From the time the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, taking tens of thousands of Afghani citizens with them, there has been no shortage of alternative solutions, and opinions - both good and bad - on how the withdrawal was executed and how it should have been executed.
Since then, the words ‘Brain Drain’ have started to bloom everywhere. Should the US have chosen only the best and the brightest Afghani people to take with them? Some argue the ethics of this - it is the most vulnerable and powerless that everyone should be trying to save. Activists around the world believe that it should only have been women and girls rescued from the Taliban and the concomitant future of servitude and suppression. During the US’s quandary about who they should save and prioritize, women in Afghanistan were already burning their degrees and certificates, female journalists were wiping the Internet clean of a trace of their work, and artists were destroying their art that may be viewed as unorthodox.
On the other hand, there is growing discourse about who deserves to leave the country. Some people cite the population of Syrian doctors, lawyers, and teachers in Germany - when the German government chose to give asylum to a large population of skilled Syrians so that they could add to the country’s economic growth and assimilate more smoothly into its population. This would ultimately be most beneficial for the US - to advance with the help of skilled, educated workers. In the long run, it could even be beneficial to Afghanistan - for the diaspora to return and ‘rebuild’ their home country and gradually reduce the income disparity between the two nations, however long it may take. This may even give the migrants a sense of purpose that they often lose when they separate from their homes and families.
This point can be argued against, as well. There has been a rising anti-immigrant sentiment in countries like Germany, England and Hungary, particularly for the last two decades, which was one of the factors that led to the renowned ‘Brexit’ only last year, which was spurred on by the popular idea that immigrants, and especially South Asian immigrants, were taking away employment opportunities for the ‘natives'. This xenophobia has led to tangible challenges for minority immigrant populations, with rapidly rising violence and verbal abuse. In addition, the thousands of Afghani citizens that have been interviewed during and after this withdrawal feel that Afghanistan ‘holds no future’ for them any longer. Taking the brightest out of the country that want no connection with their nation may result in a rapid and irreversible deterioration of the nation of Afghanistan and the slow erosion of the human rights afforded to its current inhabitants, which would inevitably start spreading to the countries near it.
Currently, there is no consensus in sight, or even an agreed upon alternative for the US government’s withdrawal strategy, though it is still being challenged and questioned and certainly discussed. I, like millions of others around the world, am still unsure about the right way, or even the better way that the US could have withdrawn. Although, I still have hope that the future of the thousands of men, women, and children that have found asylum have fulfilling and bright futures ahead of them.
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