Same for me. And, they would likely have discounted any “level 4 warning” as, “Well, sure, it’s dangerous if you are a typical American tourist, but I’m not. I’m native. I know the language, the people, where I’m going, and I blend in.”
Not an unreasonable position to take.
Have you been to El Cajon ? No surprise they wanted to go back.
(Sorry, East County. I still love ya’…)
[Moderating]
I’ve edited the title to make it clearer that this wasn’t something the school district itself did.
[/Moderating]
Having lived in countries that the US issued warnings about, I’m going to express a little sympathy for the students. As others have pointed out, they might have badly wanted to visit family and might have (correctly) felt safer than a random American tourist who doesn’t know the language/culture/geography.
Moreover, while I have no doubt that State Department warnings were utterly correct in this instance, for those of us who have been following them for years, they suffer a bit from the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. My understanding is that prior to the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, those advisories either didn’t exist or they were much less detailed/cautious than they are now. It came to light after the bombing that US intelligence had been aware of the likelihood of an incident but told no one. There was an outcry - “lives could have been saved if you had shared that information!” - and since then the US government has been very activist in issuing warnings. (I believe I heard this story from a reliable source in the diplomatic community, but I cannot personally vouch for it so there is a chance I’m wrong.)
Anyway, I lived in Indonesia during the fall of Suharto, the financial crisis, and September 11, and in Egypt when the US invaded Iraq in 2003 - in the last two instances with a young child. The State Department warnings varied in their degree of severity during these bits of history, but definitely got pretty intense at points. For several years my husband, whose salary came from the US government through a grant to a consulting firm, got a premium for living somewhere dangerous. We thought the extra money was nice, but silly.
No way in hell would I have stayed in a place with a little child if I didn’t feel we were safe - in fact, my son and I did evacuate to Singapore briefly after Sept 11, a choice we later felt was unnecessary. My point is, things on the ground, when you know your way around, don’t necessarily align with what you read in government warnings.
Or what you see n the news, for that matter. During the fall of Suharto, CNN was ablaze with video of people throwing rocks and setting a bus on fire, implying that the whole country, or at least the capital, was going up in flames. Guess what? I lived RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER from Megawati’s headquarters (where the mayhem was filmed). I actually walked through the cinders of a charred something that was burned on the street. It was NOTHING like what you’d believe if your source of information was just CNN. Yes, there was plenty of disturbance - but it was largely short-lived, and for a foreigner quietly going about their business, it was not particularly risky. (It was terrible for Chinese Indonesians, but not us.)
I don’t mean to make light of the sacrifices made by Indonesian dissidents through the decades - there were many brave individuals whose protests cost them dearly, and Indonesia is better today because they put their personal safety at risk. Still, that doesn’t mean every single person in the country was at risk - it was certainly possible to remain safe all of the times I was there (and in Egypt as well) if you kept your head down.
I’m not 100% defending the decision to travel to Afghanistan. Just as I was writing this, the New York Times is reporting casualties and deaths outside the Kabul airport. Should the students have gone? No, I don’t think they should have. But there were plenty of people who thought my family was crazy living in Indonesia and Egypt, because they information they were exposed to was so different than our personal first-hand experiences.
I’m just saying, the decision-making process was quite likely more nuanced than what some posters are giving credit for. When you’ve got to weigh a whole lot of factors, you don’t believe the news is necessarily as bad as people say it is and you also don’t necessarily believe the risk will completely extend to you, and you love people you’ve left behind, it could be a tough choice.
I’m going to disagree with this. Especially since many of those Level 4 because of Covid countries have less Covid than the US. Saying that half the world is so dangerous that you shouldn’t leave the more-dangerous-for-the-same-reason country you live in is a massive communication failure by the State Dept.
If Level 4 means “Absolutely do not go there”, then it should be reserved for situations where traveling somewhere is more dangerous than staying at home.
Excellent post.
@CairoCarol The thing that confuses me about that is this: if you know people in Afghanistan, I’d expect you should have known this really was that bad. Everyone knew that, when the US pulled out, the Taliban was going to take over. It was only a matter of time. It was not going to be safe to try and go back to the US at that point.
I’m sympathetic to the fact that, due to the COVID restrictions, they didn’t get to go last year, and probably thought this was a now or never situation. Maybe they bought the more rosy predictions that they’d have a couple weeks to leave before the Taliban took over. Still, it seems odd to want to be around during that transition, either.
What I do 100% understand and agree with is that the system you describe is faulty. According to Beau of the Fifth Column, there is an unofficial 5th level to this system, which boils down to “GET OUT, NOW!” meaning there is imminent danger. This is apparently communicated to the people who are there, working with the military as civilians. I could see these students not getting that memo.
I’m just not sure about why their Afghan relatives wouldn’t have told them that it was going to go badly. Did they not know, somehow?
A reasonable question, but not one I can answer.
Perhaps they wanted to visit relatives before the Taliban took full control and make travel to there impossible?
Did everyone know that? I will honestly admit that I didn’t really know anything about Afghanistan and I bet the majority of people were similarly ignorant. Perhaps I was not paying sufficient attention, but of course I was also not planning a trip to Afghanistan, so this may be rational ignorance.
And even if people expected that the Taliban would take over eventually, there’s a big difference between “the government is unlikely to last a decade” and “the government is unlikely to last a week” in terms of vacation planning.
Before the beginning of the pull-out, I was hearing most predictions were the Afghan government would last maybe weeks, not months.
Sure, the average American wouldn’t know it, but I was talking about the average Afghan, who would have, I presume, a more vested interest in how their country was going to change.
Sure, the conventional wisdom in the US was that it would take 60 days before the former government fell to the Taliban, rather than the two weeks it actually took. But it still doesn’t seem like the place you’d want to be during that time, when all the fighting was going on.
I’m not saying everyone involved knew how bad it would get, but that they knew it would get bad.
My best bet is sill the pandemic restrictions putting a delay on an earlier planned trip, and people just not wanting to give up the chance to visit home one last time after they’d already planned to do it.
I hope they make it out okay. They’re not military, and they’re not helping the military, so maybe the other factions won’t target them. I’m pretty sure the leaders in the Taliban are willing to let them leave, though I could see some individuals within it being angered by Afghans who want to live in the US. But I’m more worried about the other factions that want to make a statement, like the ones who attacked the airport.
As of Aug. 27, the district said one of the eight families were still in Afghanistan; the other seven families had either returned home or were safe and on their way
Best answer so far.
I think the Taliban isn’t a threat right now but ISIS might be.