That’s how long I want to be your friend.
—“Make New Friends”
WHITE SCARVES
The two-page “kill list” was chilling to read. One hundred and twenty-five names—Afghan women I knew and admired—likely to be targeted by the Taliban after the last American troops left Afghanistan in September 2021. The departure would mark the end of the longest war in American history. It would also mark the start of a new hell for Afghans—especially women. The list had been put together by a coalition of women’s rights organizations in the United States and Afghanistan who feared that these women faced a terrible fate at the hands of the Taliban, who were known to torture or execute women who did not follow their extremist edicts. They shared it with the White House, and a concerned White House official had covertly shared it with me.
By late spring 2021, the Taliban were making steady, alarming gains. With the United States preparing to depart after twenty years of war and reconstruction, Taliban fighters were marching through the countryside and pushing back the American-trained Afghan national army. U.S. intelligence predicted that the Afghan government, led by the ineffective president Ashraf Ghani, would hold for up to a year. But that window seemed to get smaller by the day.
This was all set in motion by Donald Trump in February 2020, when he made an agreement with the Taliban (without telling President Ghani) that pledged the full withdrawal of U.S. troops. President Biden inherited this commitment when he took office in January 2021 and faced a difficult choice. Honoring Trump’s deal could doom Afghanistan to Taliban rule and prove that two decades of extraordinary effort and sacrifice had been a failure. Renouncing the agreement would mean renewed war and would require more U.S. troops put in harm’s way. Biden made the call: It was time to go. The “forever war” had to end.
As spring turned into summer and the September deadline approached, the Biden administration quietly began focusing on evacuating American troops, diplomats, and Afghans who had worked for our military and embassy in Kabul. That was a big, important undertaking. But as conversations about potential evacuations took place, I worried about the many vulnerable women who did not fall into those categories and yet were at risk for retribution by the Taliban. Leaving them behind could be a death sentence.
As I read their names, I thought about their stories—many of which I’d shared and celebrated over the years. A professor at Kabul University whose lectures on human rights and gender equality inspired countless students to continue pursuing an education. A prominent human rights lawyer who’d dedicated her life to prosecuting sexual violence and child exploitation in Afghanistan. A deputy minister in Ghani’s government who was a Fulbright Scholar to the United States and fought for women’s rights. Founders of women’s rights organizations. Judges who prosecuted the Taliban. Women who worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to rebuild their country over the last two decades with American support and encouragement. We couldn’t abandon them now.
When the Taliban first seized control of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s after a bloody civil war, women were forced to stay out of public view. They were required to wear full burqas, covering their bodies completely from head to toe with only a mesh-covered opening for their eyes, and barred from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male family member. Girls and women were banned from schools and denied social and economic rights. The stories that filtered out of the country were horrifying. I remember hearing about an elderly woman who was flogged with a metal cable until her leg was broken because a bit of her ankle was showing under her burqa. I saw photos of public executions in sports stadiums.
When Biden made the final decision in late spring to withdraw American troops, I quietly but forcefully reminded former colleagues in the White House and State Department not to forget the women. As the days slipped by and the Taliban marched closer to Kabul, I decided it was time to stop asking and start doing. If the U.S. government had its hands full, we would find more hands.
Melanne Verveer was my first call. We go way, way back. Melanne and her husband, Phil, had studied at Georgetown with Bill, and she had gone on to do great work on Capitol Hill and at People for the American Way before joining my team at the White House during the Clinton administration. For the decades I’ve known and worked with her, Melanne’s energy has been simply unstoppable—never tiring, always ready to board another plane, visit another country, meet another aspiring and inspiring leader, forge a new partnership, break another barrier.
Melanne was my chief of staff in the 1990s when the Taliban first seized power in Afghanistan. Humanitarian groups asked us to help ensure the Clinton administration did not recognize the Taliban’s new theocratic regime as a legitimate government. The more I learned about them, the more horrified I became. I began rallying international condemnation. “There probably is no more egregious and systematic trampling of fundamental rights of women today than what is happening in Afghanistan under the iron rule of the Taliban,” I said at the UN’s International Women’s Day celebration in 1999.
