A companion to The Unfinished Mission that looks beyond the United States to the whole coalition and a century of precedent before it: how nations keep, and break, their commitments to the local staff who serve their missions abroad, and the case for a shared set of Global Alliance principles. Produced in partnership with Local Staff International.
Every nation that fights a war abroad depends on local people to make the mission work, and every nation eventually faces the same question when the war ends: what does it owe them? The Allied Ledger answers that question as a ledger, across the coalition that served in Afghanistan and across a century of precedent before it. The record is remarkably consistent. Where governments made durable commitments and sustained the political will to keep them, allies were protected; where they did not, allies were abandoned.
The report walks the country ledger one government at a time, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and the rest of the coalition, then sets those choices against the longer historical record, from the Assyrian Levies to the Harkis, the Montagnards, the Hmong, and Iraq. From that evidence it builds the case for the Global Alliance Principles, a standard governments and their partners can adopt so that a mission is not counted finished until its commitments to local staff are kept.
What's inside
- A letter from the authors
- Executive summary
- The Unfinished Mission: the international and historical context
- The case for the Global Alliance Principles and the rights and protection of local staff
- The implications of the failure to protect
- The country ledger: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, France, and the rest of the coalition
- The longer record: historical precedents from the Assyrian Levies to Iraq
- Cross-cutting design lessons and what the record teaches
- What you can do
- Methodology, sourcing, and sources
Who wrote these
A U.S. Navy veteran who founded and leads the #AfghanEvac coalition. It came together to build Enduring Welcome alongside the U.S. government and civil society; today it works to hold the government accountable to that promise and to lift the voices of Afghans.
A professor at the University of York and Co-Founder of Local Staff International. Her research examines how governments account for the locally employed civilians who served alongside Western forces, the comparative backbone of this report.
A Board Member of Local Staff International, which advocates for the interpreters, guards, and staff who worked alongside allied militaries and diplomatic missions. She helped shape the cross-national survey at the heart of this report.
Board Chairman of Aman Lara, the organization that has helped move Afghans who served alongside coalition forces to safety. He brings the operational view of relocation to the report's cross-national comparison.
VanDiver, Shawn, Sara de Jong, Julia Aitken, and Jon Feltham. The Allied Ledger: How nations keep, and break, commitments to wartime allies. AfghanEvac, 2026. https://reports.afghanevac.org/allied-ledger/ (accessed …).