Timeline Cleanser: Jason Kander Is A Mensch

Mr. Charles P. Pierce’s latest by-subscription weekend post at Esquire — “The Finest Kind of Politician”:

… In 2016, Kander made his big move, taking on incumbent U.S. Senator Roy Blunt. It was a noisy, expensive campaign in a freakish political year. (How freakish? We elected an authoritarian madman to be president that year.) Neither candidate reached 50 percent, but Blunt prevailed 49 percent to 46. After that defeat, Kander launched Let America Vote, a national organization dedicated to fighting the avalanche of voter-suppression laws that had come from various state legislatures. In 2018, while his name was being bandied about seriously as a possible presidential candidate in 2020, rumors that he frankly encouraged, Kander announced that he would be running for mayor of Kansas City. In October of 2018, however, he dropped out. And that’s where things took a turn for Jason Kander, political phenom.

In a remarkable post on his campaign Facebook page, Kander explained that he was dropping out of the mayor’s race and, for all intents and purposes, dropping out of politics entirely, to deal with unresolved issues involving depression and PTSD that he’d been toting around since coming home from Afghanistan seven years earlier…

Out of this turmoil came Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, a fine account of his personal struggle. And he kept his hand in politics, working on several projects involving his long-term interest in expanding the franchise. In August of 2021, when the U.S. pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, Kander and his wife, Diana, who’d emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989, launched the Afghan Rescue Project, an effort to evacuate the Afghan citizens who had helped the American war effort there, thus saving them from the vengeance of the Taliban, which had surged back into the leadership of the country.

In the fall of 2021, Jason Kander’s Afghan Rescue Project organized a fake wedding in Mazar-e-Sharif. They got 383 people out of Afghanistan right under the eyes of the Taliban. Jason Kander said it was “the craziest thing, the biggest thing and the most important thing I have ever done.”

No argument here.

The details behind this grand and glorious scam are only now beginning to come to light. This week, in a terrific story in the Kansas City Star by reporter Eric Adler, we got the first thorough account of how Kander and his people pulled this off. And it’s, well, epic.

It begins with Kander’s having developed a friendship with an American-born Afghan named Salam Rauffi, who had served as an interpreter for Kander and other Army officers. This meant that Salam Rauffi likely would be safe when the U.S. withdrew. But it also meant that his extended family, especially his nephew, a banker in Kabul named Rahim, did not have that particular get-out-of-jail-or-worse card. This meant that Rahim Rauffi’s name, and those of many of his relatives, like would appear went on several lists that promised very unpleasant consequences once the Taliban regained control of the country…

Through his Uncle Salam, Rahim Rauffi got in touch with Jason Kander. Neither one of them had the faintest idea what to do, but they knew they had to do something. Kander felt responsible for the family’s peril because it was Salam Rauffi’s work as a translator for him that put them on those lists. Thus was launched Operation Bella, named for Kander’s young daughter. Thus was launched a project of covert intrigue that would have done credit to John Le Carré.

Kander started a GoFundMe site to raise money to help trapped Afghans, with Jewish Vocational Service agreeing to handle the incoming funds. Back in 1989, it was Jewish Vocational Service that had helped relocate the family of Kander’s wife as Jewish refugees from Soviet Ukraine. Diana, whose maiden name was Kagan, was 8 then, arriving with her family and grandmother, also named Bella. Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in from across the country. The operation, in the end, would cost nearly $3 million. Unbeknownst to Rauffi, the secret plan to rescue his family quickly grew to a plan to rescue not just one, but two, then 10, then 20, then ultimately 75 families — or as Kander called them “383 souls.” To pull it off, Kander and colleagues had to make sure that none of the families knew of one another. “We couldn’t tell them,” Kander said, “because if one got captured, the whole thing could be lost.”

Nothing was flying out of Kabul, so Operation Bella developed an escape plan that centered in Mazar-e-Sharif. It took 15 perilous hours to move the families from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif on a road on which people were being shot at Taliban roadblocks. Once there, the families were shuffled between locations until, finally, Kander called Rahim with the plan…

After two days hunkered down in the ballroom — at one point, Taliban soldiers raided an actual wedding down the hall — the 383 “guests” made it to a darkened Airbus at the airport. They got safely away to Georgia, and thence to Albania. From there, a number of them flew to St. Louis. But Rahim Rauffi and his family came to Kansas City. Kansas City, here they came, because Jason Kander, International Wedding Planner, lived there.

“I have a lot of interest in telling this story,” Kander said. “One of my purposes hasn’t changed. I want — as there’s going to be all these Afghan Americans here now — I want Americans to understand that every Afghan American they meet did something heroic to get here. They may meet them — they may be their waiter or someone else — but they’re one of the greatest heroes they’ve ever met.”

Jason Kander may never run for office again, but if Aristotle was right, and the highest form of community is the polis, the people, then Jason Kander will be one of the highest forms of politician you ever will meet.