Forget the Gold Card—We Need a ‘Red Card’ for Afghan Partners 

The second term of President Donald Trump is already iconic. A would-be assassin shot him, the government tried to put him in prison, and he still came out on top. Better yet, along the way he never lost touch with his loyal backers, whose affection for him has only grown, and he even picked up some new supporters from every background. Trump has created a new sense of optimism after years of uncertainty and distrust between conservatives and their government.

As he put it during his speech to Congress earlier this month: “America is back” and entering its “Golden Age.” Trump promised in the address that the U.S. would soon begin selling the $5 million “Gold Card,” a clever play on the Green Card. The cards will ensure “the most successful job-creating people from all over the world” will opt to “buy a path to U.S. citizenship,” Trump said Tuesday.

“America is back.”

“Gold.”

Those words are still stuck in my head two weeks later as I continue to work with my team at the Vulnerable People Project to serve our friends in Afghanistan, where the Biden administration bungled the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. forces, sparking chaos and violence and leaving American partners at the mercy of a new Taliban government.

The Gold Card proposal remains stuck in my head too, and it brings to mind another obvious idea, one that I hope Trump will soon adopt as his own: a card for foreign nationals who have already paid an expense worth more than $5 million.

I mean the brave men and women who served alongside our troops in Afghanistan over the twenty years of our occupation, only to be abandoned and to find themselves hunted by a vengeful Taliban that will never forgive them for supporting America’s mission.

These Afghan translators, intelligence support staffers, and others didn’t just offer money. They gave themselves and their families. They put their very lives and those of their spouses and children in America’s hands. The Vulnerable People Project has been serving these forgotten heroes.

As I wrote with my Afghan friend Prince Wafa in May 2022, Biden’s surrender

doomed to persecution some 100,000 Afghans who’d served shoulder to shoulder with American men and women in uniform. The State Department admits that a majority of Afghans who earned Special Immigrant Visas during the war got left behind. The Taliban is hunting them, while you read these words.

Those words still hold true. So do these: 

The best way we can honor those service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice, especially the 2,448 warriors who died in Afghanistan, is to work to bring home to the U.S. the Afghans who saved countless American lives, who bled alongside our soldiers.

The U.S. Army Rangers have a creed. It includes this phrase: “I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.” The Biden administration clearly never felt such a sentiment. We’ll have to teach it to them.

In the coming weeks, in fact, I will be going dark and traveling to visit the safe houses my team and I have created and monitored ever since the fall of Afghanistan—as the ruthless Taliban government there continues to escalate its threats of mass violence against our friends.

As an Army vet myself, I will never abandon these comrades. Never.

Trump, who had ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan, would have done a much better job executing it than Biden, a disastrously incompetent leader. The president now has an opportunity to rectify one of the worst mistakes his successor made. As Trump has said, he won last year’s election decisively, though the odds were stacked against him, and now has a moral mandate to undo Biden policies that the American public found reprehensible.

Trump knows that among the disgraced Biden administration’s most universally hated crimes was its dishonorable abandonment of our friends in Afghanistan—a historic wrong that perhaps only the equally historic return of Trump could reverse.

He can do it with a policy just as obvious and easily achievable as selling the Gold Card: by offering our Afghan allies a path to citizenship as a reward for their great sacrifices to American interests.

And since they have proved themselves willing to pay with their blood, call it the Red Card.

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