The data-driven accounting of Enduring Welcome: issuance by administration, the backlog of Chief-of-Mission-approved allies, processing time against the standard Congress set, and the 2025 shutdown that froze flights and visas.
The United States built a program to keep its promise to the Afghans who served alongside it, ran it at record scale, and then shut it off by policy. FY2024 was the program's best year ever; since the first day of 2025, the government has not issued a single visa to a principal applicant holding an Afghan passport. The machinery works; what is missing is will.
The Unfinished Mission lays out the quantitative record behind that shutdown, and shows that the government's own most rigorous review found 55 watchlist matches, 46 of them already cleared, not the figures asserted without methodology. It closes with ten concrete steps to keep a promise the country can still keep, from restoring the SIV exemption and issuing the numbers already authorized to rebuilding a durable, conflict-agnostic wartime-allies program.
What's inside
- A letter from AfghanEvac's President and Founder
- The promise, and everyone who shared the risk
- A record year, then switched off by choice
- Issuance by administration and the Chief-of-Mission backlog
- Processing time against the standard Congress set
- The 2025 shutdown: frozen flights, suspended visas
- The security rationale, measured against the government's own review
- Built on the wrong chassis: the case for a danger-based category
- Ten recommendations to keep the promise
Who wrote this
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.
VanDiver, Shawn. The Unfinished Mission: America's Broken Promise to Afghan Wartime Allies and Mission Partners. AfghanEvac, 2026. https://reports.afghanevac.org/the-unfinished-mission/ (accessed …).