When I became a senator, I convened a hearing on Afghan women’s lives under the Taliban with the help of Melanne and Vital Voices, an organization we created with Madeleine Albright and the activist, philanthropist, and former U.S. ambassador to Austria Swanee Hunt, to support women leaders and promote human rights around the world. Afghan women in exile shared terrifying stories of Taliban fighters showing up at their homes and offices and asking, “Do you realize how easy it is for us to kill you?”
After 9/11, the United States overthrew the Taliban. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I traveled to Afghanistan three times to visit our troops and talk with Afghan leaders. Each time, I also made a point of meeting with Afghan women and was impressed by the contributions they were making to build a fledgling new democracy. In 2003, I helped one of the women, Farida Azizi, who needed medical treatment after a long bout of illness, get a visa to America. We appeared on national television together to talk about the importance of centering women’s rights in U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Years later, as the Taliban resumed control, I would be trying to evacuate more of those very women I’d first met with years before.
When I became secretary of state in 2009, I insisted that the Obama administration prioritize the needs and concerns of Afghan women as we surged military and economic assistance into the country and worked to build up Afghan political institutions. It wasn’t always an easy sell. “Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities,” one senior administration official told the Washington Post, anonymously of course. “There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” It’s typical of a certain myopic D.C. male point of view to consider the needs of half the population a “pet project.” Melanne, whom I had asked to serve as the first U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues when I became secretary, started calling her team the “Pet Rock Office” and redoubled her efforts. I’ll never forget when she came home from a trip to Afghanistan and reported that the women she’d met told her, “Please do not look at us as victims, but look at us as the leaders that we are.” Those words stayed with both of us.
America’s efforts in Afghanistan, along with those of our allies and the Afghans themselves, produced results: From 2001 to 2012, the average life expectancy of an Afghan woman jumped from forty-four years to sixty-two. By the time I left the State Department, infant mortality had declined by 22 percent. Under the Taliban, only nine hundred thousand boys and no girls had been enrolled in schools. By 2010, more than seven million students were enrolled, and nearly 40 percent of them were girls. Afghan women received more than one hundred thousand small personal loans that allowed them to start businesses and enter the formal economy. But corruption was rampant, the government was weak, and the Taliban proved a resilient enemy. Sometimes it felt like we were trying to help build a democracy on a foundation of quicksand. I kept reminding myself that an entire generation of Afghan women were enjoying unprecedented freedom and opportunity in large part because of American investments and sacrifices. If I forgot, Melanne was always there to remind me: The women of Afghanistan were counting on us, and Afghanistan’s future was counting on them.
This was never more true than in the final days before the country fell once more under Taliban tyranny. Melanne shared my urgency to organize an operation to help evacuate Afghan women activists, academics, government officials, and others on our list of women likely to be targeted by the Taliban. She mobilized colleagues at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, which she’d founded after leaving government. What we didn’t know yet was just how quickly we’d need to mobilize and how many names would ultimately be added to the list—but we wanted to be ready.
We made dozens of phone calls to friends and former colleagues who worked in the Biden administration and at NGOs who we knew would want to help. Almost overnight, a small team of women came together: Allie Smith and Jess Keller at the Georgetown Institute, Alyse Nelson at Vital Voices, Tanya Henderson and Teresa Casale at Mina’s List, Olivia Holt-Ivry in the State Department, Jen Klein on the White House Gender Policy Council, Julissa Reynoso in Dr. Jill Biden’s office, my longtime aide Huma Abedin, and, crucially, the Afghan women leaders Belquis Ahmadi and Horia Mosadiq.
I first met Belquis at the White House in 1999, when Bill and I presented her with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights. She was a twenty-seven-year-old women’s rights activist who fled Afghanistan when the Taliban seized control the first time and prevented her from attending school. At the time, she was working full-time, taking university courses, and caring for her three younger siblings while living in Virginia.
“Afghan women have lost lives, family members, basic human rights, human dignity and the right to be respected,” she told the White House audience. “Soon they might lose something that destroys humanity. They might lose hope.”
Belquis and I remained in touch over the years while she pursued a career in law, led USAID programs in Afghanistan, and became a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Her more than twenty years in exile and her ongoing work in Afghanistan meant that she had an intimate knowledge of the extraordinary women’s network across the country—and knew many of the women on our list.
