We Must Do Right by Our Afghan Friends, Allies.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Editor's Notes

* Sometimes an issue in the news hits a little too close to home. I pride myself in employing logic and reason in these columns, but sometimes emotion gets in the way.

For months, some 18,000 Afghan interpreters and their families waited for visas to escape a possible Taliban takeover of Kabul--something that isn't inevitable--but "hope for the best, plan for the worst," as they say.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle pleaded with the Biden administration to do something to help these allies and avoid another Saigon, April 30, 1975 type of situation, but for weeks and months nothing happened. I felt myself grow angrier and angrier every day. Finally, a few days before press time, President Joe Biden announced that the State Department would begin airlifting those who are at risk out of the country.

The reason I had such an emotional response to the issue was because of my friend Ahmad Zia Rawish.

They say when you make an Afghan friend, you've made a friend for life. They would give you the coat off their back--take a bullet for you.

Zia was one of my students when I was a young man in 1989-91 working with Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. I was a 26-year-old teaching English to a bunch of fierce looking bearded men in their 30s and 40s. But looks deceived. They were mostly doctors and engineers, hoping to earn a scholarship to an American college, part of a USAID program organized by the University of Nebraska-Omaha's Center for Afghanistan Studies.

I have never in all my travels--before or since--met a kinder and bigger-hearted people. For a nation whose factions are always at war with each other, I admit this is a paradox.

Zia was a former Kabul University professor of economics who had fled the Communist regime and ended up as an accountant for the United Nation's demining program in Peshawar.

A mutual friend-for-life I made there was Army Staff Sgt. Frederick "OT" Otero, part of a Special Forces A-team that taught Afghans to dismantle mines under the U.N. program.

Zia ended up earning a scholarship to Park University in Kansas City, not far from where OT settled after he retired from the Army following the Gulf War. I returned to my hometown Omaha and drove to Kansas to meet with OT and Zia a few times.

Afghanistan by that time was a mess. With the Soviet puppet regime out of the picture, Kabul was being shelled daily by one side or another. Ideally, the students I prepared for college life in the United States were meant to...