. Simultaneously, we are making all this noise saying, hey, we want to meet with government to talk about how to keep this moving. We sort of found each other on accident. Once we found each other, we started working together. What Afghan evac brought was the trust of Afghans. I had a database of hundreds of thousands of people that were trying to get out. And they trusted us. They didn't trust the US Government anymore for obvious reasons. And then we had all this manpower, people who could get information, who could suss out reality on the ground with evidence and bring it to the highest levels of government, bypassing the entirety of the middle right, the bureaucracy that is going to filter it out or make it less visceral. So we were able to. To do all of that. And look, we helped them. I came from a consulting background. Most of the people on my team came from a consulting background. We were able to act as free consultants for them to build out what ultimately ended up becoming the CARE office coordinator for Afghan relocation efforts. We placed an employee there, like they took somebody from my team there in September of 2021, and she just helped them build this whole thing out. Her and John Bass and then a guy named JP Feldmeier who now works at NATO. JP Was on the ground in Kabul on the US Team. He wasn't on our team. It was incredible to see what happened. And we brought people from every part of the global experience to help provide advice on what this should look like. And we were able to, in our letter to the White House in December, sort of lay out what good enough looked like. Right. What right looked like. We were able to get them to establish Enduring welcome, which is the safest, most secure legal immigration pathway in history and represented a comprehensive end to end plan with redundancy for how to finally, for the first time in our history, meet the moment for a wartime allies actually deliver on the promises that are made down range by people wearing American flags or allied flags.

Thomas Small (33:58)

So you had that in your minds, really. You had in your minds the memory, the cultural, the historical memory of the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese.

Sean Vandiver (34:07)

Oh, yeah.

Thomas Small (34:07)

Similar scenes that probably took place when God knows when America withdrew from the Philippines after occupying it for 48 years or however long it was. You know, you knew that America's record in this regard was tarnished by failure and by chaos. And you thought, we've done it again. We just watched it happen again. But let's see. Quickly solve the problem.

Sean Vandiver (34:28)

That's right. We wanted to solve the problem. And it wasn't good enough to solve the problem in a vacuum. It doesn't matter if you have all the great policy in the world if nobody knows about it or nobody knows how to get into it, right? So we wanted to make sure we sort of forced them by creating products like our manifest eligibility chart, which people can find on our website, to communicate all of this. It wasn't good enough to develop the policy. They also had to communicate it. And then we were like a year into that, and we realized all the different parts of government are communicating things differently. They're not all aligned. So I brought to the National Security Council, I said, hey, we need you to do a communications audit and an alignment. And wouldn't you know it, they assigned it to people that were now employed at the State Department, but came from us. So we were able to all work together. And then we worked further back, right? We discovered that they weren't communicating to Afghans who were going to through the system. They would just be like, show up here in Kabul and they would be on a flight and they wouldn't know what to do or how to prepare. So they were bringing all these things they didn't need to these third country sites that we had had them establish. So we built a pre travel toolkit so every single Afghan that went through the American pipeline through Enduring welcome got sent to us. Secretary Blinken said that we were the most impactful public private partnership he's ever seen in all his career. And we didn't get paid to do it. It was all volunteer.

Thomas Small (35:45)

It must have been very exciting to some extent, you know, just watching these structures grow and succeed. There's a lot of talk these days. I myself may have indulged in such talk, criticizing bureaucrats, technocrats, criticizing that kind of whole way of governing things. But then when you actually hear from someone like yourself, working together with these top technocrats with tremendous experience, you know, whatever the politics of the situation, what they can do when they want to do it, is put together such structures, such legal structures, such administrative structures. There's a kind of general competence. One sometimes wonders if it's lacking these days in the more populist, anti bureaucratic sort of movements. But as everyone knows, the Biden administration was not long for this world. And in January of last year, 2025, Donald Trump returned to office. And I think it's fair to say he returned to office with a vengeance, certainly with a markedly more aggressive immigration posture. Just as when he came to power the first time, once again, he announced broad travel restrictions Affecting multiple countries, including Afghanistan. Immigration pathways were really curtailed. SEAN, describe that second round of Trump policy changes in, in early 2025. How did they affect U.S. afghan allies ability to relocate to the U.S. or for those inside the U.S. already to adjust their status to achieve citizenship and so on?

Sean Vandiver (37:27)

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Thomas Small (40:11)

What's tps?

Sean Vandiver (40:12)

TPS is Temporary Protected Status. It's a status that's for people who are already in the United States and something happens in their country so they can't go back. Afghanistan was under a temporary protected status. So anybody who. Any Afghan nationals who applied for it and were here were able to get that. The administration canceled both of those things. So now you'll hear them say, oh, these people are illegal aliens. Well, they made them, quote, unquote, illegal by taking away their temporary status that they were waiting on. Because our immigration system is so jacked up, the paperwork takes years and years and years for things to happen. So unless they had applied for asylum already, there were people who were SIV eligible just waiting for that paperwork to process, which takes like three years, who are now under threat of deportation. In fact, we started seeing ICE take Afghans from their workplaces, from immigration court, from the places of worship. It was horrific.

