Afghanistan's refugee crisis: after 14 years of U.S occupation, Afghans are voting with their feet.

• Author: Garcia, J. Malcolm

KABUL -- We sit in the shade near the shore of Qargha Lake in Kabul. The anemic shadows cast by thin trees point toward pitted paths where vendors sell fruit. On a road nearby, cars lurch through valleys of ruined pavement toward some distant hilltop destination.

"This is the only place for sightseeing in Kabul," says Jamshid Ahmady, twenty-eight. "We have this lake and the zoo. We don't have anything else to do in Kabul beside these two things--and avoid dying in a bomb blast."

Ahmady wears jeans, a button-down orange shirt, and shined leather shoes. He drinks Red Bull. He remembers the Taliban, but the memories do not weigh on him. What worries Ahmady now is the rising instability and lack of jobs. Like many other young Afghans, he plans to leave Afghanistan for Europe as soon as he can. He's already made one failed attempt.

"Escaping," Ahmady calls it. "Skipping out," others say. However they describe it, the modus operandi remains the same: talking to a smuggler and paying thousands of dollars to leave a country that has been mired in war for close to forty years, including fourteen since the United States invaded in the aftermath of 9/11.

More than 40,000 Afghans have sought sanctuary in Europe from January until August of this year, according to the United Nations. Syrians comprised the largest group of refugees in Europe. Eritreans accounted for the second-largest number, and Afghans made up the third.

Many Afghans worry that the Afghan National Army, in the wake of the impending NATO troop withdrawal, will not have the capability to secure the country. In 2014, the last American commander to lead combat operations in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Joseph Anderson, described the casualty rate among the Afghan army as unsustainable.

Afghan men and women who worked as interpreters for the United States and other allied forces are among those who want to leave. The Special Immigration Visa, a U.S. program designed to expedite the visa process for Afghan and Iraqi interpreters, entails a lengthy, and costly, application process. Translators and their families mired in the program's red tape risk retribution from the Taliban with each passing day.

Young Afghans today don't want to make the same mistake as their parents, many of whom stayed after the Russians left, and lived through civil war and the rise of the Taliban.

Despite assurances by the United States that NATO's departure will not be a repeat of the 1990s, many people here have...