Lawfare Presents: The Aftermath Lawfare & Goat Rodeo

From Lawfare and Goat Rodeo, this is ALLIES: A podcast about America’s eyes and ears during 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In order to tell you this story, we need to start at the beginning. After 9/11, the CIA set their sights on al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan. When the military invaded that fall, people up and down the chain of command learned that, in order to fight this war, the US needed local partners to help.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2003 the US started another war with the military invasion of Iraq. There, soldiers, aid workers, diplomats and politicians saw the threat that local interpreters, translators and partners faced for their work. That’s when Congress created the SIV program for Iraqi interpreters and then recreated it for Afghanistan. But it quickly became clear that this program wasn’t working as intended.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fred took a job as an Afghan interpreter in 2004. He ended up serving side-by-side with American soldiers for more than 13 years. But when the Taliban started targeting him after a mission, Fred started looking for a way out. The SIV program was supposed to help.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matt Zeller deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, where an Afghan interpreter saved his life. Matt spent years trying to get him resettled in the United States and saw the problems with the SIV program firsthand. Together, they started lobbying to fix it in Washington, DC.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We return to Fred—an Afghan combat interpreter who served with American soldiers for more than 13 years. After years of denials, an ad hoc team of lawyers and veterans tried to push his Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) application through federal bureaucracy. Then, we describe how a new president aimed to bring the SIV program to a screeching halt.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.