Has America Abandoned an Afghan Interpreter? : The New Yorker:
Interpreting at village meetings or during interrogations of Taliban prisoners, Shinwari made no effort to hide his face. Zeller once asked him why. “I want them to know me,” Shinwari said. “I don’t scare for them.” He was a striking man, tall and long-haired, and it seemed that everyone in Ghazni knew who he was, and inevitably his name made it onto a Taliban death list. He began getting threats in the form of “night letters”—his head would be cut off, one said. At the end of 2008, as Zeller prepared to leave Afghanistan, he told Shinwari, “You’re a brother, you’re family. Whatever I can do to get you to the U.S., I will.” Shinwari assumed that the Americans would stay in Afghanistan forever, so after Congress passed a law creating visas for Afghans who worked for the United States in Afghanistan, he didn’t apply for one.