Jason Kander, a man Missourians may know as the former Secretary of State, said that the end to the war in Afghanistan did not sit well with him. That’s why he sprung to action, helping Afghans escape after the U.S. military’s 2021 departure.
Kander sat down with CBS’s 60 Minutes, explaining that it felt like leaving a friend behind when he promised them he would not.
“One of us said, ‘Do you worry that maybe all we’re trying to do is win the war we just lost?’ Yeah, I think there was a part of that, for sure,” Kander said. “But I want Americans to know that every Afghan that they meet did something heroic to get here.”
Kander, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, said that he played a significant role in organizing a fake wedding to evacuate nearly 400 Afghans to Albania, where they awaited resettlement in the U.S.
It’s not just his military experience that helped accomplish the mission. For Kander, it was personal.
“You know, my wife came here as a refugee at the age of 8 from Ukraine with her family,” he said. “When I looked at these little girls, that’s what I saw. I saw little Diana. So not only was quitting not an option, failure wasn’t an option.”
The rescue involved navigating Taliban checkpoints.
“If (the Taliban) they do not find you until you have made it inside the airport and you are on a manifest for a flight that is visa cleared by another country, well now if they imprison you or shoot you in the head, you are someone that was expected to land in another country and now it’s an international incident,” he explained.
Among the rescued Afghans was his translator’s family of twelve, who now live ten minutes away from the former Missouri Secretary of State.
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