Thomas Small (41:05)

These challenges, the challenges facing Afghan allies of the U.S. even, as you say, those inside the U.S. have only grown bigger. Following November's shooting in D.C. the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services within the Department of Homeland Security announced a pause in processing Afghan immigration requests and asylum decisions. Though it seems from what you've just said, that was basically paused already. I don't know, maybe not. You must have followed these developments very closely.

Sean Vandiver (41:35)

I have. And look, here's what happened. Those pauses weren't in response to the shooting. Those pauses were already announced, or they hadn't announced them. They were already implemented. I know because I have good sources within government that for all asylum cases, they had an adjudicative hold placed so that political people could review every single Afghan case applying for asylum. They did the same for refugees. They said that they're going to take a look back at every single refugee who'd been admitted under the Biden administration. And they paused all green card processing. Now, they've also reduced the work authorization time from five years down to 18 months max. And then in the one big, beautiful bill, they took away SNAP benefits and other benefits from refugees and immigrants. Luckily, the FDA just released guidance that said no, actually, they're exempt. But the winds have been really, really, really hard to get to. It seems to me like the administration is just using this shooting as a cudgel to try to implement these policies they wanted to implement anyway. And that seems really unfair to veterans, to the allies who stood with us. I'm really worried the message to this sense, especially as, you know, we're going to have other conflicts, conflict in Venezuela. How is any Venezuelan supposed to trust us?

Thomas Small (42:47)

Yeah, no, that's an interesting question. We'll get to that at the end about the long term downstream effects of this kind of posture from the administration on immigration by allies that the US Depends upon in its foreign theaters of war and conflict. But what can you tell us about the alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lochinwal? I mean, he was an Afghan national. He was granted humanitarian parole in 2021. He was granted asylum in April 2025. So that's within Trump's second term in office. He had previously worked in Afghanistan with forces backed by the CIA. So this is a very close ally of the US no doubt trusted with some pretty important missions. So what do we actually know about him? What do we not know? What about the circumstances of his life after arriving in the U.S. what can you tell us about him?

Sean Vandiver (43:43)

So, look, Afghan evac did not interact with Mr. Lockenwell. I mean, we've never interacted with him. Right. He first came on our radar after he committed this atrocious, this heinous act. I want to talk a little bit about his journey here, though, now that like what we've learned about his journey, let's first talk about his immigration status. He did arrive here, flown here by the United States government because he was one of the 30,000 people the CIA was able to get out. The CIA did a very good job of getting their people out. He arrived in the United States September 8, 2021, if I'm not mistaken, you know, spent some time on a military base because nobody was released to the public until they were fully vetted and all these things had happened. He settled in Washington about a year after he got here. He applied for special Immigrant Visa status because he was eligible after having worked at the CIA. And they would have then sort of shepherded that through. Now, it takes a really long time. It was December 2024, after the election, before the new administration took hold, that the CIA started recommending people apply for asylum rather than just wait for their special program visa status. Well, good news. He got both his asylum granted by the Trump administration in April 2025. So just a few months after he applied for asylum, and he received his chief of mission approval for SIV in April of 2025. So the Trump administration gave him two looks. He was vetted before he got here, before he left Afghanistan, before he got here, the entire time he was here, and nothing would have popped up. The important thing to note is not. Is not just what happened after he got here, but what happened before he came. He was 15 years old when we handed him a gun and we said, go take life in the name of. Of the United States of America in our mission. And he did that for nine years. He did that. He was trained. He was part of an elite counterterrorism unit, the Zero Units many of your listeners will have read about. He was kicking indoors and taking life in our name. That would mess anyone up. Right. That causes deep, deep emotional trauma when you're taking somebody's life. When I think about him, I think both. He must be held accountable for his actions, for this atrocity. And also, I think that his case is such a tragedy. It's a tragedy that he committed this crime. It's a tragedy that Sarah Beckstrom is dead. It's a tragedy that Andrew Wolf is in the hospital recovering from his wounds. It's a tragedy that we don't fund the back end of our wars the way that we fund the front end of our wars. Right. We should be investing in the treatment of our veterans. And when I say veterans, I don't just mean people who wear an American uniform. I mean anybody who fights our wars for us.

Thomas Small (46:21)

Yeah. Lockenwall's now becoming a sort of symbol of Afghan immigrants or any immigrant. Like, if we let them in, look what's gonna happen. They're gonna go crazy. They're probably secret Islamists. They're gonna kill us. But actually, Locknwal is a symbol of the plight that I guess a lot of US Servicemen themselves face when they come back from service abroad.