Like Belquis, Horia Mosadiq fled Afghanistan after the Taliban took control in the 1990s. She had been studying journalism at Kabul University and worked as a journalist in Pakistan before she completed her studies in America. She returned to Afghanistan with Amnesty International in 2001. She was frequently targeted by extremists who opposed her work on behalf of women and girls, but it wasn’t until her husband and daughter were attacked that she decided to flee Afghanistan again. She settled in London, where she works to support at-risk human rights activists and advocates for women in Afghanistan. Her connections would be a lifeline for our operation.
With Belquis and Horia advising our team every step of the way, we began putting together a plan. Belquis and Horia, both fluent in Pashto and Dari, began contacting women on the list via WhatsApp and collecting addresses, passport numbers, and information about family members. At first, many of the women were reluctant to evacuate. They didn’t want to leave Afghanistan or their loved ones behind. But by July, Taliban fighters had taken control of nearly half the country as the Afghan military melted away before them. On August 6, the Taliban toppled the provincial capital of Zaranj, on the border with Iran. The next day, they had taken a second provincial capital. The next day, they took three cities. By August 12, the Taliban had defeated the Afghan national forces in Kandahar and Herat—the two largest cities after Kabul. Taliban fighters were pictured holding rifles and riding through the streets in the back of armored Ford pickup trucks. It felt like a sickening time warp. No one could quite believe the speed with which they were advancing and how easily the Afghan military was giving up. The streets of Kabul were quickly becoming crowded with terrified families who had fled provinces now under Taliban control. Belquis received a phone call from one of the women telling her that the Taliban was near and she needed to say her goodbyes.
We knew we had to move fast. We grouped the women based on where they lived, connected them via WhatsApp, and organized shelter and transportation to the airport neighborhood by neighborhood. We secured safe houses from local domestic violence shelters and hotel rooms near Kabul’s airport so that women on our list could be in position when the time was right. One woman housed thirty-five fellow evacuees in her two-bedroom apartment for a night. Women were asked not to tell their family members where they were going. Don’t wear jewelry under your clothes or pack luggage. When you leave home, it should look like you’re going to the market. Bring an extra phone battery if you have one and extra diapers if you’re bringing an infant. Wait for our signal that it’s time to head to the airport.
Alyse and her team at Vital Voices created a fundraising campaign to rent buses, pay drivers, and charter flights, led by board member and my good friend Diane von Furstenberg. They raised $10 million in just two weeks.
Our team also set up a 24/7 Zoom room where we could immediately share information with one another across continents and time zones, particularly in emergencies. Huma and other team members would fall asleep with their laptops open beside them and wake in the middle of the night to a voice asking, “Are you there? Is anybody there?” The Zoom room stayed open for the next three months. Someone was always there.
Word spread to other Afghan women and their families. The team was quickly overwhelmed by a flood of messages from women all over the country. They’d send photos of their family members who had been beaten by the Taliban or of their children, begging us for help. Look at these faces, they’d write. Is Hillary going to leave our children to die? It was overwhelming. Our list grew from 125 names to 500 to more than 1,500. By the end of summer we were working with thousands of names of women and their family members. Belquis and Horia had heartbreaking phone calls with the women about which family members they could bring with them. Some family members didn’t have passports or even the Afghan national IDs needed to board a plane. Other women were weighing impossible choices, like whether to leave behind a son in order to evacuate a niece likely to suffer more under the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime.
On August 13, U.S. marines arrived in Kabul to provide extra help evacuating embassy personnel. That same day, Taliban forces captured Pul-i-Alam, another provincial capital, only forty miles from Kabul. Two days later, the Taliban arrived at Kabul’s gates. The city fell into their hands without resistance from Afghan forces. President Ghani fled the country by helicopter. Photos and videos emerged of Taliban fighters posing with rifles behind Ghani’s carved wooden desk in the presidential palace. Afghan flags were lowered across the city. Long queues formed outside banks as Afghans desperately tried to withdraw cash. I was heartbroken by what I was seeing on the news.
Amid this chaos, the first group of women on our list and their families were dropped off at the airport. But U.S. marines at the gate refused to recognize their e-visas, which we’d worked with the State Department to secure. There was clearly a miscommunication, and it left the women confused and exposed. They sent us frantic WhatsApp messages. What were they supposed to do now? They couldn’t get past the airport gates, and they couldn’t go home because the Taliban would be looking for them.
