Five Years After the Fall of Kabul, a Report Says Governments Should Protect Local Staff From Day One

Advocacy groups are marking five years since the West left Afghanistan with a clear message to governments: plan for the safety of locally hired staff before a mission even starts.

The report, called "The Allied Ledger," was published on Aug. 13, 2026 by two organizations: Local Staff International, based in Berlin and co-chaired by Sara De Jong, and AfghanEvac, based in the United States. The date is the fifth anniversary of Kandahar falling back into Taliban hands. Kabul fell three days later, touching off a chaotic evacuation that became the defining crisis of the Western exit (The Globe and Mail).

During the war in Afghanistan, foreign militaries, governments and aid agencies hired local people — interpreters, drivers, fixers and administrative workers — to help them operate. These are called locally engaged staff. The report looks at how different countries have handled resettling these staff members and lays out guidelines for doing better in the future.

The report's main recommendation is simple: any military, diplomatic or aid mission should plan, from the beginning, how local staff will be supported during the mission, when it ends, and if a crisis follows. It also recommends limiting local staff employment to set time periods, similar to how soldiers are deployed for fixed tours. It calls for countries to agree on shared definitions of who counts as connected to a foreign mission, and to keep proper records so future immigration applications can rely on real documentation.

The numbers tell a sobering story. There is no official count of how many Afghans were hired by foreign militaries, governments or aid agencies during the war. Before Afghanistan's collapse, about 800 Afghans and their families connected to Canada's role were resettled under earlier immigration programs. That number, in hindsight, captured only a fraction of the people at risk.

During the evacuation, each country made up its own rules for who qualified for resettlement. This was especially painful for Afghans who thought they had worked for a single, co-ordinated NATO mission. They discovered that their options depended entirely on which country's flag had flown over the compound where they worked.

AfghanEvac has kept tracking what happened next. In February 2026, it held what it called the largest globally concentrated briefing on relocating and resettling Afghan mission partners. Its Global Alliance initiative urges governments to finish resettling all Afghan allies who were deemed eligible, approved, or placed into government-created pathways (AfghanEvac). The organization also runs a continuously updated guide to U.S. visa categories and pathways, and keeps a litigation tracker covering lawsuits over the Afghan refugee ban, visa processing, parole, and Temporary Protected Status.

A separate AfghanEvac report on a U.K. data breach involving Afghan records notes that the relevant Committee recommended future governments treat that case as exceptional and not as a precedent. The group says this is a signal that data governance failures during evacuations remain unresolved as policy (AfghanEvac).

Life after resettlement is also under scrutiny. A 2026 review by Amanzai and colleagues looks at the experiences of Afghan refugees in North America after resettlement and gathers evidence on integration challenges. Since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, between 4,000 and 5,000 Afghan refugees are expected to resettle in Los Angeles County alone.

The broader context here is one of institutional learning — or the absence of it. The report's prescriptions are straightforward: agree on definitions, keep records, plan for the end. Yet the fact that these must be stated as recommendations five years after the evacuation suggests how little allied governments have actually systematized the lessons. NATO ran a co-ordinated military campaign but left the moral and legal obligation toward local civilians fractured. Each country operated its own immigration pathway with its own evidence requirements. The result was a triage system that left thousands in limbo, many of whom had documentation the allied military itself had produced but not kept in a form usable for resettlement claims.

For Canadians, the report lands in familiar territory. Ottawa's Afghan resettlement programs have been spread across multiple departments — Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, National Defence, and Global Affairs Canada — with eligibility rules that shifted between programs. The 800 people resettled before the collapse reflect a pathway that closed before the full need was clear. Later special measures reached more people, but processing backlogs, paperwork demands, and the challenge of verifying employment through intermediaries in other countries have remained as sticking points common to every allied program.

What The Allied Ledger ultimately proposes is a change in thinking: locally engaged staff should not be treated as a humanitarian afterthought once a mission ends. They are a workforce whose terms, records, and contingency plans should be designed before a mission begins. Whether allied governments will adopt those principles before the next crisis is a question of political will, not a lack of analysis.