160,000 Afghans reside in America.. These are their positions on the return of the Taliban to rule Afghanistan and the American withdrawal from it

Washington -

Immediately after the school year ended last June, Khairzadeh Hamid and his wife, both in their late 70s, left their home in Montgomery County, Maryland, adjacent to Washington, to the Afghan capital, Kabul, to visit the rest of his family there and to sell a plot of land and a house they owned at the same time. .

Khairzadeh planned to return to Washington before the start of the new school year scheduled for next week, so that he and his wife would do what they had done over the past years, delivering their grandchildren to their schools and helping them with their homework.

However, with the rapid developments in Afghanistan over the past few days, Khairzadeh's three children or seven grandchildren do not know when the elder of their family will return to them.

An Afghani restaurant in the heart of Washington, DC (Al Jazeera Net)

Khairzadeh came as a refugee to the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and settled in the Washington area and obtained US citizenship in the early 1990s.

Khairzadeh's case is similar to that of thousands of Americans of Afghan descent whose return to their homeland has been hampered by recent developments.

The data of non-governmental organizations concerned with assisting refugees indicate that the number of Afghans inside the United States is close to 160 thousand people, and the largest proportion of them reached the American lands in 3 waves, the first with the Soviet invasion of 1979, and the second after the Taliban came to power in the mid-1990s, and the last of them after the start of The US invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001.

The Afghan American community is mainly concentrated in the states of California, New York and Virginia, and the passage of several laws by Congress has facilitated Afghans’ access to American lands, the most important of which are the United States Refugee Act of 1980, the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009, and the Afghan Allies Protection Extension Act of 2014 .

A demonstration in Washington in support of Afghanistan and a protest against the return of the Taliban to rule the country (European)

Anger at Biden's position

Khairzadeh's children are making continuous efforts to reach out to the State Department and the Montgomery County Congressional offices in order to ensure the speedy return of their elderly parents.

In an interview with Al Jazeera Net, one of Khairzadeh's sons confirmed that he "will not vote again for the Democratic Party, which failed the Afghan people as the whole world saw."

The sons say they constantly talk to their father, and note that telephone and internet services have not been affected at all in Kabul.

Khairzadeh's children and grandchildren participated in a small demonstration of 300 people outside the White House to protest the position of the Biden administration.

Most Afghan Americans blame the administration of President Joe Biden for the deterioration and chaos that the world witnessed, especially in the vicinity of Kabul Airport.

Shame on America

In an interview with Al-Jazeera Net, Professor Nazif Shahrani, a professor of Afghan origins at Indiana University, considered that "the decision to withdraw American forces came 20 years late, and from his point of view, the American forces should have returned to the country after their victory over the Taliban in 2001, but the United States continued its presence." It's there in the name of the war on terror, and it has failed miserably after 20 years."

The great American military victory - says Shahrani - ended at the hands of President Biden with a humiliating loss after the longest American war, and "this is Washington's second abandonment of the people of Afghanistan, and this is a disgrace to the United States, especially in the way it negotiated its peace with the Taliban, and left the country." At the same time that corrupt Afghan President Ashraf Ghani also withdrew, giving the Taliban a victory they weren't expecting, at least not in the way it did.

Afghan demonstrators protest against Biden's decision to end hostilities in Afghanistan (Al Jazeera Net)

Professor Shahrani blamed the CIA and other security institutions that were running the war in Afghanistan, and believes that they "relyed on their favorite Afghans such as Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad and others, and made no effort to reach out to others, and as a result they did not get the full picture." facts in Afghanistan.

Shahrani accused the US government of being naive, as it fed on "information from the perspectives of a few who came from only one ethnic group (Pashtuns) and who dominated Afghanistan's politics in the past. What ultimately resulted in the victory and return of the Taliban."

Shahrani expressed his anger at the official US authorities' neglect of the Afghan community inside the United States in planning, coordinating, or even listening to the opinions of its symbols, academics or experts.