The Philippines Has Agreed to Host a United States Visa Processing Center for Afghan Allies; Update Re: Afghanistan

Filipino-American Agreement for a U.S. Visa Processing Center for Afghan Allies: The Philippines has agreed to host a visa-processing center for a few hundred Afghan refugees who had worked for the United States while the U.S. and its allies had backed the Afghan Government against the Islamist Taliban regime that had harbored the al-Qaeda Islamist terrorists. Al-Qaeda was responsible for the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks on American that killed nearly 3,000 people, which was the deadliest act of terrorism in world history. The U.S. led an international coalition, together with Afghan allies, to overthrow the Taliban and attack al-Qaeda, and then supported Afghanistan’s government against the Islamists, but after the disastrous Trump-Biden premature withdrawal from Afghanistan that I have posted about, the Taliban returned to power and many Afghans became refugees. Thousands of Afghans who worked for the American have been scattered around the world wherever they could find asylum with their Afghan-issued passports. The Afghans who will undergo visa processing in the Philippines have already passed security and medical checks. After they receive their visas in a few months, they will be resettled in America, where they will join 161,000 other Afghans the U.S. was able to rescue before the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, and then resettled them in America. The Taliban targets Afghans who worked for the U.S. for persecution and murder. Instead of protecting the Afghan allies of the U.S., Trump undermined American security by implementing duplicate processes in the security checks and then cutting the budget and staff to process the visa requests. The Philippines, which was granted independence by the U.S. in 1945 after it had been liberated from Spain during the Spanish-American War and again from the Japanese Empire during the Second World War, had taken in refugees from Communist Vietnam and Jews from the Holocaust. Filipino-American relations have improved since populist President Rodrigo Duterte “the Filipino Trump” left office and amidst growing assertiveness by Communist China of territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea. Update on Afghanistan: Meanwhile, Afghan National Resistance Front (NRF), which is the successor to the U.S.-backed Afghan allies committed to liberty, representative government and respect for all ethnicities, is sending a petition signed by more than a quarter million Afghans to the U.S. Congress, urging it to pause humanitarian aid to Afghanistan to ensure none of it falls into the hands of the Taliban, as over 10% of the $2.8 billion in American aid has. The NRF is also asking that their leader testify before Congress about the increased presence in Afghanistan of al-Qaeda, which is intertwined with the Taliban.