Travis Peterson on America's Afghan Allies.

• Author: Greene, Noor
• Position: Q&A

TRAVIS PETERSON, AN Air Force veteran who spent 21 years on active duty and four years as a military contractor, knew that America's withdrawal from Afghanistan would leave behind thousands of Afghans who had helped both U.S. and NATO coalition forces. These Afghan contractors and soldiers, he says, "fought to the death for us."

So Peterson teamed up with private citizens, retired veterans, and U.S. government personnel to create the Moral Compass Federation, a group that works to get America's allies out of Afghanistan before the Taliban finds them. In January, he spoke with Reason's Noor Greene about his efforts.

Q: Afghan allies ran missions with U.S. government personnel all along, so why was it a private effort to help them escape the Taliban?

A: That's a question that everybody's had from the very beginning. It's a question that I still have. I don't understand why it happened the way it did. Even if you go back into March [2021] and say, "Hey, we're going to shut down operations," there still was no clear picture of what we were doing. And that disengagement from the top all the way down remains to this day.

Q: Some people wonder why the Afghan forces, trained by the U.S., barely put up a fight against the Taliban. What would you say to them?

A: You have your conventional side of the military, and you have your special operations side. I don't fault the conventional at all, but they're not trained to do foreign internal defense. They're not trained to culturally work by, through, and with partner nations.

Q: Why do you think the U.S. is obligated to bring Afghan allies back to the States?

A: I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for them. There's a thousand other individuals like me that wouldn't be alive because of their battlefield intelligence.

It's actually something that we put in writing for our Afghan allies years ago: "If you helped the U.S. government, if you helped a coalition, we're going to help you get SIVs [Special Immigrant Visas] to the States."

For years I've been trying to get our allies SIV...