Thousands of miles away, our team scrambled to make sense of what to do next. Our most immediate concern was getting the women and their families to a safe location. Horia quickly managed to place most of our women in safe houses around Kabul. One woman retreated to a nearby gas station and spent the night hiding in a bathroom stall after she saw Taliban fighters gathering outside. Through the sleepless night, we devised a new evacuation plan.
By morning, Taliban troops were patrolling Kabul. They struck a tenuous agreement with U.S. officials to keep the airport open and allow evacuations to continue. The Taliban wanted to be sure U.S. troops really did leave as promised and seemed to understand that the alternative to cooperation was renewed fighting. But how long would their patience last? And did they have command and control over poorly trained fighters suddenly charged with working alongside “infidels” they’d spent their lives battling?
Time was clearly of the essence. Again, we found a plane that could fly the first group from our list to safety. Now we needed to get the women from the safe houses back to the airport, but it wouldn’t be easy. An estimated twenty thousand Afghans had already surged into the airport, with thousands more trying to shove their way in. The airport gates became an unpredictable bottleneck, with U.S. soldiers, troops from partner nations, Taliban fighters, international diplomats, and huge crowds all jostling together.
On my flights into Afghanistan over the years I had landed either in Kabul or at the military airport, Bagram Airfield, just thirty-five miles away. But now Bagram was deserted. One thing I learned as a former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and as secretary of state is that the U.S. military wastes no time in carrying out an order. Once the remaining troops in Afghanistan received word in mid-April that they needed to withdraw, they packed their bags. The military base that once housed forty thousand American troops was a ghost town by July 2021. This left Kabul’s commercial airport as the main evacuation route.
From a security standpoint, the airport is terribly located. It can be approached by several roads that are narrow and lined with street vendors. One of the entrances, Abbey Gate, is bound by a sewage canal on one side. Large vehicles or crowds of people can quickly cause a bottleneck.
The rest of the city, including the roads leading to the airport, was now firmly in Taliban control. Reports emerged that militants were going door-to-door examining documents and electronic devices. Roadblocks and checkpoints went up. They were stopping cars and searching people’s phones. Panicked Afghans began deleting foreign contacts and burning documents that might connect them to the Americans, ultimately making their evacuations harder. One woman on our list reported that the Taliban had shown up at her mother’s door demanding to know where she was and threatening to kill her. Others reported that the offices of their NGOs had been ransacked, and they were terrified about what information the Taliban might have gleaned from their files.
With Belquis’s and Horia’s contacts in Kabul, we hired inconspicuous, run-down grocery trucks to pick up and transport the women to the airport. We’d told them to keep their phone locations turned on but to delete our WhatsApp chat history and foreign phone numbers in case the Taliban searched their devices.
Bill and I were vacationing with Louise Penny and friends in Quebec, although it was impossible for me to focus on anything but what was happening in Kabul. While Bill and everybody else slept, I worked the phones and continued making calls over the following days. I called UN secretary-general António Guterres, asking for the UN’s assistance providing water to the crowds outside the airport gates in the blazing August sun. I called Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, his chief of staff, and Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro and told them about our small operation. They said they would put the names of our women on a list so that the U.S. marines guarding the airport would let them through.
We needed a way to make our group more easily identifiable in the crowds around the airport if the women had any hope of reaching the marines at the gate. Belquis quickly thought of a solution: white scarves. Every Afghan woman had one. Our team told the women to tie white scarves to their handbags. By the end of August, the U.S. military’s CENTCOM was referring to us as Operation White Scarves.
I heard that Amed Khan, a philanthropist friend, was trying to secure planes from various countries that could help evacuate at-risk Afghans, so we joined forces. I called the Ukrainian government and asked if it would send planes to support our evacuation. It said yes. I called the Qatari government and asked for its help arranging flights, visas, and transport through Kabul. It said yes.
I called the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, to ask if he could accept some of our women en route to their final resettlement countries. He readily agreed to temporarily house a thousand of the women and their family members for one year in an offseason summer resort. I called the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to ask if he would also accept some of our women and families. It was not clear that they would have a path to permanent residency in the United States—assuming they could make it there in the first place—and that meant they might be at risk of being deported back to Afghanistan. Trudeau was supportive and agreed to accept as many as a thousand women and family members on refugee visas.