Sean Vandiver (46:41)

Well, not just U.S. servicemen. Right. It's anybody who's fighting wars. Right. There's folks in the uk, folks in Germany, folks in Australia, folks in every country in the world. If you're fighting a war and you're not rebuilt, you're not put back together, you're gonna have a lot of struggles. And even after you're put back together, you're gonna have some struggles. So you gotta treat that appropriately.

Thomas Small (46:59)

Maybe we should stop having these wars. But, Sean, the wars will not end because we live in the real world. And a lot of people listening to you will think, look, this guy's got a political agenda. He clearly doesn't like the Trump administration. He advocated for Hillary Clinton. So a very political listener would think, I Can't trust this guy. He's trying to tug on my heartstrings now, right? Making me feel sorry for these people abroad. But I don't care. I care about Americans. I'm just about Americans, okay? Imagine you're talking to someone like that. Because this sort of treatment of non Americans who work closely with America to achieve its foreign policy objectives, this kind of treatment now will have downstream effects. Real world, hard power, downstream effects. So even if you had no sympathy in your heart whatsoever for any non American, you might think carefully about the downstream effects. What could those effects be?

Sean Vandiver (47:54)

Look, when we go fight a war in a foreign country, we've got to have the support of local people who can tell us what's around the next corner, right? What are we not seeing? What do we not understand about the culture, the geography, the history? What do we need to know to effectively achieve our mission? And if people can't trust us, then our enemies are going to get that support and we're going to have more dead Americans, and we can't have that. And look, what I would say to lock and wall being a symbol is we have to roundly reject that. Right? We don't make U.S. veterans a symbol. When back in September, two U.S. veterans, two states, you know, several states apart, 13 hours apart, committed mass shootings, we didn't say we have to kick all the veterans out. This tragic shooting is an indicator that maybe we shouldn't leave people in limbo. Maybe our government needs to be more efficient. Maybe we need to do those the right way and actually improve government services. For whatever services government is going to provide, they should be able to be fast and available.

Thomas Small (48:52)

There is a moral argument, too, I think, which probably conservatives will resonate with. You know, you're a soldier, Sean, or, you know, a former soldier. And soldiers, they tend to have a kind of code of honor. When you fight alongside men, whether they're wearing your flag or they're just along for the ride, helping you out, they're still comrades in arms. They're fellow brothers. And there's gotta be something in you motivating you from the sense of the honor of a soldier. Like, we mustn't betray these men, usually men who fought with us against our foreign policy enemies. It's just shameful. And there's part of you that must think like the people in charge now, whatever their views on the world may be, they just. They're not really in sync with that soldier's code of honor.

Sean Vandiver (49:44)

Yeah, I don't think this is a political issue. At all. Right. Like, I think people, you know, if your listeners are hearing this and thinking it's a political issue, I would say that this is simply a matter of honor. When I joined the Navy, we talked a lot about honor, courage and commitment as our core values. We talked a lot about never leaving anyone behind. Like all the training was, we take care of our own, we keep our brothers in arms very close. And we, and we make sure that people make it home. As soon as these Afghans or Iraqis or Vietnamese or, you know, Kurds or whomever served alongside us, they became our brothers in arms and home became the United States of America. Because that's what we told them they would get. I think there's a real danger in turning into liars. You know, we were pissed off when Joe Biden turned us into liars. We were pissed off when Donald Trump turned us into liars. I think our track record shows that we are doing this from an honor bound place. And when I'm standing up with Republican members of Congress talking about how important this is, you know, I would work with any person, I don't care what their politics are, who believes in the idea of America and believes in the idea of honor.

Thomas Small (50:46)

Right.

Sean Vandiver (50:46)

We are honor bound to take care of these folks in such a manner that is not the bare minimum. These folks protected us.

Thomas Small (50:56)

Well, Sean, you know what a sterling example you are. I think of something great about America if, as you say, you're the son of a Hell's Angels dude, growing up in, you know, pretty straightened conditions in Bakersfield, California, to have grown up advocating for men on the other side of the world, rubbing elbows with the masters of the universe. You know, the American dream isn't entirely dead. Thank you so much, Sean Vandiver for coming onto Conflicted. I have really enjoyed getting to know you and I appreciate everything you've told us today. Thank you very much.

Sean Vandiver (51:30)

Thank you so much, Thomas and listeners. Thank you for being here and hearing our story.

Thomas Small (51:38)

That was Sean Van Diver, the founder and president of Afghan Evac. If you'd like to follow him, you'll find links in the show notes. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard Production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzie Andrews.

Sean Vandiver (52:27)

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Thomas Small (52:55)

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