The American retreat from Afghanistan was an unavoidable disaster for many reasons. The non-Taliban Afghan government collapsed more quickly than most predicted, the obvious hollowness of American nation building was exposed again, and it became clear that the U.S. military couldn’t build an Afghan military.

While most of those disasters became unavoidable the instant the United States entered Afghanistan or, at best, decided to stay and build a functioning government, the abandonment of individual Afghans and their families who aided U.S. forces was entirely avoidable. Although John Glaser and I have written elsewhere what the U.S. government could have done, that window for most of those actions has closed. Glaser and I had no special powers, but we accurately made this prediction that should have been obvious to all:

Unfortunately, the government probably won’t organize itself in time to help Afghans in these ways. The last, desperate option that the Biden administration will have to consider is paroling Afghan refugees into the United States. Under presidential authority, Biden could fly refugees directly from Afghanistan or surrounding countries to the island of Guam and process them there for entry to the U.S. They could immediately start working and building new lives for themselves.

It’s still not too late to fly many Afghans out, although they’d probably have to come from neighboring countries in the coming months. Below are a few facts and predictions that could inform policymakers who will have to handle this crisis.

Potential Scale of the Coming Afghan Refugee Exodus

From 2000 to 2001, the total number of global refugees from Afghanistan under the UNHCR’s mandate increased by 222,436, or by about 1 percent of Afghanistan’s total population in that year. After almost 20 years of American occupation, the Afghan population has almost doubled to roughly 40 million (estimates are clustered between 37 million and about 39.5 million). If the same percentage of the population leaves Afghanistan as refugees in 2021–2022 as left in 2000–2001, there will be approximately 410,000 refugees in the near future.

That estimate of 410,000 refugees is probably a conservative estimate based on an earlier period when most of the Afghans who wanted to leave Afghanistan had already done so. That percentage could be much higher after almost two decades of relative prosperity, peace, and population growth. It would not be out of the realm of possibility for 2–5 percent of the population to flee in the next year or two, or about 800,000 to 2 million. Most will go to neighboring countries with large Afghan resident populations, such as Iran or Pakistan, but many will also try to go to Europe.

U.S. Admissions of Afghan Refugees and SIVs

From 2001 through July 2021, the U.S. government admitted 20,841 Afghan refugees. In addition, the U.S. government admitted about 76,000 Afghans through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program for Afghan translators, allies, and their family members who aided U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Monthly data are a bit limited, but they show big shifts in admissions of Afghan SIVs over this time with about 72,176 admitted from October 2009-July 2021 (Figure 1).

Terrorism

One of the many reasons used to oppose the rapid withdrawal of Afghans who aided American forces is that there isn’t enough time to make sure they don’t have any terrorist ties. Of course, they could be flown to Guam and vetted there if the threat were serious enough, just as we proposed here and as President Ford did with the South Vietnamese. More important are the historical terrorism data. From 1975–2017, zero people were murdered by Afghans in terror attacks on U.S. soil. During that time, three Afghan-born terrorists committed attacks or attempted attacks on U.S. soil. They were Najibullah Zazi, Zarein Ahmedzay, and Ahmad Khan Rahimi. They murdered zero people and injured about 30. From 1975–2017, the annual chance of being murdered by an Afghan terrorist in an attack on U.S. soil was zero and the chance of being injured was about one in 398,828,510 per year. Those numbers could change if the number of Afghans admitted increases, but they would have to increase substantially to matter. The risk of Afghan terrorism is small.

Crime

A National Interest piece published in 2017 claimed that Afghan refugees are a tremendous source of crime in Europe. That may be true there, although it’s difficult to check as European crime data are abysmal, but it is not true in the United States. According to data that Michelangelo Landgrave and I gathered for a recent paper on immigrant criminality, Afghan immigrants aged 18–54 in the United States were incarcerated at a rate of 127 per 100,000 Afghan immigrants in 2017. By comparison, native-born Americans in the same age range were incarcerated at a rate of 1,477 per 100,000 native-born Americans. In other words, native-born Americans were about 11.6 times as likely to be incarcerated as Afghan immigrants. Afghans don’t pose much of a serious criminal threat in the United States.

Conclusion

The United States should make an open-ended commitment to evacuate and resettle Afghans in the United States, cognizant of legitimate security and health concerns. Of special interest are those Afghans and their families who aided American forces as their lives are now in serious danger. The major arguments against such resettlement are unconvincing. If ever there were a situation where the refugee system should be expanded rapidly to account for larger numbers of people facing death, this is it.